KOKO Networks' clean-cooking empire goes up for auction
PwC has opened bidding for KOKO Networks' bioethanol technology, India manufacturing plant and fuel-distribution platform after the Kenyan clean-cooking pioneer's carbon-credit-dependent model collapsed.
Three thousand fuel machines that once lit a million Kenyan kitchens are now line items in a liquidator's spreadsheet.
PricewaterhouseCoopers, acting as administrator for KOKO Networks, opened a formal Request for Expressions of Interest on July 7, inviting bids for the collapsed clean-cooking company's ethanol technology, its manufacturing plant in Sanand, Gujarat, and the fuel-distribution platform that once served roughly 1.5 million households across Kenya and Rwanda. Only buyers who can demonstrate the capacity to close a deal above $15 million are being admitted to the process. Expressions of interest close July 17.
The assets on the block read like the anatomy of a small utility: patents and hardware designs for the KOKO Cooker and its refillable Smart Canisters, the software that tracked fuel, cash and carbon flows across the network, and roughly 3,000 automated "KOKOpoints" — ATM-style dispensers bolted into corner shops from Nairobi to Kigali. KOKO Networks Limited is under administration in Mauritius, where Rajeev Bagsent is handling the sale; two Indian manufacturing subsidiaries, Saarus Innovations and KOKO Networks Private Limited, are in a separate voluntary liquidation under Nidhi Poddar, with PwC advising both processes, according to notices reported by TechCabal, Techweez and Launch Base Africa.
What broke a decade-old business
Founded in 2014, KOKO built something genuinely novel: a bioethanol alternative to charcoal, cheap enough for low-income households because international carbon markets subsidised it. Families paid roughly $15 for a starter cooker, canister and fuel; KOKO recouped the difference by selling verified emissions reductions to buyers in South Korea and elsewhere. By August 2023 it had crossed a million customers. Investors, including the Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund and Rand Merchant Bank, backed the model with more than $100 million in equity and debt, and in March 2025 the World Bank's Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency added a 15-year, $179.6 million political-risk guarantee.
The entire structure depended on one Kenyan government document: a Letter of Authorisation permitting KOKO to sell its carbon credits into compliance markets abroad. Kenyan authorities, citing concerns about the credits' authenticity and the transparency of KOKO's operations, declined to issue it. Without that revenue, the subsidy that made KOKO's fuel affordable evaporated, and so did the cash to run the network. KOKO laid off more than 700 staff across Kenya, Rwanda, India, the UK and Mauritius on January 31, and PwC took over as administrator on February 1.
This is not a story of a founder who lied or a product that failed to work. Real families in Nairobi's densest neighbourhoods lost a fuel source they had come to depend on, delivered the news by text message. Hundreds of employees who built and maintained a genuinely useful piece of infrastructure lost their jobs over a regulatory decision they had no part in making. Whatever KOKO's governance shortcomings, the sale process now under way is as much an attempt to recover something for creditors and honour unpaid wages as it is a business transaction — proceeds go first to secured lenders including FirstRand Bank, the Africa Go Green Fund and the Mirova Gigaton Fund, with staff owed salary arrears further down Kenya's insolvency queue.
Why the buyer matters more than the price
For Himilo's readers, the number to watch on July 17 isn't the $15 million floor — it's who shows up to bid. A private-equity buyer chasing the manufacturing plant and patents for salvage value would end KOKO's story as a cautionary tale about carbon-market fragility. A buyer who wants the distribution network and the software — the actual infrastructure connecting fuel, cash and carbon data across thousands of neighbourhood shops — could restart something that took a decade and $300 million to build, this time without betting the entire business on a single government letter.
That is the deeper lesson African climate-tech has to sit with. KOKO's downfall wasn't a demand problem; it proved households would switch off charcoal when the price was right. It was a single-point-of-failure problem: one regulatory approval financed almost the whole subsidy. Any founder building a carbon-credit-dependent business on the continent now has a concrete, recent example of what happens when that approval doesn't come — and investors underwriting the next generation of clean-cooking, clean-mobility or reforestation ventures will be asking harder questions about revenue diversity before they write a check.
KOKO's technology and brand still carry real value — the hardware works, the software exists, and a supply chain already reaches customers who want it. What happens after July 17 will say more about the durability of Africa's climate-tech financing model than the sale price ever will.
