“There isn’t one single phrase you can use to capture such a diverse continent in any shape, not to talk of angel investing….If you consider the continent in its diversity, the one thing we can say is, yes, angel investing is continuing to grow. The growth rate and the trajectory has been consistent with what we’re seeing in early-stage entrepreneurship and its inbound capital”.
Those were the unequivocal words of Tomi Davies—Chief Investment Officer at Greentech, President of ABAN, and Co-Founder of Lagos Angel Network—in a firsthand testament of the 'status in quo' regarding African tech startups and their fundraising pursuits.
TD’s intuition regarding angel investing in the continent is a projection of increased local value. African startups are, after all, now swinging in appreciable capital—both from homefront-focused sources and from international fountainheads.
Prior to the present decade, fundraising for startups building out of Africa was pretty much a straightforward—however scarce—undertaking: every once, twice, or thrice in a month, a longstanding VC from somewhere outside decides to make the bet on a fledgling (and perhaps unpopular) African startup.
More recently, however, the same early-stage ventures are attracting “more sizable” cash injections from a multiplicity of sources, no longer only from deep-pocketed VCs.
More often than not, these sources involve syndicates—a collection of experienced angel investors and tech startup founders pooling financial resources to back high-growth ventures at ridiculously early stages.
As a way to work around the challenges hurdling institutional investments in the continent’s yet nascent tech ecosystem, funders such as Iyinoluwa Aboyeji’s Future Africa Collective, and Growth Capital Fund by CCHub’s Bosun Tijani and iROKOtv’s Jason Njoku are currently in the practice of “syndicating” African startup investments, on the VC side.
