For five consecutive editions of Ask an Investor, we’ve asked Africa-focused investors the same core questions: how can local capital fund the continent’s startups, how do those backers add value, and what makes money?
This week, our recap of the past five episodes pulls hard-won lessons from every interview: Marge Ntambi (Benue Capital), Axel Peyriere (serial angel & founder), Fisayo Durojaye (Immerse VC), Biola Alabi (Delta 40/angel syndicates), and Alexandre Lazarow (Fluent Ventures).
The importance of local capital and local knowledge
When Uganda-based Benue Capital invited dozens of Kampala high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) to a closed-door summit, Ntambi’s team started with a blunt provocation: “Every missed Series A is someone else’s yield farm.”
She then pulled up a simple bar chart showing how a $100k cheque into Ugandan startups could already be worth 10× after a couple of years. “True ecosystem ownership starts with local investment,” she told .
Ntambi’s larger thesis is that local capital is not charity but risk arbitrage. A Kampala landlord most likely has information about land registries, boda traffic patterns, and parish-level politics that a Palo Alto associate might never acquire quickly enough to price. That knowledge compresses uncertainty, and local investors, if properly organised, can buy the same venture upside at a meaningful discount because they can diligence faster and support better.
Peyriere echoed the point from an operator’s chair. After 14 years writing cheques across Africa and Asia as an angel investor, he backs only sectors he has operated in: mobility and marketplaces. His wins—Julaya, Termii, Grey—grew out of pain points he has lived through. “The best solutions are built ground up for local realities,” he said.
By staying in sectors he’s familiar with, he avoids the tourist trap Lazarow warns about: importing a Valley checklist into markets that do not care about Valley heuristics.
For Immerse VC’s Durojaye, local domain mastery is his first filter; it let him spot Shuttlers and OnePort early and walk away from financial-inclusion pitches that made people download apps. “If I know more about your industry than you do, I’m out.”
Biola Alabi’s journey underscores the same psychology. Her first cheque—into Big Cabal Media—was tiny by today’s standards, but it snowballed because she paired cash with crisis-time mentorship.
Local insight as a competitive moat
Each investor gave a case where local context, not capital, was decisive. Durojaye only invested in Shuttlers because he had spent years in yellow buses and BRT queues. When a structured commuter-bus platform was pitched, he instantly saw the market others dismissed.
Lazarow, on the other hand, recognised OffBusiness’s Indian model but only funded Matta after its founders proved they could underwrite credit in naira without bureau data, something a Brazilian or US team could not replicate.
Designing exits in a market short on IPOs
Every investor acknowledged an uncomfortable fact: Africa still lacks deep public-market or private equity demand for $200 million tech companies. They offered three ways to generate returns, like secondaries, exit-first deal design, and valuation discipline.
Peyriere, Durojaye, and Alabi have each sold portions or all of their positions, sometimes grudgingly, when later-stage investors wanted cleaner caps or when they wanted to exit from their investment. These partial exits returned capital to LPs and angels without strangling upside. Their rules of thumb: if a secondary offers 5–10X on an early cheque, take at least some chips off; bake secondaries into term sheets: 10–15% of any Series B or C can be allocated to liquidity for earlier holders; keep founders above a threshold stake post-secondary.
Lazarow will not enter a deal unless at least one of three paths feels realistic today: a strategic acquirer list with precedent multiples, local or regional private equity buyout appetite, or an active secondary market with discount parameters understood.
Ntambi pushes founders to prepare governance artefacts—data room hygiene, board minutes, clean option pools—from the seed round. “Exit blockers seed themselves at incorporation,” she warned.
Durojaye’s harshest critique: funds marking companies at $100 million at Series A in markets where banks or telcos rarely pay over $40 million. The inevitable down-round kills morale and dilutes everyone.
What value-add looks like when cash is only 50% of the need
Across all five conversations, value-add meant time-consuming, sleeves-rolled work: cap table surgery, hiring CFOs, co-founder matchmaking, and regulatory hand-holding. This is what often separates a good investor from a great investor.
At Benue Capital, the value-add is geared towards local investors as the firm walks HNWIs through real exit case studies like Asaak and SafeBoda and offers co-investment vehicles so first-timers learn without too much risk.
Peyriere, on the other hand, has an operator hotline for his portfolio startups where he offers advice, brokers warm intros to Series A investors, and pressure-tests founders’ market strategy using his AUTO24 playbook.
Alabi operates as a crisis manager and syndicate shepherd. She helped engineer Big Cabal Media’s CEO transition, and in other deals, she structures paperwork, mediates disputes, and once even helped an angel liquidate their investment to handle mid-life emergencies.
The common thread across these six stories is that investors insist that Africa’s biggest competitive advantage is context-specific execution. “If we want startups solving problems that matter to African communities, we need African investors at the table,” Ntambi said. Local money brings patience and accountability, local knowledge turns global playbooks into profit, and locally engineered exits recycle cash back into the next cohort of startups.
