Voltron Capital is a venture capital firm co-founded by entrepreneur-cum-angel investors, Olumide Soyombo and Abe Choi.
Before coming together to found Voltron, Soyombo and Choi had collectively invested in over 41 startups as angel investors; Soyombo had invested in 26 startups while Choi invested in 15.
Launched in the third-quarter of 2021, Voltron is on a mission “to back extraordinary entrepreneurs out of Africa solving important problems in large markets”. Their investment thesis is to back exciting founders in large markets, where large markets mean large exits, and investing early means large multiples.
With Voltron’s Fund 1, they intended to invest $20,000 – $100,000 in 30 startups headquartered in Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa and Northern Africa. But surpassed that.
If you are reputable for angel investing, you will get a lot of inbound and your initial expectations will be stretched.
Of the tons of inbounds that Voltron received they were able to meet with 500 companies, which implies that they met two startups every working day.
I asked Olumide how his team was able to achieve this and he explained that they have really good signal. “Most of our deal flow is from founders we have backed and other co-investors”, says Olumide Soyombo.
By September 2022, Voltron closed Fund 1 having invested in 53 startups, a 10% acceptance rate reminiscent of what we see from top business schools. In 2016, Harvard Business School’s acceptance rate was 12%, Wharton had 9% and Columbia had 18.2%.
True to fashion, the 53 startups are run by non-solo founders totalling 113. Thus, each startup that Voltron invested in had at least two co-founders, one of which is most likely a technical co-founder. In February 2021, Olumide told Benjamindada.com that he prefers to invest in a group of founders, featuring a technical co-founder. Here is an excerpt from that article:
What specific characteristics do you look for in the founders you invest in? Are you looking for technical founders?
I usually like teams more than solo founders. And I think technical co-founders are key. I prefer technical founders/co-founders because it reduces the raise amount. Imagine if you have to raise for your development and you are outsourcing to a dev shop or to India. That increases the amount that is needed to raise to prove viability. So yes, we like technical founders as part of the team.
Also, they backed all these startups, but one, at the pre-seed stage.
All the startups Voltron invested in are headquartered in seven African countries—Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Morocco, Senegal, Rwanda, and Uganda.
The first three are members of the “big four”, so that’s expected. But it’s interesting to find that Rwanda and Uganda made the list, as they had very low startup funding activity in 2022. According to our Africa startup funding tracker, there was only one disclosed investment activity for startups headquartered in Rwanda and three in Uganda.
The startups in Voltron’s Fund 1 are operating in 14 key industries that include Financial Services (43.4%), Crypto (11%), Education and Healthcare (7.5%).
Comparing the ratio of investments in Voltron’s portfolio to the continent’s average, they were fully aligned with the rest of the industry when it comes to investment in HealthTechs (7.5%). Closely aligned in EdTechs (5%) while being very bullish on Crypto (3.9%) and fintechs (30%).
More than 30% of Voltron’s portfolio companies (portcos) have been accepted into top global accelerators like YC, and Techstars. Thereby, attracting the attention of tier 1 venture capitalists.
Meet the 53 startups in Voltron’s first Fund
The 53 startups are:
- Akoma Health: Akoma Health is providing Africans with access to quality on- demand therapy and support from the comfort of their homes. Think BetterHelp for Africa.
- Allawee: Allawee is unlocking credit access, with real-time financial data insights delivered instantly via API’s & Radar Dashboard. With their API first approach, Allaweee is building Africa’s credit infrastructure.
- Altschool: AltSchool is skilling up Africans and issuing them accredited certificates at scale. They are on a mission to get every African a future-proof marketable skill.
- Alvin: Alvin is democratizing access to assets for all Africans by helping them track current expenses and building personalized and dynamic budgets that guide them on the path to acquiring new assets.
- Bamba: Bamba enables small businesses to conveniently manage their customers and stock levels, get paid, payout and take out cash advances against their future cash flow. Think “Square” in SSA but for micro-merchants using mobile money instead of cards. IROKO co-founder, Bastian Gotter is the founder of Bamba.
- BFree: BFree is enabling efficient credit collection across emerging markets starting with Nigeria and Kenya. Their digital-first credit collection processes consist of a self-service platform for customers, AI collection, and human collection. On January 8, 2022, BFree announced their pre-Series A round of $1.7 million.
- Bridgecard: Bridgecard gives Africans one card and app to manage and withdraw from multiple bank accounts while giving their money the security it deserves. Think Curve for Africa.
- Bujeti: Bujeti is enabling African businesses to take complete control of their spending through a centralized platform that tracks spending, offers corporate business cards and provides high- resolution monitoring and reporting.
- Capsa: Capsa is meeting the financial needs of Nigerian MSMEs by helping them turn their unpaid invoices into working capital. Capsa has built an online invoice marketplace to make it possible to access needed capital within 48hours.
