AFRICA – P1 Ventures, a seed-stage venture capital firm focused on Africa, has secured US$35 million in its second fund, bringing it closer to its US$50 million target.
The World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) joins P1 Ventures as its first public institutional investor.
This funding will allow them to expand their presence in Dakar, Senegal, and Kenya while focusing on high-growth sectors like AI-powered Software as a Service (SaaS).
This partnership aims to bridge the gap for early-stage African tech startups seeking growth capital for expansion and attracting further investment.
Founded in 2020, P1 Ventures is a high-conviction investor on a mission to back Africa’s best entrepreneurs, aiming to support founders utilizing emerging technologies, such as Generative AI, to disrupt mainstream industries, from healthcare to retail and agriculture.
It is particularly focused on backing repeat founders and experienced operators that have validated products, proven and in-demand software business models that can scale up capital-efficiently, and which have early traction with customers.
“We’re seeing an unprecedented rate of innovation, high-quality founders and strong resilience across Africa. As international investors retreat, we’ve stayed contrarian,” Hisham Halbouny, P1 Ventures co-founder and managing partner, said.
“We’ve leaned into the most attractive investment opportunities and believe this will be one of the best vintage years for regional venture capital funds. Similar to what happened in Latin America a couple of years ago, local VCs have a great opportunity to back great founders at better entry valuations as markets begin to normalize.”
Recognising the potential of AI in its own processes – and to tap into the emerging trend being seen across VC – P1 Ventures recently hired a data scientist to integrate AI into its workflow and investment processes.
In doing so, P1 Ventures aims to enhance its investment processing capacity, identify promising opportunities more efficiently, and lead the way in terms of AI-powered deal flow on the continent.
“We’ve decided to allocate meaningful resources in building our in-house data science tools and processes that will augment our investment team by sourcing and screening more programmatically,” Mikael Hajjar, P1 Ventures co-founder and managing partner, said.
“As far as we know, no firm has built anything like that in Africa yet and we believe this will help us pick up signal from the noise by focusing on a few themes such as repeat founders. We can also leverage these tools to create more value to our portfolio companies.”
P1 Ventures’ current portfolio includes Yassir, an Algerian mobility platform, Money Fellows, an Egyptian savings app, Reliance Health, a Nigerian employee healthcare platform, and Chari, a Francophone-focused e-commerce and fintech app.
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