Taiwo Ilesanmi and Gbenga Akanmu founded Alliance Chemicals in 2023 with a simple but ambitious thesis: Africa cannot scale manufacturing without building a stronger chemical supply chain behind it.

Last year (2025), we invested in Alliance Chemicals, an integrated chemical supply-chain company helping some of Africa's largest manufacturers reliably access the raw materials and chemical inputs they need to produce everyday goods.

At first glance, chemical distribution may not look like a conventional venture capital opportunity. But look deeper, and the opportunity becomes compelling.

Chemicals sit behind almost everything we consume — from food, pharmaceuticals and personal care products to detergents, paints, construction materials, agriculture and industrial manufacturing. Yet across Africa, the infrastructure required to reliably source, finance, store and distribute these essential inputs remains highly fragmented.

Alliance is building to solve that problem.

The company currently operates in Nigeria and Kenya, with Nigeria serving as its primary hub for West Africa. Its longer-term ambition is to build a pan-African chemical supply-chain platform, expanding into markets such as Ghana and other strategically important manufacturing economies across the continent.

We participated in Alliance's Seed Round because we believe the combination of a large underserved market, exceptional founder-market fit, strong early traction, and an opportunity to build critical industrial infrastructure creates the foundations for a significant African business.

Here is why we invested.

A large market hidden in plain sight

Africa's chemical industry is one of the continent's least discussed but most fundamental industrial sectors.

Chemicals are critical inputs into nearly every major manufacturing value chain. The detergent in a household, the paint on a building, the ingredients in personal-care products, the additives used in food production, and the materials required by construction companies all depend on chemical supply chains.

Africa's chemicals market has been estimated at more than $100 billion, with some industry estimates projecting it could approach $230 billion by 2030.

That growth is supported by powerful structural trends: population growth, urbanization, infrastructure development, industrialization, and an increasing push toward local manufacturing.

As African manufacturers produce more locally, they will require significantly greater volumes and varieties of chemical raw materials.

But demand is only one side of the equation. Many African manufacturers continue to navigate fragmented procurement networks, long import lead times, foreign-exchange volatility, high working-capital requirements, inconsistent local availability and complicated logistics.

We believe solving these problems represents a significant opportunity and Alliance is building the infrastructure to do it.

Alliance Chemicals is more than a chemical distributor

One of the things that attracted us to Alliance was the founders' view that the opportunity extends well beyond buying and selling chemicals.

Alliance is building an integrated chemical supply-chain platform.

The company sources raw materials from global chemical manufacturers and supplies enterprise customers across sectors including home and personal care, food and nutrition, construction, coatings and industrial applications.

But its involvement increasingly extends across the customer's supply chain.

Alliance supports customers with demand forecasting, sourcing, technical and product testing, inventory management, warehousing, logistics and last-mile delivery.

It also helps companies manage excess and underutilized chemical inventories, turning what might otherwise become idle or obsolete stock into productive working capital.

This creates an increasingly embedded relationship with customers and allows Alliance to address several of the structural inefficiencies that make chemical procurement difficult across African markets.

The company operates a 3,100-square-metre stock-holding facility in the Lagos Free Zone, strategically located alongside the Lekki Deep Sea Port, and has established operations in Kenya to serve East Africa.

The next phase is particularly exciting to us.

Alliance is expanding beyond distribution into local value addition and manufacturing, including a new approximately 10,000-square-metre manufacturing operation.

This evolution could allow Alliance to import raw materials and feedstocks, undertake more processing locally and supply finished or semi-finished chemical products to African manufacturers—capturing more value within the continent while improving availability and shortening supply chains.

Exceptional founder-market fit

Perhaps our strongest conviction comes from the team.

Alliance is led by founders who have spent much of their professional lives inside the industries they are now disrupting.

Taiwo Ilesanmi previously served as Managing Director of BASF West Africa, where he led the operations of one of the world's largest chemical companies in the region. His experience spans chemicals, pharmaceuticals, transportation, logistics, strategy and complex industrial supply chains.

