They Bled $500 Million. Most Are Already Building Again.

The last time Meshack Alloys stood at the center of a room, it was probably to explain why Sendy stopped moving. The logistics startup had raised over $24 million to move packages across East Africa. By 2023, it was gone. The money was gone. The drivers were gone. And yet, barely a year later, Alloys was back in meetings with a new stack of term sheets and a new company no one had asked him to build.

That's the detail that sits at the heart of a new TechCabal investigation published this week. Ten Kenyan startups. Approximately $500 million in combined venture funding. All of it dead, in administration, or pivoted away from the original vision. The reporters did the unglamorous thing: they pulled regulatory filings, scrolled LinkedIn, checked who was speaking at conferences. Then they asked the only question that matters after the money burns — where do the humans go?

In Alloys's case, the answer is: back into the fire. In December 2024 he founded tabb, a startup that lets banks give businesses revolving credit lines that can be used instantly across a network of suppliers. He had already co-founded AfroQuality in 2024, a retail and distribution platform for African brands. And more quietly, he had been serving as chairman of Boya, the expense-management company he started in 2021 while still pretending Sendy was going to make it.

Rubble Has a Gravity

Kenya was supposed to be the blueprint. Nairobi became the place where venture capital met African ambition — logistics, clean energy, agri-tech, e-commerce. The names were spoken with the kind of certainty that only exists before the collapse: Sendy, MarketForce, iProcure, KOKO Networks, Copia. Together they pulled in sums that would have seemed fictional a decade earlier.

Then the physics changed. Sendy folded in 2023. On April 26, 2024, iProcure entered administration, with KPMG taking control of its business and assets. Copia Global, which had raised about $123 million — including a $50 million Series C in 2022 and a $20 million extension in December 2023 — ran out of runway when the next cheque never came. Administrators from KPMG were appointed. And then came the most violent death of all: In January 2026, KOKO abruptly shut down, laid off more than 700 employees, and entered administration. A company that had served over one million Kenyan households with clean cooking fuel simply stopped. Its technology and manufacturing platform are now being marketed to buyers as part of an insolvency process, a detail TechCabal has reported in depth.

Those failures didn't happen in a weekend. They were slow, expensive unravelings. And the $500 million figure isn't vanity math. A separate TechCabal data project on Africa's tech layoffs from 2023 to 2026 found that Copia and KOKO alone accounted for 43% of disclosed losses among five major companies. One country, two dead unicorns-in-waiting, nearly half the damage.

The Second Act Is Not a Redemption Arc

The other central figure in the TechCabal piece is Tesh Mbaabu. He built MarketForce's B2B marketplace RejaReja, which shut down in 2024 under the weight of high operational costs and razor-thin FMCG margins. His pivot, Chpter — an AI-driven conversational commerce platform — onboarded about 1,500 merchants in four months, according to company statements. Then, by late 2025, Mbaabu and his co-founder stepped aside from Chpter to launch Cloud9, a digital bank aimed at younger users. And in a move that reads like narrative symmetry, in August 2026 Cloud9 acquired Chpter, folding Mbaabu's previous company into his newest one to build commerce tools for business customers.

There's something unsettlingly efficient about it. The founder doesn't mourn. The founder recycles. Copia's founders — Tracey Turner, Tim Steel, and Michael King — have gone on to new ventures like Stahili Commerce and Olverra, according to a related TechCabal Daily report. Alloys sits at Enza Capital as an entrepreneur-in-residence while running tabb and AfroQuality. The venture that failed becomes a credential, a lesson, sometimes a calling card for the next pitch meeting.

This is where the story turns. The popular narrative about African startup failure is one of tragedy: naive founders, foreign money, overblown valuations, sudden silence. But TechCabal's reporting shows something arguably more radical. The founders are not hiding. They are not broken. Many of them went straight back to building, often with better corporate governance, leaner models, and a clearer sense of which burns to avoid. The Five African founders who staged major comebacks in 2025 piece had already profiled Alloys, Mbaabu, and others from this exact cohort — months before this week's $500 million accounting landed.

Copia raised $123 million. KOKO raised enough to serve a million households and then laid off more than 700 people in a single January. iProcure entered administration under KPMG's watch. USAID's Development Innovation Ventures programme, which poured more than $100 million into Kenyan startups over the past decade, now represents another capital channel that may not return. The institutional memory of these failures is not gentle. And yet the founders the TechCabal team traced are, in many cases, still moving.

Some disappeared from public view, which is its own kind of answer. Others left for real estate, consulting, or quieter roles. A few, like Alloys and Mbaabu, moved toward something harder to name — the belief that the second attempt will not end the same way. The question is not whether the ecosystem can survive $500 million in losses. The question is whether the people who lost it will be trusted again. If tabb and Cloud9 work, the answer writes itself. If they don't, the graveyard only grows more crowded.