- Catlog: Catlog makes it easy for Africans to sell on social media by simplifying order management, customer management, invoicing, payments, etc.
- Chargel: Founded by Moustapha Ndoye and Alioune Ndoye, Chargel connects transporters and shippers across Francophone West Africa on a single digital platform, eliminating the need for brokers. They are making the trucking experience more reliable, efficient, and transparent. Ventures Platform is also an investor of Chargel.
- Clafiya: Founded by Jennie Nwokoye and Itoro Inoyo, Clafiya is a digital primary healthcare service that connects Africans to health practitioners who provide them with on- demand, high-quality, and affordable primary care. They got into Google for Startups Accelerator Class 7.
- Demand Research: Demand Research has built a DeFi (decentralized finance) platform on which Africans can earn interest on their digital currencies when they stake it to predict outcomes. They have also developed a lossless lottery system ensuring users never lose their staked amount even if they predict wrong.
- Earnipay: Earnipay is enabling Nigerian employers offer their employees access to their earned salaries at any time without making changes to their existing payment process. Think wagestream in the UK or Minu in Latin America.
- Fluna: Fluna enables mid-market businesses across Africa to manage, optimize and unlock their latent cash flows via their digital treasury platform. Think Brex for Africa with an embedded pipe marketplace.
- Gwala: Founded by Simo Abaouz and Aakash Jain, Gwala unlocks access to earned wages for Africans in structured jobs at any point during the pay cycle, addressing the liquidity crunch and financial vulnerability that African workers experience.
- Heyfood: HeyFood is enabling African restaurants, hotels, QSRs and food vendors set up and manage their food ordering and delivery businesses using connected digital products.
- IndyGeneUS: IndyGeneUS AI is a genomics startup creating the world’s largest blockchain encrypted repository of indigenous and diasporic African/Afro-Latin clinical data for disease prevention/detection, drug discovery, and development.
- Izifin: Founded by Dr. Dumebi Okwechime and Hossiein Ghaffari, Izifin makes it simple for African fintechs to embed Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence directly into their products through simple API integrations, allowing them to scale, optimize, and automate complex processes.
- Jackfruit Finance: Jackfruit Finance is FinTech for education. Jackfruit finacne is increasing access to low-cost African private schools by providing technology, capital, and reward programs to educators across Sub-Saharan Africa.
- Klas: Klas is a platform for digital creators to teach online classes. Klas’s all-in-one browser-based platform enables creators to efficiently manage the logistics of teaching online, giving them time to focus on what matters – teaching!
- Klump: Founded by Celestine Omin and Olufunbi Falayi, Klump is on a mission to enhance the online checkout payment experience with innovative and customer-friendly products. Their flagship product makes it possible for Nigerians to buy anything now and pay later.
- Lazerpay: Founder by Njoku Emmanuel, Lazerpay is building Africa’s blockchain-powered payment infrastructure. They are making it easy for African merchants, freelancers and business owners to accept payments globally, invest in crypto and earn rewards.
Another Voltron portfolio company, Nestcoin invested in Lazerpay. At the end of November 2022, Lazerpay laid off some of its employees, following the pull out of one if its proposed Seed fund investors - Mecho: Mecho is giving Nigerian automobile owners access to affordable, verified automobile technicians & parts.
- Metacare: Metacare is providing scalable customer service for startups across Africa. Using their proprietary AI service automation tool, support architect roles and services, Metacare is helping African startups create great customer experiences.
- Moni: Moni is financing Africa’s mobile money market using their community-driven model based on social trust to ensure repayment from mobile money agents.
- Nestcoin: Founded by Yele Bademosi and Taiwo Orilogbon, Nestcoin is democratizing access to economic opportunities within the crypto space in Africa. They’re building crypto-native products that use non-custodial decentralize finance and social engagement to go beyond trading and investments and drive crypto adoption across Africa.
In February 2022, they announced a mouth-watering $6.5 million pre-seed round. However, following FTX’s collapse, they were badly hit and had to downsize. - Nomad: Founded by James Figueroa (CEO) and Nyasha Fraser Yerro, Nomad is on a mission to transform SME finance across Africa with a range of products including low cost digital banking, supply chain finance and credit building finance.
- Norebase: Founded by Tola Onayemi, Norebase is enabling anyone, launch and expand a business across Africa using technology. Think Stripe Atlas + Turbo Tax for Africa. They closed their $1 million pre-seed in May 2022, in September, Google announced them as one of the recipients of its 2022 Black Founders Fund Africa.
- Notto: Founded by Dalumuzi H. Mhlanga, Notto is an Africa-focused credit-scoring fintech that unlocks financing for creditworthy Africans, so they can own assets and build wealth. Notto accumulates consumer financial data to create a credit rating (Notto Score) for Africans.
