A number of funding alternatives are opening up for African startups from numerous sources, the newest being from Savannah Fund.
The enterprise capital agency has raised $25 million to spend money on early-stage startups throughout sub-Saharan Africa, with a deal with “supporting girls entrepreneurs and disruptive corporations in high-growth sectors.”
This $25 million fund is the agency’s second shut and has been aptly named “Savannah Fund II”. Funding into the brand new fund was led by the Worldwide Finance Company (IFC) and the Girls’s Finance Initiative (WeFi).
Savannah will spend money on Kenyan, Nigerian and South African startups which can be on the seed to Series A stage. They outline the three international locations as their “core markets” however plan to increase their portfolio to incorporate startups in Rwanda, Ethiopia, Uganda, Ivory Coast and Ghana.
In every nation, Savannah’s focus spans a number of sectors together with fintech, schooling, logistics, e-commerce, software-as-a-service and healthtech startups. Agrictech, a sector that has been sizzling lately, can also be on their radar.
Based by Mbwana Ailly and Paul Bragiel, Savannah Fund launched funding actions in Africa in 2012 with an accelerator program in Kenya. They transitioned totally to creating seed and sequence A investments in 2016 and have invested in 31 corporations throughout 7 African international locations since.
A few of these corporations embody Aerobotics from South Africa, IoT startup Safigen and Moringa College (each based in Kenya) and Flex.membership, a mobility startup working in South Africa and Mexico.
Extra lately, Savannah has invested in pre-seed rounds of Orbit Well being in Ethiopia and Ando Meals, a cloud kitchen firm in Kenya. The agency says their portfolio corporations raised $118 million throughout Collection A, B, and C, a report for the agency to this point.
Different backers of the fund embody Tim Draper of Draper Associates, Visa Forsten, co-founder of Supercell (now a part of Tencent) and UMA, a enterprise studio primarily based in Senegal.
Bragiel stated one in every of Savannah’s motivations is to again African corporations that “have the potential to scale past the continent that may increase into Silicon Valley and rising markets like South East Asia, Central and Japanese Europe, and Latin America.”
Savannah has an Entrepreneur in Residence programme which prioritises the funding of feminine founders. Ailly, the agency’s managing accomplice, says their partnership with WeFi will “additional increase and encourage feminine founders on the continent.”
To bolster Savannah’s funding method, Ailly has tapped his connection to Stanford the place he did his MBA and teaches; Steve Ciesinski, a former president of the Stanford Analysis Institute, will be a part of Savannah’s Funding Committee.
Ciesinski shall be joined by Tommy Chia, a Hong-Kong primarily based investor who has invested in Paga and OneFinance out of his household workplace. Erik Hersman, who based iHub (now owned by Co-creation Hub), co-founded Kenyan civic-tech platform Ushahidi, and presently runs the web infrastructure firm BRCK, will turn out to be a senior advisor at Savannah.
