In early 2025, Joovlin, a Nigerian fintech built to help micro-suppliers accept and manage payments, shut down. Despite early traction, including more than 2,000 active resellers and over 6,000 products listed by suppliers, the company said in a LinkedIn post that its user base “hadn’t yet grown enough to generate the revenue needed to sustain operations without external funding.” With no new capital coming in and runway running out, Joovlin simply couldn’t survive.
Joovlin’s isn’t an isolated story. Across Africa, the startup graveyard is filled with companies that raised millions, onboarded users rapidly, and then folded. While lack of funding is often blamed for these shutdowns, there are deeper issues that arise: weak execution, premature scaling, undisciplined internal structures, and unclear market fit. Experts estimate that around 70% of African startups fail in their first five years. Within the last 30 months, about 33 African startups have shut down due to dwindling funding as well as weak operational discipline.
In this climate, Clarus, a firm offering part-time go-to-market and growth leadership—fractional Go To Market (GTM)—founded by Victor Ekwealor, has found its purpose. The firm works with startups, accelerators, and investors to build repeatable growth systems that turn ideas into traction.
The sunshine decade
Ekwealor describes the past decade, beginning in 2015 when Paystack began attracting global attention, as an era of “forgiving capital and fast scaling.” Raising money became a proxy for success. “Access to capital created a lot of speed,” he says, “but speed didn’t always translate to structure. It didn’t necessarily translate to growth.”
Ekwealor said this era allowed founders to test ambitious ideas without immediate accountability and pitch decks came before product strategies. As long as investor excitement stayed high, few questioned retention or unit economics. But that era is ending. In 2024, African startups raised about $2.2 billion across 488 deals, a 22.7% decline from 2023 activity, and far below the peak years of 2021-2022. He calls this shift “the end of easy money.”
“Interest rates are up globally, and emerging markets feel the shift fastest,” he says. “Investors haven’t disappeared; they’re just more demanding. Execution is what sells now, not promise.”
According to Ekwealor, failing startups often grapple with the same five problems with their go-to-market strategies: weak positioning issues where founders try to sell to everyone; channel guesswork where startups throw money at trending platforms without measuring ROI; retention neglect where acquiring users is easy but keeping them proves impossible; disconnected teams where product, marketing, and sales operate in silos; and no operating rhythm where startups confuse motion with measurable progress.
On channel spend, he’s blunt: “That’s not GTM. That’s gambling.”
Back to basics
Ekwealor calls the current moment a behavioural reset where African startups are thinking about “fundamentals, not funding.” The ecosystem’s focus is shifting from vanity metrics—user counts, weekly sign-ups—to retention and efficiency.
“It’s no longer about how fast you scale,” he says, “but how long you can sustain. The market is rewarding operational maturity over storytelling and vibes.”
Investors echo this reality. “We’re telling startups what we told them last year: stick to fundamentals, recurring revenue, margins, and sustainable progressive growth,” Olu Oyinsan, managing partner of Oui Capital, told in January.
At Clarus, Ekwealor sees founders asking about positioning, funnel maths, and lifetime value— concepts that existed long before but never sat at the centre of strategy. Investors are now asking tougher questions about retention curves, activation rates, and revenue quality instead of superficial user numbers.
To Ekwealor, the quieter ecosystem isn’t a signal of decline but a recalibration. “The ecosystem is not dying,” he says. “It’s detoxifying. The era of adrenaline is over. Clarity is what comes next.”
The name Clarus itself means clarity, symbolic of the ecosystem’s transition from reactive spending to deliberate strategy. The founder references Nassim Taleb’s concept of antifragility, arguing that difficult periods often produce the strongest companies. “It’s exciting when you think about it from that perspective,” he says.
The operator behind Clarus
Before launching Clarus six months ago, Ekwealor spent more than 11 years working in Africa, the UK, and Europe across startups, marketing, and media (including at ). “I was doing GTM before I knew what GTM was,” he says. “I’d go to startups and offer unsolicited advice: Why not do this like this?”
Before tech, he ran businesses with his family: a fish farm, a telephone call business, a fashion brand, all of which taught him unit economics early. “If you buy something for one naira, you have to sell it for at least one naira five kobo,” he says.
