We meet on July 28 at Somerset Westview in Kilimani, Nairobi. Kuye is in town for Halcyon’s Africa Food & Climate Resilience programme, where his company is part of the 2026 cohort. He sits easily, speaks without hurry, and rarely seems to search for a thought.

Kuye is the founder of KAMIM Technologies, a Nigerian climate-tech company that builds solar-powered cold storage infrastructure and connects farmers to markets. 

It is not the company Kuye imagined himself building. In fact, he never imagined building a company at all. The son of a chemical engineering professor and a nurse, Kuye grew up taking toys apart to understand how they worked and expected to become a mechanical engineer working on cars.

During his national youth service, he was posted to a rural community in Enugu State, Southeastern Nigeria, where he also worked unpaid for a solar company, carrying panels and batteries into communities, and began to understand the everyday problems farmers faced.

He later left for Germany for a master’s in renewable energy, financing his studies with factory jobs and night shifts at Amazon. When he finished, staying offered the safer, more obvious path. Friends and family urged him to take it.

Instead, Kuye bought a one-way ticket to Nigeria without telling anyone. “Are they using juju to pull you home?” he recalls someone asking.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Nigeria loses enormous amounts of food before it ever reaches consumers. Was there a single moment when you realised the country’s biggest agricultural problem wasn’t production, but preservation?

I have an engineering background and started my career at a solar company. We built mini-grids in rural communities, mainly powering healthcare centres, schools and other infrastructure.

It was going into those communities that I began to see the problem. A lot of the people were farmers. We would install mini-grids there, but over time, we noticed that many could not afford to pay for solar home systems because what we were providing did not necessarily have productive value for their livelihoods.

That got me thinking: how can we build something that actually improves what these farmers are already doing? I started asking them questions. They told me, “This is what we’re facing. Once we harvest, we have to quickly take everything to the market and sell it because there is no infrastructure to preserve it.”

I wasn’t fully aware of the scale of the problem initially. But after those conversations, I started doing my own research. Cold storage at the farm gate was almost non-existent.

You see cold rooms in urban areas, supermarkets, and large farms, but they weren’t common near smallholder farmers. Yet we produce a lot of perishables in Nigeria—vegetables, tomatoes, and other produce that are very sensitive to heat.

There is something called pre-cooling. Once you harvest, rapidly removing the heat from the produce can significantly extend its shelf life. That basic infrastructure simply wasn’t there. That was when I realised there was a major gap.

You trained as an engineer. At what point did engineering stop being a profession and become a way of thinking about society?

I love being on the field. We go into a community, deploy a system, and leave. I just love the process of building stuff. I had no plan to run a business. I’m not a natural businessman who always knew, “Ah, I’m going to become an entrepreneur.” Everything I know about business, I learned on the job out of necessity.

But when we started working on cold storage, I knew we had stumbled on something big. We were solving a real problem affecting people’s lives. Farmers would tell us, “This is the business I use to feed my family. This is what my wife does.”

It became more than building cold rooms. Then we discovered another problem: affordability. Smallholder farmers cannot afford to buy cold rooms. So you start asking, “How do you finance them?” How do you create a business model that makes the infrastructure sustainable?

Many people avoid this space because it is difficult. Traditional financing institutions ask: How will the farmer pay? Can they pay back? But we said, “We’re already in this thing. We need to find a way to make it work.”

I’ve been working on agricultural cold-chain infrastructure full-time since 2019, collaborating with farmers, impact investors, and people in the climate space to develop various models. One experience I’ll never forget was deploying our first solution.

When we initially visited the community, farmers told us that after harvesting tomatoes, they put them under a tree or found somewhere cool. That was their storage system. They only knew cold rooms for fish and meat. The idea of storing tomatoes in one place was completely new.

So we did an experiment. We kept some tomatoes outside and put others inside the cold room. After 21 days, we showed them the difference. You needed to see their faces. That was when I knew: okay, we are doing something important.

Growing up, what was the dinner table like? Were conversations about politics, business, faith, or simply getting through the week?

I grew up in an engineering home. My father is a professor of chemical engineering. My mother was a nurse. My sister also studied engineering. It was a very academic home: do your work, do what you’re supposed to do. Like most African homes, ours was religious. You went for Bible study during the week, and church on Sunday. That was always part of our lives.

But academics were a big thing. From a young age, I knew I wanted to do engineering. I had toys, and the first thing I would do was scatter them. I wanted to open them and see how they worked.

My family gave me the freedom to explore. They wouldn’t say, “Ah, you destroyed that!” They allowed me to take things apart and find a way to put them back together, even if they didn’t look as new afterwards. I was lucky to grow up in that kind of environment.