- Novek: Using its proprietary IOT technology, Novek is helping African FMCG manufacturers eliminate single-use plastic from their supply chains — increasing their margins while minimizing the environmental impact of FMCG packaging. The founders of Novek are Zahid Mitha and Edoardo Biraghi.
- Ovalfi: Founded by Chinedu Okpala and Segun Mustafa, Ovalfi enables African fintechs, neobanks, and other institutions to offer crypto-enabled products to their customers, allowing them to save, execute cross-border transactions, access credit, and invest powered by USDC.
- Payday: Founded by Favour Ori, Payday is making it possible for international companies to make efficient and reliable cross border payroll payments to Africa’s talent as well as seamless P2P remittance. Payday raised a pre-seed round in October 2021.
- Payourse: Payourse is on a mission to build the crypto infrastructure for Africa. With products like Coinprofile and Simpa, Payrouse makes it easy to move crypto through the continent and start a crypto exchange.
- Plumter: Plumter is building multicurrency accounts/infrastructure to help African individuals and businesses make foreign payments with local cards, convert money between currencies and accept international payments.
- PressOne: PressOne makes it possible for Nigerian solopreneurs to operate a single business phone line that is always reachable and is sharable between multiple business administrators.
- Raenest: Raenest is enabling employers worldwide to effortlessly onboard remote employees from 120+ countries. They also make it possible to coordinate payments, sort out compliance and taxes and control team expenses with virtual cards.
- Rapture: Rapture is a creator community and platform for publishing mobile comics of Black American, African & Arab Origin. They offer bite-sized content through mobile apps and web platforms.
- Remedial Health: Remedial is improving the quality of life in Africa by providing e-procurement & CRM tools to pharmacies & patent medicine stores (PPMVs). They also offer pharmacies & PPMVs access to credit.
- Sats: Sats is on a mission to enable Africans to build wealth & transact freely. Their flagship product is a custodial wallet that allows Africans to store wealth in digital dollars, earn interest and send/receive payments in USDC.
- Sendme: Sendme is using social commerce and artificial intelligence to meet the animal protein demands of Nigerian households and businesses at remarkable prices.
- Shekel Mobility: Shekel empowers used car dealers across Africa, providing them with access to credit, car lots and a dealer management system to optimize their operations and increase profit.
- Steward: Steward enables African education institutions to build sustainable and resilient funding models. Its flagship product gives them the tools to create vibrant alum communities and manage recurring donations to their endowment funds. Former principal at Future Africa, Peter Kisadha is the CEO and co-founder of Steward, alongside Henry Mugenyi.
- SunFi: Sunfi is simplifying and scaling clean energy access. Their financial technology matches Africans to the right clean energy solution from entrepreneurs on their platform. Additionally, they offer flexible consumer payment plans and project execution support.
- TalkSay: Talksay is a super app for African language markets, making it easy to find engaging content and build new communities in your African language.
- ToNote Technologies: ToNote enables digital trust for Africans transacting in a post- covid world. Its first product digitizes the entire notarization process, making it 26X faster and 55% cheaper to notarize documents. The founder of ToNote is Fikayo Durosinmi Etti.
- Topset: Topset is uses gamification and machine learning (amongst other things) to democratize access to tailored online tutoring and e-learning for Africa’s 150 million students. Frank Williams, Uche Azinge, and Yvonne Eniola Williams are the founders of Topset.
- Topup Mama: Topup Mama aggregates demands from African restaurants and delivers goods and services to them, offering a wide selection of products, direct delivery, and access to credit.
- Traction Apps: Traction Apps is an ecosystem for African SMEs to accept payments, run their businesses and access capital for growth. They are building a suite of connected tools which will be the operating system for SMEs in Africa.
- VeendHQ: VeendHQ is making it easy for African financial institutions and merchants to embed credit into their products profitably and at scale. Olufemi Olanipekun founded VeendHQ.
- Venco: Venco is building the operating system for smart cities and communities. They are making it possible for Property Owners, Property Managers, and Residents to organize their residential and commercial communities better.
- Vendy (FKA Bill Easy): ‘Bill Easy’ is building an alternative payments infrastructure that enables African merchants to collect payments from customers using only phone numbers. Their unique Request to Pay solution means merchants can now preempt the collection of payments via USSD or mobile app.
- WoodCore: WoodCore is building a composable cloud banking infrastructure that enables financial and non-financial institutions to embed financial services into their existing products and go to market 10X faster with over 250 APIs.
In conclusion, venture investing is a high-risk business with the potential to not only mint millionaires but also create social impact in the world.
With the likes of Voltron Africa making a huge bet on African startups, one can expect to see more advancements in tech and the standard of living on the continent.
Hey Africa-focused investors, we are open to receiving your 2022 fund performance report. Email me: [firstname]@benjamindada.com