His time in Europe taught him discipline; Africa taught him creativity. But he adds something many founders rarely admit: he made mistakes too. Ekwealor says he has been guilty of the same optimism that blinds founders today: assuming good ideas would sell themselves, delaying tough GTM decisions, and treating momentum as validation. Those experiences, he says, shaped Clarus into a company built around structure rather than vibes. “I’ve seen how lack of clarity can kill a good idea,” he says. “That’s why I take this work personally.”
How Clarus works
Clarus positions itself as a fractional GTM and growth company. What this means is that instead of hiring a full-time VP of growth, startups can access senior experience and structure at a fraction of the cost. “It’s not consultancy,” Ekwealor insists. “It’s embedded execution.”
The approach begins with a GTM audit: positioning, messaging, customer profiles, funnels, retention loops, and channel performance. Clarus then creates a blueprint and builds systems including Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) clarity, channel and funnel maths, lifecycle frameworks, and benchmarks for Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)—the amount it costs to acquire a customer, and Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)—revenue each customer generates over time, along with dashboards and weekly operating cadences.
“What we do is help startups operationalise fundamentals like positioning, unit economics, customer understanding, and execution discipline,” Ekwealor says. “These sound basic. They are basic. But they’re missing from the core of what most startups do.”
GTM goes far beyond campaigns, Ekwealor stresses. “Most founders treat GTM as something to do after you build your product,” he says. “But GTM starts the day you decide to build. It’s the survival bridge between your product and the market.”
Without structured GTM, growth becomes accidental, dependent on investor connections or viral moments. “That’s gambling,” he repeats.
He measures success by behavioural shifts and system replication. “When founders stop asking ‘What should we try next?’ and start saying, ‘Here’s what the data tells us to double down on,’ the system is working.”
Clarus works with early to growth-stage startups across fintech, SaaS, education, and digital infrastructure, partnering with accelerators, venture funds, and innovation programmes in Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, South Africa, the UK, Europe, and the Middle East.
To generate revenue, startups pay Clarus for GTM projects while investors and accelerators fund support for their portfolio companies.
Beyond individual engagements, Clarus is launching the Clarus Growth Lab to embed GTM fundamentals across entire portfolios. The initiative works with accelerators, funds, and ecosystem partners to deliver operator-led GTM systems inside their programmes.
“I used to wonder why VCs weren’t more involved with portfolio companies,” he says. “The truth is they don’t have the capacity. What we want to do is become the first layer of GTM across their portfolios.”
The Growth Lab runs as a cohort-based sprint, beginning with diagnosis and ending with systems founders can run independently – dashboards, operating cadences, and conversion frameworks. Investors gain clearer visibility into real traction, and accelerators embed GTM discipline as a service.
“Most accelerators stop at demo day,” Ekwealor notes. “We start where they stop.”
The fractional model makes this accessible at scale: early-stage founders get senior support without hiring full-time teams, and investors get structured GTM capability without building internal departments.
Ekwealor sees the Growth Lab as foundational infrastructure for the next decade. “The next generation of programmes and funds will be built by operators who can teach traction, not just tell stories,” he says.
Looking forward
If the previous era in African tech was defined by optimism and abundant capital, the next will be shaped by clarity, retention, and disciplined execution, Ekwealor argues. Founders who show product-market fit through execution—not storytelling—will attract better capital and talent.
His five-year vision for Clarus is simple: “I want Clarus to have made structure normal,” he says. “I want every accelerator, fund, and startup hub to have clear GTM systems as part of their DNA. Growth should be deliberate, not accidental.”
He acknowledges the cultural shift will take time. “When you meet a 21-year-old adult, you need to give them grace in unlearning undesirable traits,” he says. “The ecosystem is older, so it needs even more grace. But the market is enforcing the lesson. Founders who ignored fundamentals are struggling. Those who built with discipline are still growing.”
Clarus is betting that African startups will thrive not because of hype or easy capital but because of operational discipline and structured growth. By embedding replicable systems across founders, investors, and accelerators, the firm hopes to help shift the ecosystem from a decade of adrenaline-fuelled ambition to one of predictable, repeatable success.
