Our investment philosophy is inspired by the principles of African prosperity built on lessons from a decade of building and investing on the continent. Indeed, what makes investing in Africa different is that a trusted community, comprised of longstanding relationships built over time and nurtured through trust, drives action and leads to success.
This is why our fund’s secret weapon is our vibrant 300+ member Future Africa Community, a community of the brightest and best across government, corporate, venture capital, development finance, and the startup founder ecosystem in Africa, across Africa, and its diaspora.
This community supports us in providing founders with active guidance, relationships, and coaching around storytelling, leadership, business and product development, and fundraising. We work together with the founders to build category-defining businesses that turn Africa’s biggest challenges into global businesses.
We work with founders from as early as an idea or problem statement and we roll up our sleeves to help set their businesses up for impact and scale. We support our founders in a wide range of areas critical for early success including crafting a convincing narrative, building strong teams, building the value proposition and finding the first customers and outside capital.
We call ourselves founding investors - with check sizes ranging from $100,000 to $500,000 – and significant follow-on capital.
It takes a village to build a unicorn. This is why we created the Future Africa Community, a highly-curated membership of local founders, corporates, investors, and advisors that work with us to nurture our portfolio with advice and relevant networks from day zero. We also work with institutional and government partners who help us to translate our solutions to impact at scale.
Like our own team, we believe the bold and visionary entrepreneurial leaders we back will come from every walk of life because they have a lived experience of uncommon insight into Africa’s biggest challenges. Our portfolio demonstrates a willingness to eschew false stereotypes of who a great founder is or could be, particularly in an African context.
The best business relationships are built on trust, that’s what we ask and expect from our long-term partners. Given we fund founders long before any due diligence is plausible, we source companies through networks and relationships of trust. We are also very strict about expelling bad actors from our ecosystem particularly if they show no signs of contrition or repentance.
In fact, most of our deal flow comes from introductions made by our trusted network of founders.
At Future Africa we believe African prosperity is regenerative. Many of the founders in our portfolio are alumni of companies we have previously invested in. We give back, and this is why a huge segment of our investor base consists of founders and operators in our portfolio, many of whom give back, too.
We support bold and visionary leaders by collaborating with our local ecosystem for co-investments and targeted founder support.
Our community, which consists of over 300 high-profile local founders, venture firms, international business leaders, government policy-makers, and angel investors, share our vision to solve Africa’s biggest challenges.
As part of our ecosystem, they bring their experience and offer their knowledge, strategy and hands-on support.
With our third fund, we will invest in businesses tackling our prism of opportunity: T.I.M.E. These four pillars address the critical challenges that we’re meeting in the next decades to realize the vision.
Build new talent pipelines to give African youth the skills to participate in the digital economy.
Deploy digital and physical infrastructure that will power innovation and entrepreneurship via the digital economy.
Innovate new data driven approaches to aggregating demand and supply across fragmented markets in Africa and its diaspora to create huge new markets for global non- consumption.
6 Elsie Femi Pearse St, Victoria island 106104, Lagos
8 The Green, Suite #4952, Dover, DE 19901
