Powerstove Wins $1.2M Cascador Backing for IoT Clean Cookstoves in Nigeria

Cooking with firewood and charcoal quietly harms millions — through indoor smoke, deforestation and daily fuel costs. Nigeria's Powerstove just won about $1.2 million and the Best Impact Prize at Cascador Pitch Day 2026 to scale a smarter alternative: a smokeless, self-powering, IoT-connected clean cookstove.

Few everyday activities carry as much hidden cost as cooking does across much of Africa. The smoke from open fires damages lungs, the hunt for firewood eats into schooldays and working hours, and the steady demand for charcoal strips forests bare. Yet clean-cooking solutions have historically struggled to reach mass adoption, mostly because cleaner stoves cost more upfront than families can spare. Powerstove attacks that adoption barrier head-on — not only making the stove cheaper to run, but turning it into a small source of income. That combination is what caught the eye of Cascador's judges.

What Powerstove does

Founded by Okey Esse, Powerstove bills itself as the world's first clean cookstove with IoT built in. The smokeless stove uses roughly 70% less cooking fuel, cooks food up to five times faster than traditional stoves, and even self-generates electricity while it burns. To feed it, the company produces wood pellets from sawdust that are around 80% cheaper than charcoal, firewood or kerosene — turning a waste stream into affordable, cleaner fuel.

The carbon-credit twist

Powerstove's most distinctive feature is how it rewards users. Because each stove is connected, the company can measure usage and convert the avoided emissions into carbon credits — then pay households back up to $120 per year directly into their mobile-money accounts. In other words, families are paid to cook cleaner. That flips the usual adoption barrier for clean-cooking hardware on its head, aligning household economics with climate impact.

Inside the deal

Powerstove was among seven startups sharing more than $5 million from Cascador at its 2026 Pitch Day in Lagos. Cascador singled out founder Okey Esse for the Best Impact Prize, recognising the company's work delivering clean cooking to thousands across Africa. The award — around $1.2 million — will help scale manufacturing, distribution and the pellet supply chain.

Why it matters

Clean cooking is one of the most under-funded, high-impact problems in African development, touching health, gender equity (women and girls bear most fuel-collection burdens), deforestation and climate. Powerstove's model — efficient hardware, cheaper fuel from waste, and a carbon-credit payout that puts money back in users' pockets — is a compelling blueprint, and its Cascador win reinforces 2026's pattern of catalytic capital backing hardware with measurable impact.

The clean-cooking crisis

Roughly a billion people across Africa still cook over open fires or inefficient stoves, burning wood, charcoal or kerosene. The toll is enormous: household air pollution is a leading cause of premature death, fuel-gathering consumes hours that fall mostly on women and girls, and the demand for firewood drives deforestation. Clean cooking sits at the intersection of health, gender equity, climate and household economics — and yet it remains chronically underfunded. Powerstove's proposition is compelling precisely because it attacks all of those problems at once, with a device that is cheaper to run and actually pays its users.

What to watch next

The genius and the challenge of Powerstove's model both lie in the carbon-credit loop. Paying households up to $120 a year is a powerful adoption driver, but it depends on a functioning carbon market and robust measurement of usage — exactly the kind of verification the credit market is under pressure to tighten. With Cascador's capital and the Best Impact Prize behind it, Powerstove now has the resources to scale manufacturing, its sawdust-pellet supply chain and distribution. If it can keep the economics honest as it grows, it stands to become a flagship for how clean-cooking hardware can be made genuinely affordable — and even income-generating — for African households.

Details as disclosed via Cascador, GSMA, Empower Africa and public announcements, June 2026. Figures are as reported; NGN–USD conversions are approximate.