Ventures Platform closes $84m fund
Photo: venturesplatform
Ventures Platform has reached the final close of its second institutional fund, VP Pan-African Fund II, at $84 million. The seed-stage venture capital firm says the fund is 1.8 times the size of its first, which closed at $46 million in December 2022.
- Final close of $84 million, just $23 million short of the combined total raised by all six African venture funds that closed in 2025
- New institutional backers include the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Norfund, Dutch family office Alphatron and the Ashesi University Foundation
- The firm targets entry ownership of 10 to 12 percent, with a first cheque of up to $3 million and an average ticket of around $1.5 million
- Founding partner Kola Aina says 73 percent of African venture exits happen through acquisitions, shaping the firm's reliance on secondary sales for liquidity
The larger fund size signals a shift in how African venture capital firms approach ownership and returns. Aina says the firm's earlier lesson was that entry stakes matter more than follow-on support, since thin ownership limits what a firm can realise at exit. By writing bigger cheques and reserving capital to double down on strong performers, Ventures Platform is positioning itself to hold meaningful stakes through to secondary sales, which it treats as the most reliable route to liquidity on the continent. The fund's mix of development finance institutions, a Nigerian government programme and private family offices also reflects the broader challenge facing African fund managers: securing capital at scale despite what Aina calls a persistent, unjustified risk premium on the continent.
The bigger picture
The close brings Ventures Platform's fund size close to matching what all African venture funds combined raised in 2025, underlining how concentrated capital raising has become around a small number of established managers. Nigeria's iDICE programme wrote one of the fund's largest cheques, a sign that sovereign capital is playing a bigger anchor role in African venture funds. The firm has also hired investors in Abidjan and Cairo to diversify currency exposure across Francophone West Africa and Egypt, treating devaluation as a structural condition rather than a risk to hedge. Aina points to Africa's less than 2 percent share of global venture capital as the gap this scale of fundraising is meant to close.
Source: TechCabal