If your 18-year-old self met you today, what decision would surprise him the most?

Running a business. At 18, I thought I would be working for a company somewhere. I wanted to be on the field doing something. I actually wanted to be a mechanical engineer and work on cars. I was never business-minded. I just wanted to get my hands dirty. So he would definitely be surprised.

You’ve chosen to solve a problem most people never see. Consumers notice expensive tomatoes, not the food that spoiled three days earlier. Do invisible problems make for lonely entrepreneurship?

It does, especially when it is a capital-intensive, asset-heavy business. You’re solving something that is not, quote-unquote, sexy. You’re not building a platform or Business-to-Business Software-as-a-Service (B2B SaaS). You’re building physical infrastructure.

That can be lonely. Look at many food-tech businesses in Lagos. A lot of them have closed. Why? There is no on-the-ground infrastructure for them to leverage.

Imagine saying you want to build a platform connecting hotels to farmers and you’re dealing with perishables, but there is no cold chain. How are you going to survive?

Many investors have asked me, “What exactly are you doing?” It isn’t a popular thing. Hardware and physical infrastructure are difficult, especially when you’re among the first people trying to build it. We’re also doing it with solar energy. Fifteen years ago, even solar itself wasn’t popular here. So yes, it can be lonely

Founders often speak about resilience. What happened before KAMIM that quietly prepared you for this journey?

My youth service was one of the toughest years of my life. After university in Nigeria, you go for the national youth service. I was posted somewhere in Enugu State I didn’t know anybody. There was no family, no support system. I ended up in a village about three hours away, on muddy roads.

I had just finished school and didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted to do. I just knew I wanted to be an engineer and get experience. That was when I started working for companies for free.

I told a solar company, “Just let me follow you to the site.” They weren’t paying me. I would carry solar panels, carry batteries, and climb roofs. I think that was where I first fell in love with solar energy.

Sometimes I was the driver and the installer. We could finish an installation around midnight, and I would still drive back through the middle of nowhere. It became normal. That period built resilience because it was the first time I was fully on my own. After my youth service, I went to Germany for my master’s degree. That was another story.

I had to learn a new language, and I was self-sponsored. There was no scholarship. I worked in a factory and at Amazon. I would do night shifts, sometimes from evening until morning, and then go to class. Anyone who has studied in Germany knows they don’t spoon-feed you. I still had to go to the lab and carry out my work. There were periods when I was literally broken.

When I finished, I carried my bag and came back home. Those periods helped me understand what I wanted from life. I realised I wasn’t going to find joy just staying in a foreign country. I thought about the problems I had seen during my youth service, the communities I had worked in and the people I had met.

I felt I would find more happiness working on those problems. Those experiences built the resilience I rely on today.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ignored?

I’ve ignored like 95% of the advice. One was that I shouldn’t come back to Nigeria. People were like, “What’s happening? Are they using juju to pull you home?” I was born and bred in Nigeria. Why is it abnormal to want to come back home?

There was a clear career path for me in Germany. I had a master’s in renewable energy and some very solid opportunities I could pursue. Instead, I said I wanted to leave all that behind, return to Nigeria, and build something, even though I didn’t even know anything about running a business.

Even during my youth service, people advised me to change my posting to somewhere more comfortable. I said no. What is the point of being there if I don’t experience something different?

If I hadn’t gone there, I wouldn’t have met the people I met. KAMIM might not exist. And when I eventually returned from Germany, I didn’t tell anybody. I just bought a one-way ticket. I was back home. Anything you wanted to say, you could say it after I arrived.

You’ve spent years working with farmers, transporters and markets. Who has taught you the most about business? I suspect it wasn’t an investor.

The people we’re trying to solve the problem for: farmers and aggregators. You can do research and market studies, but you don’t really understand the problem until you go on the ground.

I’ve learnt that you need to iterate with the people you’re trying to serve. The best feedback comes from the field. I once spoke to an investor who asked, “What exactly are you doing? Are you building cold rooms or are you a B2B platform connecting people?”

I said, “We’re doing both.” He said, “You cannot do both.” But I told him, “You don’t know what we face on the ground.”

You cannot just build cold rooms. If you want to be sustainable, you need to integrate further into the supply chain. You can build cold rooms with grants and provide access, and there is an impact side to that. But if you want to build a proper, scalable business, you have to go further.

The business is also in distribution and connecting farmers to higher-value markets. I wouldn’t have understood that if I had just listened to people telling us, “Build cold rooms.”

Suppose the Nigerian president called tomorrow and said, “You have one hour to convince me how to reduce food inflation.” What would you tell him?

