Ventures Platform, one of Africa’s most active seed-stage venture capital firms, has closed its second institutional fund at $84 million, just $23 million short of the total raised by all six African venture funds that closed in 2025.

The fund, VP Pan-African Fund II, brings in four new institutional backers—the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development; Norfund, Norway’s development finance institution; the Dutch family office Alphatron; and the Ashesi University Foundation—alongside a consortium of new family offices. 

The new investors join limited partners from the $64 million first close in November 2025: Nigeria’s iDICE programme; the International Finance Corporation; Standard Bank; British International Investment; Proparco through the EU-backed Choose Africa programme; Egypt’s micro, small and medium enterprise development agency (MSMEDA); AfricaGrow and Alder Tree Investment.

The second fund will allow Ventures Platform to increase its stake in startups, as it is 1.8 times the size of Ventures Platform’s first institutional fund, which closed at $46 million in December 2022. Still, it will back roughly the same number of companies with much bigger cheques, targeting entry stakes of 10% to 12%. 

That ownership target reflects how African venture capital actually returns money, according to the firm. Secondary sales have become its most reliable route to liquidity. In a secondary sale, an early investor sells part or all of its stake to another investor, rather than waiting for the company to be acquired or go public.

“What we’re looking to do is invest with much deeper conviction, so much larger ticket sizes,” Kola Aina, the firm’s founding partner, told TechCabal in an interview. “We’re looking to target entry ownerships of between 10 and 12%. And then we want to be able to have reserve capital to double down on our winners.”

Ventures Platform now runs three entry strategies—pre-seed, seed, and pre-Series A—and has modelled a first cheque of up to $3 million, with an average ticket around $1.5 million, Aina said. Series A is where the fund stops, and it will follow companies it already backed into that round, but it rarely writes a first cheque in that round.

The reason for the larger cheques stems from what Aina describes as the single biggest lesson from the last fund. “Entry ownership is everything, because the stock only gets pricier,” he said. “If you’re coming into the company, you’re super supportive of the company, but then you don’t own enough of the company; at exits, it hurts when you get there.”

Aina shared that the lesson was learnt after the firm’s liquidity events. Ventures Platform has leaned on secondary sales, and the arithmetic of a secondary punishes small stakes. If a venture capital firm owns 10% of a startup at pre-seed and builds to 15% or 20% by doubling down, it can sell half its position at a Series B, realise liquidity, and hold the rest for the upside. If it owns 3%, there is little to sell.

That is also how Aina thinks about exits for Fund II. He still treats strategic sales as the goal and calls initial public offerings “somewhat mythical.” His firm’s research backs this thinking, as 73% of African venture exits occur through acquisitions. He expects secondaries to deliver a good share of the liquidity, given how early the firm enters. Without naming companies, he said Fund I already shows promising signs of liquidity outcomes in the near future.

Where did the money come from?

The fund’s limited partner base leans heavily on development finance and sovereign capital, which many investors say can shape a firm’s thesis. But Aina is quick to push back on that framing, pointing to Standard Bank, the largest bank in Africa, as a commercial LP, several European family offices, and a university foundation. Private capital, particularly European family offices, makes up a larger share of Fund II than it did of Fund I, he added. 

“Africa only gets less than 2% of venture capital, and we need a lot more venture capital, not less,” he said. “So personally, as a fund manager, I’ll take capital from anywhere I can get it, as long as it’s not misaligned with my strategy.”

His broader argument is that a diverse LP pool is the only way to raise capital at scale for Africa right now because capital allocators still price in what he called an unjustified risk premium on the continent. “If you actually look at the performance, Africa is not any more risky than some of these other markets. But the reality is that there is a perception issue.”

The one he is proudest of is sovereign. iDICE, the Nigerian government’s digital and creative enterprise programme, has invested in Ventures Platform as an anchor LP, and according to Aina, it wrote one of the largest individual cheques in the fund.

“The shape of the world today requires that countries line up behind the kinds of innovations that they believe that people need for sustainability,” he said, tying it to a world he sees becoming more insular.

Ventures Platform is raising and deploying dollars in markets where the currency is eroding. Aina says the firm treats devaluation as a structural condition of investing in Africa, something to plan around instead of hedge against.

The response is built into portfolio construction in three ways. Geographic diversification comes first, as the firm recently hired an investor in Abidjan for Francophone West Africa and has a team member in Cairo, giving the portfolio exposure to a basket of currencies. 

Second, the growth bar is set high enough that a company has to outpace devaluation and inflation to qualify. Third, the firm looks for businesses whose business model naturally generates foreign-exchange revenue or spreads risk across currencies.

“We are assuming that we could have even more devaluation in the future, and we’ve baked that into our investing strategy,” he said, while noting that reforms in markets like Nigeria have delivered relative stability over the past couple of years.

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