Seedstars has announced a new partnership with Paris-based First Growth Ventures to launch a $100 million fund to invest in African tech startups. Seedstar made the announcement at the Seedstars Summit held at the SwissTech Convention Centre in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Seedstars World chief financial officer Charlie Graham-Brown said “The strategy that we’re developing now and have started working on, is to have a fund per region of around $100-million to be able to do deals in Series-A and Series-B,”
Speaking to Ventureburn Graham-Brown said the fund in Africa will be Seedstars first such regional fund. He said the aim is for the fund to invest in 30 to 40 companies and to begin investing by the end of this year.
The fund according to a press release from Seedstars will focus on early-stage investments from $250 000 to $5-million in “the most promising innovative ventures across sectors and countries”.
Since its inception in 2013, Seedstars has invested in ticket sizes of between $50 000 and $500 000 in 40 companies so far.
Four of these startups were set up by Seedstars itself through its venture building team in Nigeria that focuses on the fintech sector and a further four were venture built by the organisation in Ivory Coast that focuses on edtech.
“We are very proud to be supporting all these entrepreneurs and we’ll continue to expand our activities with the launch of new acceleration and training programmes across the world. We’ll also be announcing more funding to these unbelievable entrepreneurs that we have seen on stage all week,” said Pierre-Alain Masson, co-founder at Seedstars.
A recent report by Partech Africa revealed that African tech startups raised a total of US$1.163 billion in equity funding in 2018.
The report covers equity deals in tech and digital spaces, and funding rounds higher than US$200K and lower than US$100 Million.In 2018, the report notes that 146 African startups raised a total of US$1.163 Billion in equity through 164 rounds, this is a +108% growth YoY, compared to +33% in 2016 and +53% in 2017. This also represents x4.2 growth multiple over the last 36 months.
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