Nigerian-based Ventures Platform has announced the first round closing of its $40M pan-African fund.

The fund was founded by one of Nigeria’s most vibrant early-stage investors, Kola Aina who has made 69 investments since 2016.

This update is also coming after another pan-African VC firm, 4DX recently closed the final round of its $60M fund.

Founding and general partner of Ventures Platform, Aina disclosed that when he established the firm, he started out with his own money for the first rounds of investments he made. Subsequently, the VC Firm experimented with an accelerator model, where it issued standardised checks of $20,000 to pre-seed to seed-stage startups in exchange for 10% equity.

However, the firm, in 2017, took outside capital for the first time and formed some syndicates. And within the two-year period, some of the startups invested in included financial platforms like Piggyvest, Paystack, Kudi and also Thrive Agric.

“We wanted to perfect our style of finding high-performing companies early before they become obvious and backing them with everything we bring to the table from our experience as operators ourselves,” Aina disclosed.

“We didn’t want to go out and try to fundraise when we didn’t really have evidence that we could make money out of this.”

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In October 2020, the VC Firm became one of the local investors that cashed out from Paystack's $200M⁺ exit to Stripe With a few other secondary exits under its belt, Aina said he felt this was the perfect time for the firm “to go to the market and raise its first institutional fund.”

Ventures Platform has positioned itself as a thesis-centred fund. Aina has also said that the fund’s thesis is centred around funding market-creating innovations that solve non-consumption and create innovative new ways to deliver goods and services to low-income markets.

Ventures Platform is focused on six core capital verticals: fintech, edtech, agritech and food science, healthtech and bioscience, enterprise SaaS and digital infrastructure.