In 2015, the Future Africa Fund was founded by Nigerian men who took their success with American companies and turned it into angel investments in Africa.
Iyinoluwa Aboyeji and Nadayar Enegesi have just made this unique fund official, with the former serving as a general partner and the latter as a limited partner. This announcement of the fund being “officially official” comes on the heels of the announcement of the pair investing nearly $2 million across 19 different African companies.
The Future Africa Fund, according to TechCrunch, is technically a “syndicate,” which is a much easier way to get investors to invest in African companies. According to the outlet, this type of setup is so “most of the capital in Africa for promising startups is typically distributed among many investors. Syndicates are now emerging as one way of bringing the long tail together for more equity firepower.”
To be more specific, then, the Future Africa Fund’s syndicate arm is better known as the Future Africa Syndicate — to put it another way, investor money goes into the fund, and is disbursed through the syndicate.
“There’s a massive early-stage funding gap for African startups. All the data we were looking at pointed to the fact that work needed to be done to bridge that gap,” Aboyeji told TechCrunch. “We simply couldn’t go on the journey alone to fix the gap and decided to build Future Africa Collective to democratize access to African startups. We think of ourselves as pioneers in this field.”
