An African SME in Lagos has been selling solar lanterns into a rural distribution network for three years. The business is profitable, the impact is real. A development finance institution in London has a sustainable finance facility designed for companies exactly like this one. The two never meet, because the SME cannot produce verified sustainability data in the format the DFI’s underwriting requires, and producing it costs more than the loan would unlock.

Greenbaq is built to close that gap. Ijeoma Akwiwu founded the company in London after three years building Pivo, a YC-backed digital bank for African freight businesses. Pivo solved a different version of the same gap. The instinct connects both.

The product

Greenbaq is an AI-powered platform that helps African SMEs construct the sustainability data infrastructure required to access sustainable finance. It sits upstream of the lending process, building auditable ESG profiles before businesses approach lenders, rather than producing reports after capital decisions are made. On the other side, it gives lenders a verified data layer they can underwrite against, with the data lineage exposed so every metric is traceable to its source.

The technical positioning matters. Greenbaq is built around explainable AI, every assessment, every metric, every readiness output defendable to a lender, an auditor, or a regulator. Ijeoma has written explicitly that unexplainable AI in sustainable finance is a liability, not an asset. That’s a deliberate technical bet in a category where most platforms treat explainability as a feature rather than the thesis.

The bet

What’s interesting about Greenbaq is what Ijeoma keeps doing across her career. At Pivo, the problem was African freight SMEs being unable to get paid on time because the banks had no underwritable data on them. The solution was to build the data and put it in front of the banks. The business grew 400 percent in its first year and raised a $2 million seed.

At Greenbaq, the problem is structurally identical. African SMEs are locked out of sustainable finance, not because they lack the impact, but because they lack the verified data to prove it in a form lenders can underwrite. According to the ICC and Sage, 86 percent of SMEs say sustainability matters to their business; only 9 percent formally report on it. On the other side, 84 percent of financial institutions identify data as the main reason they cannot extend sustainable finance to small businesses. The capital exists. The data layer that would let it move does not.

The bet underneath is that across every category of finance African SMEs are excluded from, the bottleneck is the same: not the absence of capital, not the absence of impact, but the absence of verifiable, audit-ready data. Pivo proved this for trade finance. Greenbaq is testing it for sustainable finance.

What to watch

The ESG data category is crowded with global incumbents who can afford to add African features when they need to. Greenbaq is differentiating on geography and on explainability, an honest technical bet most large platforms have not made.

2 things will tell us whether the bet is working. Whether Greenbaq closes named partnerships with development finance institutions or African banks who use the platform to underwrite sustainable lending, since those reference customers are what convert a data infrastructure play into a defensible business. And whether Ijeoma’s build-in-public cadence on Medium translates into a community of African SMEs who actually onboard, not just readers of the analysis.

What we’re rooting for

We’re rooting for Greenbaq to add 100 new verified SME sustainability profiles by end of Q3 2026. That’s a meaningful first cohort from a sandbox stage, the kind of number that signals the data infrastructure is being used by the businesses it was built for. Spotlight is cheering every onboarded SME, and we hope Ijeoma comes back to share the win when the cohort lands.

SMEs interested in building their sustainability profile can sign up for the sandbox.