Money fuels the startup ecosystem. Whether from venture capitalists, family, or personal savings, startups do not run only on dreams or grit. But in Africa, venture capital, once a lifeline for many startups, has slowed since the post-COVID boom.
Amid this recalibration, Trium, a Lagos-based venture builder within the Coronation Group, is developing its playbook. Instead of cutting cheques to dozens of founders and hoping one hits unicorn status, Trium is building its own startups from scratch, and putting up $100 million over the next five years to prove that Africa’s venture future can be built, not just funded.
“We landed on this strategy in 2019, and before that, we were thinking we would do VC but do it differently,” Adebayo Adewolu, MD/CEO, told . “Our thesis at the time was that a lot of VC investments failed because there was a lot of focus on products and market fit, go to market, and there was not enough around the things that make a business.”
Inside Trium’s model
Trium starts with ideas developed in-house, which it tests through what it calls pretotyping—creating simplified versions of a product to test market demand before investing heavily.
“We have an internal digital incubation team that manages the process,” Adewolu said. “Ideas pass through several gates, and our investment committee decides how much capital to commit at each stage. When the idea proves ready, we hire a CEO and spin it out.”
Each venture starts small, with about $50,000 for market validation, then grows in stages, sometimes up to $2 – $3 million as milestones are hit.
“We are not big on ticket sizes in the conventional VC sense. The model is to deploy smart capital for each stage of the business. And we support it. And there are metrics that we align around that will take the startup to the next stage,” he said.
The hands-on model trades speed and slows burn as it focuses on the reality of building in Africa, where markets remain fragmented, infrastructure gaps are wide, and talent is costly.
Early bets
Venture building is a hands-on investing model where an in-house team of experts works to build ideas or young companies into full-fledged businesses. Instead of just writing cheques to founders, a venture builder invests its resources, infrastructure, networks, experience, and capital in startups.
Startups get capital and talent to design products from their earliest stages, and the venture builder gets a significant portion of discounted ownership in the business.
The model isn’t entirely new. Venture studios like Founders Factory in the UK and Antler have shown its potential globally. But Trium wants to become one of the few African firms doing it at scale, backed by institutional funding.
“If you manage risk better, your chance of success is higher,” Adewolu said. “You can’t build as many companies as a VC, but because you’re involved from ideation through to operations, you can manage risk and build stronger businesses.”
Confidence in the model
Trium’s next phase will involve inviting external founders, two to five a year, starting from Q2 2026. Since 2019, the company has focused on building startups internally, validating its thesis. It thinks it is ready to fund and build external founders now.
“We are looking at African founders, actually, we are not just looking at Nigeria,” he said. Adewolu noted that Trium’s investments will be sector-agnostic and focused on businesses whose ideas survive market validation.
Within the next six months, it is prioritising expansions into Ghana, Rwanda, Zambia, Cameroon, Tanzania, and Barbados. Namibia and Botswana remain on its horizon.
One of the things that makes Trium’s model work is control. The firm often holds majority stakes in the companies it builds, a structure that challenges the power balance founders are used to.
“We know that founders worry about ownership,” he said. “But if you look closely, by the time most founders raise successive rounds, they end up with less than 10% ownership. What matters is the value created, not the percentage held.”
To address this, the company is focused on a type of founder — pragmatic, execution-focused, and resilient.
“We have been deliberate about inviting founders. In this ecosystem, many come through referrals; we have conversations, and some stay,” Adewolu said. “The ideal founder should have grit and passion about the idea. We are seeing a lot of that energy from female founders. They bring something extra.”
Founders won’t always lead as CEOs; Trium sometimes installs seasoned executives while supporting technical founders to grow into leadership roles.
“A founder could be a great CTO or a great chief product officer,” Adewolu said. “Some grow into CEO roles over time. That is something we are very conscious about.”
Returns
Trium has built six ventures— including Clane, Sparkle, and Fiducia—so far and exited one, a payments business sold to an international player in Cyprus. That exit, Adewolu said, was a deliberate decision to step away from operational risks the board wasn’t comfortable with.
The company’s money-making economics is similar to traditional VCs, and it gets the majority of returns since it owns a larger part of the company and the risk.
“We are not in the play for a short-term exit, which is a very big difference between us and a conventional VC,” Adewolu said. “We are in the play for building sustainable businesses that are cash flow positive. So we are not looking to just build up evaluation and exit.”
Trium sees exits through secondary sales and strategic acquisitions, realistic pathways that reflect Africa’s market maturity. “We think exit opportunities will improve as more returning founders get into the space,” he said.
“A good percentage return for an exit depends on the appetite of the investor and founder. The real question is what’s next after the exit.”
Its early success has come in financial services, but it is now expanding into cybersecurity and market infrastructure. It leverages the Coronation ecosystem for shared services, partnerships, and market access, reducing cost and time-to-market for its ventures.
In a market where money often chases hype, Trium is taking a slower, steadier approach, investing deeply, managing risk, and staying closely involved in the operations it funds. If more investors follow this path, Africa’s next generation of startup founders are likely to receive more than just money, but also VCs involved in the daily running of their firms, rather than those who are updated monthly.
