OnlyPlants Foods, selected for investment through the Spring 2025 Brainforest Venture Program, has now secured an additional $125,000 from one of our partners Wyss Academy for Nature, matching Brainforest's own commitment and bringing meaningful new momentum to a venture we have believed in from the very beginning.

We are very proud to see this happen. When we selected OnlyPlants for our portfolio, we saw a rare combination: a strong founder, a business model with ecological and social impact, and a product with the potential to reshape how food systems work in East Africa.

This is exactly the kind of support that early-stage nature-positive ventures need and exactly the outcome and visibility we work toward when we bring a new company into the Brainforest portfolio.

What OnlyPlants Food is building

OnlyPlants Foods is a Nairobi-based company creating plant-based milk from the Bambara groundnut, an indigenous African crop that is drought-resilient, nitrogen-fixing, and rich in protein, cultivated by farmers across East Africa for generations.

Founder Marie-Louise Wiegert left a career in private equity in New York to build something with real, tangible impact. In a Nairobi market, a farmer named Phanice introduced her to the Bambara groundnut, and OnlyPlants was born. You can read the whole interview with many more details here.

A partnership that goes beyond funding

The Wyss Academy for Nature supports entrepreneurs who build nature-positive solutions together with local communities. Through their Innovation Fund, they back early-stage ventures willing to test new ideas in real, complex environments.

Their investment in OnlyPlants comes with something more than capital. Together, the two organisations are now running a pilot in Northern Kenya with the Chui Mamas, a women's group in Laikipia who have acquired their own land and are building income through farming.

The Chui Mamas are not passive participants in this story. They are experienced farmers who know their land, its rhythms, and its limits. When introduced to the Bambara groundnut, their questions were immediate and practical: Will this crop actually grow here, in this soil, under this sun? Could Bambara milk feed our families during the dry seasons, when the livestock produce very little and the shelves run thin?

These are not abstract research questions. They are the questions of women who have staked something real on the answers.

Those questions are now being answered in the field. At Tambuzi, a local partner in the region, different Bambara varieties are being tested under semi-arid conditions, tracking which varieties survive the heat, hold the soil, and produce enough to be worth growing at scale.

The goal is to understand whether this crop can genuinely anchor a women-led livelihood model: one that improves income, supports soil restoration, and contributes to local food security in a region where all three are under pressure.

It is early. But the questions are the right ones, and the right people are asking them.

What this means to us

At Brainforest, we select ventures for their potential to change something, not just commercially, but for nature, biodiversity and socially.

OnlyPlants was selected for all three.

Seeing Wyss Academy step in with matching capital confirms what we saw early on. When the right venture meets the right support, things move. Farmers gain better crops and better income. Communities gain a reliable food source.

Landscapes begin to recover.

We are proud to have OnlyPlants in our portfolio and look forward to sharing more as the pilot progresses!

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Pictures taken by Fiona Stappmanns, Private Sector Engagement Expert at Wyss Academy Team