Build infrastructure. Ensure farmers have the right productive equipment and storage to reduce waste. Our food supply chain is fragmented. There are too many players, including unnecessary middlemen who make food more expensive while exploiting farmers. If farmers have the right tools, they can set prices and bargain better.

Build irrigation. Many farmers still depend on seasonal rainfall. Give them infrastructure for irrigation, storage and processing. Then create the right policy environment.

Almost all the funding we have raised to build this infrastructure has come from outside Nigeria. There are people ready to work, but you need financial instruments and incentives that make it easier for entrepreneurs to build.

Sometimes we want to enter a community and set up a cold room, and we spend weeks trying to reach the local government chairman and sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). We are not even asking for money. Give us permits. Let us do our business. Build roads. Transport is another contributor to food inflation. Getting produce out of farms is difficult. Trucks break down on bad roads. Produce spends longer in transit, and more of it spoils before reaching Lagos.

All those costs eventually appear in the price of food. There is a huge infrastructure gap between the farm gate and the consumer that needs serious investment.

Everyone celebrates funding announcements. What’s the hardest day you’ve had as a founder that nobody outside the company knows about?

Probably the periods when I had to pay salaries out of pocket. At the early stage, I did a lot of consulting. I’ve consulted for the United Nations (UN) and universities and developed courses. I used some of that work to sustain myself and the company.

I didn’t pay myself for a very long time. People would see the company from the outside and think everything was going well. Meanwhile, internally, you’re asking: what is happening?

There is also the physical stress of deploying infrastructure in Nigeria. You’re transporting a cold room somewhere, and suddenly somebody blocks the truck and says, “You have to pay us money.”

They call you at night, saying your goods have been stopped, and you have to start driving in the middle of the night to resolve it with people on the roadside. There are a lot of sleepless nights.

People go to my Instagram, see me in Nairobi or on a game drive, and say, “Please, can I be your PA?” I tell them: if I call you at midnight to go and sort out a truck that has been stopped somewhere, will you go? There are many stories people never see.

You’ve built infrastructure instead of an app. Has Africa become too fascinated with software while neglecting the physical systems that actually make economies work?

We always talk about leapfrogging. I understand it, but there are some things you cannot leapfrog. Amazon did not become Amazon simply because it was an internet business. It relied on existing infrastructure, including the US Postal Service. It could sell books online because there was physical infrastructure underneath that model.

We need to build ours. There are problems we keep trying to slap software onto that software cannot solve.

We’re in the age of AI now, and everybody wants AI for its sake. AI cannot solve post-harvest loss by itself. You need to build the cold room. AI can add value. You can use it to monitor systems remotely, do predictive maintenance, and analyse data. We are integrating some of those things ourselves.

But you cannot leapfrog the underlying infrastructure. We’re talking about software in a country where a significant part of the population still lacks reliable electricity. If you’re not building power infrastructure, what software are you talking about?

Someone has to build the physical infrastructure. We cannot escape it.

When people introduce you at conferences, they usually list your achievements. What important part of Adekoyejo never makes it into those introductions?

The failures. Do you know how many applications I’ve made? I have a rejection folder in my email going back to 2018. There are thousands of emails in that folder now. People see the things that worked and think, “Ah, this guy is always winning.”

A lot is happening behind that. But rejection also helps. In the process of applying for things and failing, I’ve learned a lot. When I fail at something, I know that if I try it again, I’ll be much better. You cannot catch me the same way twice. So now, when I suffer, I sometimes just laugh.

I’ve failed professionally. I’ve failed personally. Even relationships—there have been relationships where someone probably thought, “Who does this guy think he is? He thinks he wants to solve the world.” Those things don’t make it into conference introductions.

If I asked your closest friends to describe you in one sentence, what would they say?

They would say I’m a very unserious and playful person. People who aren’t close to me don’t know that side.

You spend your days preventing food from going to waste. Outside work, what do you think is the greatest waste in Africa today: talent, time, leadership or opportunity?

Talent. Take Nigeria. Look at the size of our young population. Countries wish they had that kind of youthful population. I studied in Germany, and Germany has an ageing population. If Germany had the kind of young population Nigeria has, imagine what they could do with it.

We have enormous talent that is being wasted. We also have resources where we’re not adding enough value. We export goods that could be processed locally, creating jobs here. So for me, the biggest waste is that talent—the people we have and the things they could be doing.

When people look back at your career, what would disappoint you more: if they remembered the technology you built, or forgot why you built it in the first place?

I want to be remembered for what I did and why I did it. The technology is important, but the point has always been what it does for people.

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