Grace Ashiru
Saviu Ventures, an investor with offices in Paris and Nairobi, has backed Senegalese industrial company SORAM Afrique in a $1.36 million round. SORAM’s management team also put money into the round. The cheque came from Saviu II, the firm’s second fund, and it’s the first climate tech deal Saviu has done.
SORAM Afrique was founded in Dakar and is led by Florian Baudoin. For more than a decade it has supplied printing infrastructure to SMEs, large firms, government agencies and schools in Senegal and the wider West African region. It doesn’t sell new machines. Instead, it refurbishes professional printers (Konica Minolta, Kyocera and Canon models) and puts them back into service, which keeps equipment out of the waste stream and cuts down on consumables.
Clients go through a five-stage process: an audit, a recommendation, installation, training, and then ongoing optimisation. So far SORAM has served over 1,000 customers and placed about 4,000 machines across three countries.
The company now sits inside OLU 360, a holding group that also includes IRIS Afrique and SIS. Together, the three businesses employ 60 people, manage more than 2,000 machines, and bring in FCFA 1.3 billion in revenue.
Saviu framed the deal as a statement about where value gets built in Africa; in its words, future category leaders “will not only be built in software.” The firm pointed to strong local operators and industrial models that can scale as its reasons for backing the group.
The money will fund OLU 360’s next stage of growth. The group already runs operations in Gambia and Guinea, and Côte d’Ivoire is next on its list.
