Sistema.bio raises $53m to make cheap clean energy affordable for smallholder farmers across Africa

Sistema.bio, a Nairobi-based biogas company founded in 2010, has closed a $53 million first round for FarmCarbon, a new climate finance fund built to make clean energy technology affordable for smallholder farmers across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

BNP Paribas Asset Management, British International Investment (the UK’s development finance institution), and Shell Foundation supported the funding round.

The funds will support the deployment of over 90,000 biodigesters, which convert livestock waste into biogas for cooking and electricity, as well as organic fertiliser that reduces reliance on chemical inputs for farms.

This raise builds on a previous $3.5 million investment from Sistema.bio, which secured funding from Novastar Ventures in early 2025, as part of a broader $7.75 million internal round to support expansion across Africa.

How Sistema.bio plans to use the fund and what farmers will get

FarmCarbon’s system is simple: Farmers receive biodigesters at a significantly reduced cost, either immediately or over time. In return, they transfer the rights to the carbon credits produced by their farms to the FarmCarbon fund.

The fund then sells these carbon credits to buyers through long-term contracts. The money earned from these sales is used to pay back the investors who funded the biodigesters.

The model allows farmers to essentially exchange something they produce for clean energy technology. They receive affordable clean energy hardware, and in return, the fund providing the hardware receives the carbon credits generated by their farms.

Similar read: Funding in Africa: Kenya, Nigeria slump as Benin and Ivory Coast break into Big 4

Farmers benefit immediately through reduced energy and fertilizer costs, and improved farm productivity, all without having to pay the full upfront cost of the technology.

Alexander Eaton, CEO and co-founder of Sistema.bio, said the fund is the next step in work the company has been doing for 15 years. “FarmCarbon takes the biodigester proven solution and makes it accessible at an even larger scale, paying the economic benefits of carbon credits forward to farmers,” he said.

Targeting one of climate finance’s most underfunded problem

Livestock waste produces a lot of methane, a greenhouse gas that warms the earth much more than carbon dioxide in the short term. Sistema.bio estimates that the 90,000 biodigesters funded by FarmCarbon will capture and eliminate enough methane to reduce emissions by the equivalent of over nine million tonnes of carbon dioxide over the next ten years.

Despite methane’s outsized impact on global warming, it remains one of the least funded areas in climate finance. FarmCarbon was designed specifically to channel institutional capital into that gap while ensuring the benefits reach the farmers generating the emissions reductions in the first place.

Sistema.bio currently operates across 35 countries on three continents and has worked with more than 200,000 users since its founding.

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