Shark Tank judge invests Sh44 million in Margaret Nyamumbo coffee business
New York-based Kenyan entrepreneur Margaret Nyamumbo has received an massive investment of Sh44 million for her coffee company after she convinced one of Shark Tank judges to buy 5 per cent of Kahawa 1893.
Ms Nyamumbo is the founder and CEO of Kahawa 1893, a firm that exports African coffee to America.
She earned plaudits for the way she described her business and pitched for investment to famous business moguls in the reality TV show ‘Shark Tank’.
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The alumni of the Harvard Business School pitched to investors Mark Cuban, Emma Grede, Robert Herjavec, Kevin O’Leary and Lori Greiner in the show that aired on Saturday at 4am Kenyan time on ABC Television.
She told the panel that she is all about sharing the wealth and “brewing a coffee revolution”.
It was Emma Grede who convinced Ms Nyamumbo to take the $350,000 she was seeking but for an 8 per cent stake in the business.
“Any brand that’s going to scale and do really well now has to be rooted in some kind of community,” Emma said.
Shark Tank is an American reality show were aspiring entrepreneurs from around the world pitch their business models to a panel of investors and persuade them to invest money in their idea.
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The former consultant at the World Bank in Kenya, who moved to the US for her undergraduate studies in 2007, left her lucrative Wall Street job working with retail and consumer companies to start Kahawa 1893 in 2017.
Her company is named after the year that coffee was first planted in Kenya, but too her it is more about designing the future of the coffee supply chain than honouring the status quo of the past.
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