Ventures Platform closes $84 million fund after backing Moniepoint and Paystack

Ventures Platform, the Abuja seed investor behind early positions in Paystack and Moniepoint, has closed its second institutional fund at $84 million, overshooting a $75 million target in a market where most African fund managers have struggled to raise anything at all.

The scale is easier to read against what the rest of the industry managed. The six African venture funds that reached a final close during 2025 raised roughly $107 million between them. This single fund comes within about $23 million of that combined total.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Norfund, Alphatron and the Ashesi University Foundation joined as new limited partners, alongside a group of family offices. They sit with investors from the first close, which included the International Finance Corporation, Standard Bank, British International Investment, Proparco through the European Union-backed Choose Africa programme, Egypt's Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency, AfricaGrow and Alder Tree Investment.

Nigeria's government is in the fund through its Investment in Digital and Creative Enterprises programme, the first time the state has taken a position in a venture capital fund. Michael Seibel, formerly of Y Combinator, came in as an individual backer.

The firm has been investing since 2016 and is run by founding partner Kola Aina alongside managing partner Dotun Olowoporoku, who joined as the first fund was closing and has led the institutional fundraising since. Olowoporoku was previously a principal at Novastar Ventures and chief commercial officer at Moniepoint, where he served as a board observer from 2021 to 2022, before the company became a unicorn. Damilola Teidi-Ayoola heads platform and networks.

The raise took time to assemble. The process ran more than two years before the first close of $64 million was announced in November, with about 70% of that interest coming from investors in the firm's first fund. Aina had been aiming to finish by the first quarter of this year.

Dirk Werner, managing director of equity at the EBRD, said venture capital on the continent "remains underdeveloped relative to the scale of entrepreneurial activity," framing the investment as an attempt to strengthen the market infrastructure that lets young companies reach growth capital.

The money will go out differently from the last fund. Ventures Platform now runs three entry points, at pre-seed, seed and pre-Series A, and has modelled first cheques of up to $3 million with an average around $1.5 million. It is targeting entry ownership of between 10% and 12% and holding reserve capital to follow its winners. Series A is where it stops. The firm will follow companies it already owns into that round but rarely leads there.

That shift came out of what happened when the first fund started returning money. Ventures Platform has relied heavily on secondary sales for liquidity, and the mathematics of a secondary punish a small initial position. Aina has put the lesson bluntly, saying that "entry ownership is everything, because the stock only gets pricier."

He has also been careful not to oversell secondaries. He told Techpoint last year that if secondaries are the only thing happening, later-stage investors end up with nowhere to go, and that the tool belongs in the kit rather than at the centre of it.

The track record is why institutions came back. Ventures Platform was an early backer of Paystack, acquired by Stripe in 2020, and of Moniepoint, which crossed a billion-dollar valuation in 2024. Its portfolio also holds PiggyVest, LemFi, Raenest, OmniRetail, Seamless Technologies, Thrive Agric, Nomba, Brass, Mono and Reliance Health. Moniepoint, OmniRetail and Thrive Agric all appeared on the Financial Times list of Africa's 25 fastest-growing companies in 2024.

The firm has put money into more than 90 startups since 2016. Its first institutional vehicle, the Pan-African Fund, closed at $46 million against a $40 million target.

Aina has said the fund matters less for the capital raised than for the founders it lets the firm back, describing a generation of entrepreneurs with deeper technical skills, stronger governance and a clearer grasp of the markets they operate in.

Whether that holds will show in the exits rather than the announcements. African venture funding remains far below its 2021 and 2022 peaks, the continent's exit routes are thin, and a fund leaning on secondaries is betting that later-stage buyers keep turning up.