Copia Global had a simple enough idea: let customers in smaller Kenyan towns order goods through local agents, cutting out the long journey to a big-city shop. The company raised $123 million to make it work, building out warehouses, logistics networks, and inventory systems to keep the whole thing moving. But in May 2024, it entered administration. By February 2026, administrators estimated its realisable assets at KES 206.6 million, roughly $1.6 million, against liabilities that far exceeded that number.
Koko Networks tells a similar story. The company raised more than $100 million to sell subsidised clean cooking stoves across African markets, leaning on carbon credit sales to help carry its costs. When regulatory and commercial problems disrupted that carbon credit business, the debt piled up fast. Koko Networks (UK) Limited found itself in much the same position as Copia: obligations it could no longer meet, and a queue of creditors waiting to find out how much, if anything, they would recover.
Together, the two collapses put a spotlight on something venture capital storytelling tends to skip past. Raising hundreds of millions of dollars and building real customer bases does not automatically mean a company holds enough cash or sellable assets to cover what it owes. When the runway ends, the losses do not stop at investors. Suppliers, employees, and lenders all file claims against whatever is left, and the process of figuring out who gets paid, and in what order, can stretch on through months of court proceedings.
What these cases leave open is a harder question about the businesses that come after them. The problems Copia and Koko were trying to solve, clean cooking and rural commerce access, did not disappear when the companies did. Someone will try again. The question is what they will do differently.
Originally published by TechCabal.