Company profile

Rivy is a climate finance company building the fast, fair, and flexible financial infrastructure that powers affordable, widespread access to clean energy in Nigeria and beyond. Rather than simply offering loans, Rivy creates the conditions for clean energy to spread through inventory financing for vendors, asset financing for homeowners, and micro-grid financing for developers, while connecting clean energy projects to carbon markets so they can earn from their green impact. To date, the platform has disbursed over ₦45 billion ($34 million) and approved more than 39,000 loans for homes, businesses, and microgrid developers across the country.

Why we invested

In much of Nigeria, the grid is less a utility than a rumour. It comes and goes on its own schedule, and the businesses that cannot afford to stop – the workshop, the clinic, the cold store, the school – bridge the gaps with a diesel generator that drinks money and breathes fumes. Solar would fix both problems at once, cheaper energy and cleaner air, but the upfront cost sits just out of reach for the very SMEs that would benefit most. They cannot afford the lump sum that unlocks this. That gap, between a business that is ready and a solution it cannot quite pay for upfront, is where Rivy works.

Rivy finances clean energy and inventory for Nigerian SMEs, turning an impossible upfront cost into payments a business can actually meet, tied directly to the asset that lowers its bills. It is a young, fast-growing segment, and one traditional banks struggle to underwrite because the model runs on short-tenor receivables and technology-led credit assessment rather than the hard collateral a bank wants to see. Where a bank sees an unfamiliar risk, Rivy sees a specific, solvable pain: a business drowning in diesel costs, and an asset that pays for itself.

What gave us the confidence to lend was not the mission but the discipline behind it. The management team is experienced, commercially sharp, and fluent in credit, operations and the Nigerian SME market in a way that showed in every diligence conversation. They had already learned the hard lessons from an earlier, broader SME lending model, and used them to pivot deliberately into a more secured, cashflow-driven book. And the numbers bear that discipline out. Since June 2024, Rivy has disbursed hundreds of loans, most to business clients, and collected at a very high rate with less than 1% of the loans being non-performing. This says the underwriting works, the repayments are real, and the income servicing our facility rests on a book that actually performs.

That reliability is what makes the impact possible, and the impact is the reason we are here. Our capital does not sit on a balance sheet; it becomes solar systems on more roofs, more SMEs moved off expensive, dirty generation and onto power that is cheaper and cleaner from the first month. Every facility Rivy funds is a business that spends less to keep its lights on, a little less diesel burned over a Nigerian city, and a step towards an energy transition the grid alone will never deliver.