Money Is Flowing Into African Startups, But The Path Out Remains Unclear

Pan-African venture capital fund, Ventures Platform, which backs early-stage startups, used last week’s Africa Prosperity Summit in Lagos to push an argument many investors have been whispering for years, confronting the reality that Africa’s funding story is maturing, but exits are not.

The three-day gathering of more than 250 fund managers, founders and policy people focused on a single problem investors say will determine whether capital on the continent converts into durable wealth.

Ventures Platform’s Kola Aina told attendees that closing Africa’s “liquidity gap” is not merely about pumping in capital but building companies that are acquisition-ready, improving listing pipelines and finding continent-specific exit mechanisms.

The fund behind the event is itself in the middle of that work. Ventures Platform announced a USD 64 M first close for its USD 75 M Fund II this month, a move the firm says will deepen seed investments and help catalyse Series A rounds across Africa.

Speakers ranged from exchange executives to fintech founders. Temi Popoola of the Nigerian Exchange Group and Tosin Eniolorunda of Moniepoint both warned that weak listing markets and operational fragility inside fast-scaling companies make exits harder to deliver. That echoes a growing industry refrain that fundraising is easier than delivering repeatable, verifiable exits that satisfy limited partners.

Data was positioned as part of the solution. Michael Famoroti, head of research at Stears, unveiled an African Exit Index during the Summit. The index is billed as a publicly accessible benchmark to measure exit performance, providing a common yardstick for policymakers and investors trying to judge whether exits are improving or flatlining. If it works as promised, the index could make an opaque part of the market easier to track.

But the Summit’s sober tone also highlighted why promises matter more than rhetoric. Market signals are mixed as industry data reveals an uptick in documented exits compared with a few years ago, yet key local mechanisms remain underused.

Nigeria’s tech-focused board on the NGX, set up to lure startups to list domestically, has yet to deliver a single major tech IPO three years after launch, a gap that underlines structural frictions between private capital and public markets. Until those frictions are addressed, stakeholders reckon exit outcomes will remain uneven across countries and sectors.

The Summit showcased pragmatic routes investors are exploring, including venture debt, revenue-based financing, and blended structures that can buy founders time and reduce reliance on headline-grabbing IPOs. But it’s been emphasised that while those tools matter, they do not remove the need for deeper corporate participation, predictable regulation and better governance inside startups so they become attractive buyers or listing candidates.

Ventures Platform and its peers have demonstrated they can mobilise capital. As it stands, the harder task, and the one the continent needs to crack, is turning that capital into reliable exits that actually prove the business case to cautious institutional investors.