How Thomas Njeru is building a data-driven dafety net for farmers

Thomas Njeru did not set out to build a company at the intersection of insurance, agriculture and data. For a long time, his path looked more conventional - a steady climb through institutions that reward polished thinking and predictable progression, including a trajectory that could have ended in partnership at Deloitte.

Consulting, in fact, was the unexpected turn. He remembers watching consultants arrive in black suits, speaking in polished language and presenting “very fancy presentations”, and thinking that might be the best work in the room. He joined Deloitte and spent several years advising leaders running businesses at scale, learning how to frame problems and persuade people with logic.

Over time, the distance between ideas and execution started to bother him. He would push clients to act on clean strategic logic, only to hear the same response: “The logic made sense, but there were other complexities… reality is different”. That tension, alongside a search for deeper meaning, pulled Njeru back towards entrepreneurship - and towards a problem he understood personally.

Growing up, his parents and community expected him to become a doctor or an engineer. When he chose actuarial science instead, they asked: "How would it help the community? He did not have an answer then. He found it later, when he began connecting insurance - stability, predictability, financial security - to the shocks he had seen growing up. Droughts could change livelihoods quickly and permanently. Yet, as he puts it, “the insurance industry does not do much work in agriculture.”

That gap stayed with him. Even while working in insurance and later consulting, he kept returning to it. “Every time I worked on it, I felt I finally had an answer to what actuarial science could do - and, with it, a sense of meaning.”

Pula grew out of that conviction. Founded in 2015 by Njeru and Rose Goslinga, the company focuses on agricultural insurance and data-led products for smallholder farmers. Today, it has supported more than 20 million farmers across multiple markets - a scale that matters in a sector where pilots often struggle to last.

The harder part of the story came later. After early traction and seed funding, the company tried to scale before its route to market was fully proven. “The route to market was not clearly proven,” he states. “As an entrepreneur, you can never scale before you get to product-market fit.”

Pula had handed over commercial execution too early. The result was immediate. “We burned cash. We didn’t achieve our targets. It was a disaster.” The company was also operating under co-CEOs, which slowed decision-making at a time that required speed. Performance dipped, and fundraising was not viable without clearer traction.

“The thing I always say - cash doesn’t lie.  When you realise you have two or three months of cash left, that’s it,” he says. 

What followed was a reset. The company moved to a single-CEO structure, brought commercial execution back under founder leadership, and cut costs. It was, by Njeru’s account, the most difficult period of building Pula. “End of 2021, beginning of 2022 was tough, tough, tough,” he says. “If I had one moment where I asked myself, ‘What did I do?’ it was that.” The turnaround came quickly. By 2022, Pula had turned profitable and rebuilt around a clearer model. “Pula was made that year,” he recalls.

By the time TLcom entered the cap table, Njeru frames the relationship less as rescue and more as alignment. TLcom led Pula’s $6 million Series A in January 2021, backing its approach to derisking smallholder farmers through insurance and data.

Omobola Johnson, Senior Partner at TLcom recalls - “When we first met Thomas and the Pula team, we were struck by both the scale of the problem and the strength of the solution. Pula is addressing a critical gap for smallholder farmers in Africa with a model that brings together insurance, data, and distribution in a way that can be scaled. Thomas brought a rare mix of technical depth, commercial discipline and founder conviction, and we believed the team was well placed to build an enduring business in an underserved market.”

For Njeru, the value of a partner like TLcom shows up when plans meet reality. He points to the firm’s commercial and strategic input to pressure-test decisions with people who understand what scale demands. “I remember the first conversation I had with the team, the kind of questions they were asking. It was, wow, this is exactly what we need,” he says.

Today, Pula’s footprint stretches well beyond a single product or market. Across Ethiopia, Uganda, Zambia, Mozambique and Benin, the company is helping governments, agribusinesses and farmers build more resilient systems - from an insurance-linked input scheme in Ethiopia that reaches over 7.5 million farmers annually, to the geo-mapping of 1.65 million coffee farmers in Uganda, to drought payouts in Zambia that reached more than 800,000 farmers. In Mozambique, the products reach over 1 million households, while Benin’s national programme targets more than 1 million farmers by 2027. At the centre of that push is the Pula Insurance Engine [PIE], its digital pricing platform, which signals where the company is headed: not just insuring farmers but building the infrastructure to price and manage agricultural risk at scale.

Internally, that approach shows up in how the company operates. Pula is, in Njeru’s words, “a data company.” Decisions are expected to be grounded in evidence, not instinct. That mindset extends to leadership. One of the biggest shifts for him has been stepping back from execution. His role now is less about doing and more about enabling - setting direction, questioning assumptions, and creating space to think. “One decision is worth a whole month of working,” he says.

That balance between thinking and doing also influences how he advises other founders. “Keep your head in the sky and feet on the ground,” he says. Ideas can guide strategy, but he warns against treating slides as proof: “Just because you put it down in a presentation, it doesn’t make it a fact.”

For Pula’s legacy, he keeps it grounded in farmers rather than startup mythology. “Making climate shocks a setback, not a life sentence for farmers,” he says. He also wants Pula to show it is possible to build a commercially viable business with impact built in. 

He is careful, too, about quoting fast-moving metrics from memory. And if there is a broader lesson in the journey, it is one he returns to often - the gap between what sounds right and what is true. Closing that gap, consistently, is where the real work happens.