Company profile

Sabi provides the digital infrastructure for transparent, compliant sourcing of Africa’s critical minerals and rare earths, connecting artisanal and large-scale producers to international buyers. At the core of the platform is TRACE, Sabi’s proprietary traceability technology, delivering real-time, end-to-end visibility across ten mineral value chains covering thousands of verified metric tonnes to date. Around it, Sabi embeds financial services, supply chain intelligence, risk management and compliance-ready reporting into the transaction lifecycle, and is live in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe.

Why we invested

There is a paradox buried in the ground across Africa. The continent holds much of the world’s critical minerals, the very materials the global energy transition cannot happen without, and yet the people who dig them out of the earth capture the least value from them. That gap is exactly what Sabi set out to close, and closing it is the reason we lent.

Sabi has built a B2B, vertically integrated commodity export platform, proprietary technology running the length of the chain, from procurement to logistics to payments, connecting rural producing communities across Nigeria and the wider continent to export routes into Asia, the Middle East and North America. Where a traditional lender sees a volatile, high-risk commodity sector and walks away, Sabi sees a structural sourcing gap it can close by formalising producers and using its rails to guarantee quality and provenance. This is a fast-drawdown, transaction-backed facility of the kind banks are slow and cautious to underwrite, especially for a technology-led business, which is precisely the gap our capital fills.

What gave us the conviction to lend was the person running it and the way the money comes back. Sabi’s founder and CEO is a seasoned, internationally-experienced leader who has built and scaled businesses across multiple African markets. The systems inside Sabi reflected a real command of the minerals trade, its ethics and traceability agenda, and the discipline required to run complex, multi-country supply chains. 

Sabi gets fast, purpose-built working capital to execute confirmed orders it could not easily fund elsewhere; we get a secured, contract-linked repayment path over a short tenor. The reason this facility matters beyond its return is what the capital does at the far end of the chain. It lets Sabi procure minerals and execute offtake contracts it could not fund from its own balance sheet, and each of those trades pulls artisanal and small-scale miners out of the informal margins and into secure, traceable supply chains where producers finally capture fairer value, while supporting Nigeria’s push to move beyond raw extraction towards higher-value processing and export. The impact is measurable – in trade volumes financed, miners and suppliers onboarded, export value generated, and compliance with global ESG standards. We lent to Sabi because a disciplined, well-secured trade could also be a fairer one, and because the capital returns to us through the same channel that lifts the people at the bottom of the chain. That is private credit doing exactly what it should.