Company profile

Tulay Africa is a commerce and supply chain company optimising the sourcing and delivery of raw materials across local and global markets. Operating a network spanning Africa, Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia, Tulay ensures timely, reliable delivery of raw materials and solid minerals to industries across continents. Beyond global supply chain management, the company crafts customised solutions for large corporations and works to build a resilient ecosystem for entrepreneurial empowerment, positioning itself as a trusted partner for businesses seeking to launch, grow, and thrive.

Why we invested

The word “tulay” means bridge in Filipino, and it is the most honest description of the company we could offer. Across Nigeria's mineral-producing regions, some of the most valuable materials in the modern economy comes out of the ground through the hands of artisanal and small-scale miners, people working at the very edge of the formal economy, far from the global buyers who need what they produce, and are rarely paid what it is worth. Between those miners and that demand sits distance, informality and a long history of value leaking to everyone but the people doing the digging. Tulay is building the bridge across it, bringing systems, structure and fair pricing right up to the communities that produce, so the trade finally works for them too.

On the economics, Tulay runs the same fundamental model that gave us confidence in this kind of trade elsewhere in our book. Minerals are procured and sold on to pre-approved offtakers, with repayment coming directly from those contracted proceeds, so each trade cycle is self-liquidating rather than reliant on general trading profits. It is a repayment path anchored to contracts and cashflows we can see, not to a hope of future growth.

Where Tulay differs is stage. It is earlier in its journey than the more established operators running this model, and we have priced and structured the facility with that in mind, funding specific, verified trades against secured receivables rather than extending open-ended growth capital. That is the discipline the structure is built for, letting us support an earlier-stage business precisely because each trade clears itself before the next begins.

And the reason we are glad to lend is what the capital does at the far end of the bridge. It gives Tulay the working capital to procure minerals and execute confirmed offtake that it could not otherwise fund from its own balance sheet, while keeping more of the value of Nigeria's minerals in the hands of the communities that produce them. We lent to Tulay because a well-secured trade can also be a fairer one, and because the same capital that clears itself safely back to us lifts the people standing at the very start of the chain. That is the bridge worth building.