Ventures Platform raises $84M oversubscribed second Africa fund

Ventures Platform has raised an oversubscribed $84 million second fund as the Pan-African venture firm expands beyond its home market of Nigeria, with a strategy shaped by a tougher, more selective venture market. The firm plans to back early-stage founders across sectors including fintech, healthcare, and SaaS, and other areas “where technology can address essential needs and build large, enduring businesses,” founding partner Kola Aina told TechCrunch, adding that AI is part of the thesis where it changes the economics of serving African markets by cutting costs or addressing labor shortages.

Ventures Platform, headquartered in Nigeria, previously raised a $46 million Fund I in 2022 with a similar but more limited scope focused primarily on pre-seed and seed rounds. That fund, Aina said, demonstrated that its approach to early-stage investing in Africa could work at institutional scale and laid the foundation for Fund II. The firm is now expanding beyond Nigeria and has already written checks from Fund II to five companies in Kenya, South Africa, and Egypt; check sizes will run up to $3 million, and the firm hopes to deploy the capital over the next three to four years.

Raising the fund took about a year and a half, with Aina describing the environment as more selective than when the firm raised Fund I, as LPs ask harder questions about performance, portfolio construction, liquidity, manager discipline, and differentiation. This year, African startups have raised around $930 million across more than 200 deals, down from $1.16 billion across 447 deals last year — part of what Aina and others describe as a venture market now shaped like a barbell, with LPs giving capital to a handful of top firms and to emerging managers with a track record they trust. “Three years ago, there was still a significant amount of curiosity around the African opportunity. Today, LPs expect proof,” Aina said, adding that simply being a Pan-African fund is no longer a strategy on its own; LPs want to know about access to top talent, how funds navigate individual markets, and why a firm has “the right to win.”

That pitch appears to have resonated with existing backers: 70% of Fund I’s LPs returned for Fund II, including the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Norfund, and Ghana’s Ashesi University Foundation. Aina said the firm’s edge comes from understanding the institutional and market realities founders face while connecting companies to regional and global networks as they scale.

Why it matters

Ventures Platform’s ability to raise a larger, broader-mandate fund — with most of Fund I’s LPs returning — in a market where LPs increasingly concentrate capital in proven managers suggests African-focused funds now need a track record, not just geographic thesis, to raise institutional money.