ABIDJAN, Aug 27 – Ventures Platform has closed its second institutional fund at $84 million, giving the African seed-stage venture capital firm a much larger pool of capital to invest in startups across the continent.
The new fund, VP Pan-African Fund II, is almost twice the size of the firm’s first institutional fund, which closed at $46 million in December 2022.
The fund attracted new institutional investors, including the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Norway’s Norfund, Dutch family office Alphatron and the Ashesi University Foundation, alongside several new family offices.
They join investors from the fund’s $64 million first close in November 2025, including Nigeria’s iDICE programme, the International Finance Corporation, Standard Bank, British International Investment, Proparco through the EU-backed Choose Africa programme, Egypt’s MSME Development Agency, AfricaGrow and Alder Tree Investment.
Despite the larger fund size, Ventures Platform plans to back roughly the same number of companies as its first fund. Instead, it intends to write larger cheques and take bigger initial stakes, targeting ownership of between 10% and 12%.
“We’re looking to invest with much deeper conviction, so much larger ticket sizes,” founding partner Kola Aina told TechCabal.
Ventures Platform now invests at the pre-seed, seed and pre-Series A stages. Aina said the fund can write initial cheques of up to $3 million, with an average investment of about $1.5 million. The fund will stop at Series A, although it can follow existing portfolio companies into the round.
The strategy reflects a key lesson from the firm’s first fund: owning enough of a company matters when it is time to exit. Ventures Platform has increasingly relied on secondary sales, where early investors sell part of their stake to another investor. Aina said smaller stakes leave less room to generate liquidity.
Strategic acquisitions remain the firm’s preferred exit route, while Aina described initial public offerings as “somewhat mythical”. The firm’s research shows that 73% of African venture exits happen through acquisitions.
The new fund also has a more diverse investor base, with private capital, particularly European family offices, making up a larger share than in Fund I. Aina said this is important because Africa receives less than 2% of global venture capital and still faces what he considers an unjustified risk premium.
Ventures Platform is also planning for currency depreciation across African markets. It is diversifying geographically, including through an investor based in Abidjan and a team member in Cairo, while focusing on companies capable of growing faster than inflation and devaluation or generating revenue in foreign currencies.
