Linah Farms invests in solar startup NoorNation as it closes USD 1.05 mn seed round

Cairo-based solar and water startup NoorNation closed a USD 1.05 mn seed round backed by agribusiness group Linah Farms, Africa-focused climate tech investor Catalyst Fund, and Saudi VC firm KBW Ventures, founder and CEO Ragy Ramadan (LinkedIn) announced at an event attended by EnterpriseAM on Monday. Linah signed on at the event after nine months of due diligence, turning one of NoorNation’s biggest clients into a shareholder, Ramadan said.

The round transitions Linah Farms from a commercial off-taker into a strategic investor and co-development partner, formalizing a contract for NoorNation to build five solar stations totaling 1.1 MW at Linah’s farms in the Bahariya Oasis and Minya.

Linah has been looking for a solar partner for years: The group expanded from hospitality into agriculture in 2010 and went a decade without making a firm move into solar, even after measuring its carbon footprint, because it was searching for a partner with the technical capacity to deploy solar at scale across its operations, Linah Group Founder and Managing Partner Mohanad Khedr said.

Three pilots brought Linah around: Linah Group’s CEO Mohamed Wahdan said all 30 wells on Linah’s 3k-feddan Medjool date farm in the Bahariya Oasis ran on diesel when the group measured its carbon footprint in 2021-2022. NoorNation’s first job there was a hybrid solar-diesel system on a 1k-meter-deep well, tracked through a real-time dashboard that compares the two power sources, Wahdan adds. NoorNation followed with a solar-and-battery system at the farm’s school for palm cultivation and a 400 kW system at Linah’s 520-room Sultan Gardens Resort in Sharm El Sheikh. The Bahariya well has saved more than EGP 3 mn in diesel, while Sultan Gardens has cut more than EGP 2.2 mn off its grid electricity bill, Ramadan said.

Scaling Solar Irrigation as a Service (SIaaS): Linah will also help fund NoorNation’s pay-per-use irrigation model for smallholders as a stakeholder, along with partners including the World Food Program (WFP), Ramadan said. Farmers pay nothing upfront: NoorNation installs a solar LifeBox unit, switches the farm from flood to drip irrigation, and charges for water by the hour, with top-ups through the myFawry app, says co-founder and CTO Mohamed Khaled (LinkedIn).

NoorNation contracts through Community Development Associations to cut payment risk, with ownership passing to farmers after five to seven years, Ramadan said. Three pilots are already running and bringing in revenue, including the first in Aswan with the WFP and the Adaptation Fund, Khaled says.

Why it matters: Agriculture accounts for about 13.7% of GDP and 19% of employment, and about 94% of Egypt’s water needs rely on the Nile, yet much of it still runs on diesel. About “95% of old-land farmers still irrigate with diesel pumps,” Ramadan said, a burden on both farmers and the state, since diesel is one of the biggest items on Egypt’s import bill. Most of them also use flood irrigation, which wastes “roughly 70% of Nile water,” Khaled says. Buying a solar pumping station outright is out of reach for most, with a 20-hp station costing roughly EGP 1 mn, Ramadan said, a bottleneck its pay-per-use model aims to avoid.

The startup behind the round: NoorNation, which officially launched in March 2022, develops and assembles its systems at a factory in Abu Rawash. They range from LifeBox units, which run pumps and desalination on solar power without batteries, to grid-tied systems for hotels and factories. It has installed around 66 projects totaling 7 MW across 13 governorates, serving more than 5.2k feddans, Ramadan said. Beyond Egypt, it has carried out projects in the UAE and supplied two LifeBox desalination units to hospitals in Tajikistan with Unicef. By the end of December, NoorNation will also roll out a new platform version with automated irrigation and remote sensing for soil and water.