Gbenga Akanmu spent almost a decade at Dow, where his career spanned finance, treasury, commercial leadership across Africa and the Middle East, and ultimately global e-commerce and digital transformation. He subsequently worked at S&P Global, supporting chemical companies and other industrial businesses with commodity pricing, market intelligence and commercial strategy.

Between them, the founders bring more than two decades of experience operating across global chemical companies and African industrial markets.

This matters enormously. Chemical distribution is not an industry that can easily be entered with technology alone. Success requires deep technical knowledge, supplier relationships, understanding of product applications, credit and working-capital discipline, regulatory expertise and the ability to navigate complex international supply chains.

The wider Alliance leadership team reinforces this capability, bringing experience across technical sales, chemistry, finance, legal, governance, compliance and supply chain from organizations including Dow Chemical, BASF, KPMG, S&P, GlaxoSmithKline and CardinalStone.

We believe this is a rare level of founder-market fit.

Strong early traction

Alliance's execution since launch has strengthened our conviction. In its first year of operations, the company generated its initial revenue which was approximately 8 figures. Over the following two years, revenue grew rapidly, roughly doubling in the second year and then tripling again in the third, culminating in approximately sixfold growth from the company's initial year to its most recent one. 

Alliance has built relationships with more than 60 customers, including major multinational and indigenous manufacturers, while expanding from Nigeria into East Africa. Importantly, this growth has been achieved in a sector where access to working capital can often constrain growth long before demand becomes a problem.

The company's trajectory suggests to us that the fundamental market need has already been validated. The question is increasingly how quickly Alliance can build the capital, infrastructure, and geographic footprint required to capture it.

Strong synergies across our portfolio

Another important part of our investment thesis is the potential for Alliance to create value alongside other companies within our portfolio and ecosystem.

There is potential for Moniepoint to support localized banking, payments, and financial services as Alliance's transaction volumes and geographic footprint expand.

Through Duplo, Alliance could access invoice-discounting and supplier-financing solutions that improve liquidity and optimize its working-capital cycle—particularly important in a business where inventory and receivables can consume significant amounts of capital.

Matta, a technology-enabled marketplace for chemicals and derivatives, presents opportunities around demand generation, digital procurement and broader market access.

And as Alliance expands across borders, financial infrastructure providers such as Cauridor could potentially support foreign-exchange and cross-border settlement requirements, particularly as the company develops its presence across Francophone Africa.

We see considerable potential for these relationships to compound value across our portfolio while helping Alliance scale more efficiently.

A compelling venture opportunity

We believe Alliance is not just any other startup, it is a market maker. Beyond consistently smashing growth expectations, the company will play a major role in Africa's industrialization. Africa's next generation of transformative companies will not all be pure software businesses.

Some will solve fundamental problems in industrial infrastructure, supply chains, manufacturing and trade.

Alliance exhibits many of the characteristics we look for in an ambitious venture-backed company: a very large addressable market, exceptional founder-market fit, strong revenue growth, geographic scalability, and the potential to build meaningful competitive advantages as it scales.

The barriers to entry are also significant. Supplier relationships, technical knowledge, customer trust, working capital, warehousing infrastructure, regulatory capabilities and logistics networks take years to build. As Alliance expands its physical infrastructure and moves further into manufacturing, we believe those barriers can become even stronger.

Building the Infrastructure Behind African Manufacturing

Ultimately, our investment in Alliance is a bet on something much larger than chemical distribution.

It is a bet on African industrialization. Africa's growing population will need more food, medicines, detergents, cosmetics, housing, infrastructure, transportation, and manufactured goods.

Producing those goods locally will require factories and these factories will require chemicals.

Alliance is positioning itself at that critical intersection—connecting global chemical producers with African manufacturers today while progressively building the inventory, logistics, technical capabilities and local manufacturing infrastructure required for tomorrow.

In just a few years, the company has grown from an idea conceived by two former global chemical executives into a multi-country business generating millions of dollars in annual revenue.

There is still a long way to go. But we believe Taiwo, Gbenga and the Alliance team have the experience, ambition, and execution capability to build one of Africa's important industrial supply-chain companies.

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