Systemic venture builder investing in regenerative food and agriculture in South Africa
2023
Inanna is a systemic investing studio building the future of food and agriculture in Southern Africa. Our approach is grounded in regenerative economics and steward-ownership principles. We aim to reprogramme how capital behaves, shifting it from extraction and speculation toward stewardship and regeneration. We are building a model of investment for Africa that prioritises long-term ecological, social, and financial resilience over short-term performance. Our ventures return value through revenue sharing, local reinvestment, and regenerative dividends, keeping wealth circulating within living systems rather than extracted from them. We co-build and invest in regenerative businesses that make farming viable, food nutritious, and rural economies resilient. Our model integrates systemic venture building, market shaping, and investment to regenerate the foundations of our food system: production, infrastructure, culture, capital, and participation. Rather than funding isolated start-ups, we invest in connected ecosystems of ventures that shift incentives, build shared infrastructure, and unlock circular value chains. Each venture is founder-led, rooted in place, and aligned with regenerative principles. We stay with our founders from concept to growth, offering hands-on business support, purpose-fit finance, and access to a collaborative network across policy, capital, and industry. Inanna’s founders bring deep experience in reimagining how capital and innovation drive systemic change. We have designed mission-centred approaches that blend financial and non-financial instruments to drive innovation in climate, health, and education across Sub-Saharan Africa. We have worked across philanthropy, development finance, and impact investment to design adaptive, mission-aligned funding architectures that challenge the status quo of how wealth flows. South Africa’s £34 billion agri-food economy reflects deep systemic imbalances: extractive capital flows, ecological degradation, and inequitable access to opportunity. Our hack is to design the next-generation investment architecture that regenerates both the real economy and the financial logic underpinning it. By building regenerative, inclusive, and investable systems, we aim to show that finance itself can become a living system, circulating value, restoring ecosystems, and rebalancing the patterns of wealth that shape our shared future. Our mission is to prove that regenerative agriculture can be a thriving economic engine, and that Africa can lead this transformation.