Last week, the African Venture Capital Association (AVCA) brought its flagship VC Summit back to Lagos, the home of Africa’s unicorns, for the first time in a decade, and the timing could hardly have been more charged.
Against a backdrop of painful FX devaluations and a global capital-raising cooldown that has hit the continent hard, Africa’s biggest investors drilled into the continent’s toughest questions: how to unlock follow-on capital, where the next exits will come from, and who will underwrite growth outside the “Big 4” tech markets.
In case you missed the insightful panels, in-person conversations, and the food and drinks, not to worry; here’s everything I heard at the AVCA Conference. From Calendly’s future plans straight from the CEO’s mouth to how Africa’s newest unicorn, Moniepoint, wants investors to earn dividends before a possible IPO.
Calendly’s $3 billion lesson: Price, distribution, data
Before the investors even started discussing solutions to Africa’s problems, Tope Awotona, the founder of Calendly, talked about how three elements—price, distribution and data—made his company a success.
“I didn’t invent online scheduling,” Awotona told a packed opening-keynote fireside, “I just made it accessible.” Awotona explained at the AVCA Conference that his three-step playbook: price (freemium), distribution (viral links), and product (data-driven iteration) now looks prescient in an era when cash-burn tolerance has evaporated.
The pandemic, he noted, merely “pulled demand forward.” Virtual meetings took off, Calendly’s user data exploded, and revenue began landing within 99.9% of the company’s forecast. Awotona argued that bottom-up PLG (product-led growth) can be as predictable as enterprise sales if the volume is big enough.
Calendly’s next act? Embedding AI to “nurture” customers and keep churn negligible over the next five to seven years.
Life Below 0 °C: Fundraising when the music stops
Khaled Ben Jilani of AfricInvest set the tone for the first panel—Life Below 0 °C—reminding delegates that the firm has survived four macro meltdowns in 30 years by treating each as “part of a cycle, not the end.” Panelists converged on three survival rules:
1. Local asymmetry matters. Africa is a mosaic; regulatory fluency, particularly in payments, has become a non-negotiable moat.
2. Stablecoins are functional now. With 20% of global stablecoin volume already touching Africa, cross-border trade finance is being repriced “from days to milliseconds”.
3. Unit economics outrank narratives. “We’re running from models that only work at unsustainable scale,” said Mareme Dieng, partner at 500 Global, doubling down on AI-healthcare hybrids where proprietary data cuts training costs.
Bridging the missing-middle
The Unlocking Scale panel at the AVCA Conference tackled Africa’s yawning late-Series A/B capital gap. Walter Baddoo of 4DX fame offered the bluntest remedy: “By Series A, you need to look like a Series B company in the U.S.—or you won’t clear diligence.”
Dr. Omobola Johnson, the first Nigerian minister of communications and technology and TLcom partner, urged founders to craft global stories early, while Brian Odhiambo of Novastar called venture debt the “untapped bridge” but warned that Africa still lacks the predictable revenue curves lenders crave.
Titans of Industry: Inside Moniepoint and QED
Tosin Eniolorunda traced Moniepoint’s rise from an InterSwitch spin-out to a platform that now processes $1.2 billion in monthly transactions. The secret? “Great fundamentals—top-line growth, EBITDA margins, ROE—then exits take care of themselves.”
Nigeria’s anaemic stock market means the company is eyeing sovereign wealth or leveraged buyouts before any IPO, Eniolorunda said.
Across the Atlantic, Nigel Morris of global fintech investors, QED Investors, distilled a fintech investment checklist: do no harm, price in risk, master fraud and collections, never build on loopholes, and stay intellectually humble.
Half of QED’s capital now sits outside the U.S., yet 90% of its Limited Partners’ (LP) money is still American—evidence, Morris said, of “a perception lag that a single African breakout could erase.” No pressure on Moniepoint, I guess.
What LPs really want in 2025
Limited partners really matter. They give fund managers money, and without them, there would be no venture capital and definitely no startups, so hearing what they want at the AVCA Conference was something most investors needed.
DFI heavyweights from British International Investment, Proparco, Visa Foundation and FSD Africa Investments lined up for the LP Mindset session. The headline: discipline and differentiation beat vintage-year internal rate of return. Here are the other takeaways from the panel:
- Team over track record for first-time managers—but only if cohesion is ironclad.
- Exit thesis first. “Start with who’s buying,” urged Visa Foundation’s Najada Kumbuli.
- Distributed to Paid-In Capital (how much of the invested capital has been returned to investors) is king. With IPO windows shut, secondary sales and mergers and acquisitions are the new scoreboard.
Venture debt: Cautious optimism
Returns look “very good”, said Rosanne Whalley of AHL Venture Partners, but African venture debt will stay niche until founders accept that profitability, not the next equity round, secures loans. Convertible notes drew near-universal scorn for misaligning interests when startups stumble.
Beyond the Big 4: Betting on Addis, Kigali and Dar-es-Salam
Only 30% of Africa’s people live in Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt and South Africa, (the Big 4) but those four markets swallow 80% of VC dollars. Panellists argued that the imbalance cannot persist. Henok Assefa, the co-founder of Addis Ababa Angels, called Ethiopia “Nigeria ten years ago—raw talent, zero hype.” Sissi Frank, an investment officer at BIO, said deals are cheaper outside the Big 4 but warned scarcity of exit data scares LP committees.
The Next Wave: Fintech (still), B2B SaaS and asset-backed plays
Late-afternoon debate pivoted to sectors that could mint the next “soonicorns.” The consensus picks on the promising fund returners were:
- Embedded fintech everywhere. Fintech is no longer a vertical; it is the plumbing beneath others.
- Enterprise software for Africa’s real economy. From supply-chain ERPs to climate tech, B2B adoption is finally catching up, and investors are excited.
- Asset-backed finance. Future Africa’s Iyinoluwa Aboyeji is backing models that “take 20% of every productive asset they fund” as a hedge against weak discretionary spending.
For all the hand-wringing about liquidity droughts and FX pain, the mood at the AVCA Conference felt closer to pragmatic recalibration than despair. Speakers agreed Africa’s venture story is pre-Series A on the global timeline—still early enough to architect better governance, diversified capital stacks, and region-agnostic exit routes.
What the ecosystem needs next is a marquee growth-stage win to snap LP mindsets out of risk-off mode. If Nigel Morris is right, one Nubank-scale breakout could make the continent’s middle-capital desert bloom. Until then, Africa’s VCs will keep fundraising “below 0 °C”, armed with thicker skins, sharper narratives, and, if Tope Awotona has his way, a Calendly link that closes the deal before the money chills.
