Ventures Platform Fund II has closed at $84 million, the Nigerian-headquartered pan-African firm confirmed in its official newsroom, topping both the original $75 million target and the $83 million figure that had circulated in earlier reports. The final close added $20 million to a $64 million first close announced in November 2025.
For context: the firm’s debut vehicle, Fund I, raised $46 million in 2022. Fund II is nearly double that, and the LP roster has grown considerably more institutional in the process.
Ventures Platform Fund II’s LP base: who came back, and who is new
Seven in ten of Fund I’s limited partners returned for Fund II, a re-up rate that Kola Aina, the firm’s founding partner, says the team does not take for granted. The returning cohort includes the International Finance Corporation, Standard Bank South Africa, British International Investment, Proparco (through the EU-backed Choose Africa VC programme), Nigeria’s iDICE programme, AfricaGrow, and Alder Tree Investment.
The new additions include the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), which committed $8 million (€6.8 million) via its Early-Stage Innovation Facility II. The EBRD described the commitment as its first-ever to a pan-African venture capital fund focused on sub-Saharan Africa. Dirk Werner, the EBRD’s Managing Director of Equity, put it plainly: ‘Innovation is increasingly shaping Africa’s economic future, yet venture capital remains underdeveloped relative to the scale of entrepreneurial activity across the continent.’
Norfund, Norway’s development finance institution, committed $6 million. Ghana’s Ashesi University Foundation also participated, alongside a new institutional investor, Alphatron, and a consortium of new family offices.
The EBRD’s ticket is specifically oriented towards startups operating in Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, and Senegal, adding a layer of geographic specificity that goes beyond the fund’s broader pan-African mandate.
A wider mandate, and a more selective market to raise it in
Fund I was primarily pre-seed and seed, and largely Nigeria-focused. Fund II keeps early-stage discipline but widens the aperture: Ventures Platform has already written cheques from the new vehicle to companies in Kenya, South Africa, and Egypt. Individual investments will run up to $3 million, with the firm aiming to deploy the full fund over three to four years.
Sectors in play include fintech, healthcare, and SaaS, with AI threading through the thesis. Aina is not particularly interested in AI as a feature add; his framing is more structural. ‘We’re particularly interested in where AI changes the economics of serving African markets,’ he said, pointing to cost reduction and labour-shortage mitigation. ‘For us, AI is most interesting when it is not simply a feature, but an enabler of an entirely different cost structure, business model or market.’
The fundraising process took roughly a year and a half, and Aina is candid that the environment has shifted. Limited partners are asking harder questions about performance, portfolio construction, liquidity, and what he calls ‘manager discipline.’ The post-2021 hangover is still visible: LPs want evidence that paper gains can become realised returns, and they are no longer treating Africa as a curiosity to allocate speculatively.
‘The conversation has moved from “Why Africa” to “Why you and how exactly are you going to generate returns,”‘ Aina said. Simply being a pan-African fund, he added, is no longer a strategy on its own.
That shift in LP expectations arrives against a backdrop of recovering, though still uneven, dealflow. African technology companies raised $4.1 billion in combined equity and debt financing during 2025, up 25% from the prior year, according to data cited by Empower Africa, drawing on Partech’s research. Equity funding specifically rose 8% to $2.4 billion across 462 transactions, with Kenya, South Africa, Egypt, and Nigeria together accounting for 72% of all capital raised. The four markets that dominate LP attention, in other words, are the same four where Ventures Platform has already been writing cheques.
Fund II made its first disclosed investment in July 2026, co-leading a $3 million round in a Nigerian cybersecurity company. Ventures Platform’s existing portfolio includes PiggyVest, Moniepoint, OmniRetail, Raenest, and Seamless Technologies (formerly SeamlessHR).
The fund’s deployment timeline runs three to four years. Whether the LP market stays disciplined or loosens again before that window closes will tell you a lot about what Fund III looks like.
