“Entities offering VC invest in a company until it attains a significant position and then exits the same. In an ideal scenario, investors infuse capital into a company for two years and earn returns on it for the next five years. Expected returns can be as high as 10x of the invested capital,” explained Groww.

Venture capital is generally offered by venture capital firms, investment banks and high-net-worth individuals (they are often referred to as Angel Investors). Venture capital firms often create VC funds (a pool of money collected from other investors, companies, or funds), apart from investing from their own pockets to show commitment to their clients.

Venture capitalists have established themselves as investors who pump their money into early-stage companies having promising futures. A venture capitalist can be a sole investor or a group of investors who come together through investment firms.

How Things Work

Venture capital only comes into play when a small business owner/start-up leader is looking to expand his/her business. Opting for funding through venture capitalists is a good option, as the move helps the entrepreneur to encash his/her business, financial and legal expertise which is usually required during business expansion.

“A venture capitalist brings in a lot of expertise, knowledge, and networking along with his capital investment. You can utilise their guidance to build your own network, promote your business with their direction and ultimately make it reach bigger heights,” Groww remarked further.

Venture capital can be classified like Seed Funding, Start-up Capital, Series A, Expansion Funding, Late-Stage Funding and Bridge Funding.

Once again, the article makes it crystal clear that when we talk about venture capital, we are strictly talking about a funding source generally accessed by small, medium and start-up kinds of ventures. Also, companies eligible for VCs are the ones providing high returns along with a high risk. VCs, as investments, help to commercialise a new entrepreneur’s idea on a particular product/service.

Even though VCs are long-term investments, where the returns can be realised after 5-10 years, the investors can disinvest in a company if the latter shows promising turnover. This is to ensure more capital gets fused in that business, rather than generating profits.

Here Are The Pros

Venture capital often helps new entrepreneurs gather business expertise. The investors come with significant experience to help the owners in decision-making, especially human resource and financial management.

Entrepreneurs are also not obligated to repay the invested sum. Even if the company fails, it will not be liable for repayment.

Owing to their expertise and network, venture capital providers can help build industry connections for business owners. This comes in handy in terms of marketing and promotion. Also, VC investors seek to infuse more capital into a company to increase its valuation. To do that, they can bring in other investors at later stages. In some cases, the additional rounds of funding in the future are reserved by the investing entity itself.

Venture capital can supply the necessary funding for small businesses to upgrade or integrate new technology in their operational ecosystems, which can assist them to remain competitive.

What Are The Cons?

As per Maximilian Fleitmann, former CEO of BaseTemplates, Only 0.05% of start-ups successfully raise money from venture capitalist firms. That is 1 in 2000! A funding round can be a lengthy process (sometimes over nine months) as venture capitalist firms will conduct due diligence on the applicant’s business to ensure the partnership is suitable. The criteria usually consist of the total addressable market, the commercial potential of the business’ services/products, management team’s strength, and whether the rewards outweigh the risks.

“Venture capitalist firms will want to see your business plan and financial forecasts. In these, you need to show the value of your enterprise and make the growth potential clear to see,” Fleitmann commented. Another issue for a new entrepreneur, while availing VCs is, giving up part of his/her business.

“This is one of the most debated elements of venture capital investment. It might not sound that bad to start with because, as we mentioned earlier, start-ups benefit from networks and guidance. However, companies very quickly outgrow their initial funding. This means they have to raise more rounds from VC firms, which also means giving up more equity. Therefore, in the process, the founders will gradually lose more equity in their own company,” Fleitmann explained further.

The move only results in reduced control and power to make decisions. Bringing in more shareholders also brings in more opinions on how the business leader should run his/her business. Also, some stakeholders will have a lot of involvement others will choose not to, which can lead to obstacles in the business’ growth.

Some venture capital firms can ask for anywhere between 10 to even 80% of the business’ equity, and due to that, even if the entrepreneur starts earning profits, a significant percentage will go to the investors.

Another risk factor is the venture capitalists’ appetite for receiving a return on their investments, as they are putting the money into the business with no guarantee that it will give them their capital back. So, from day one, start-ups will face the pressure to grow as quickly as possible and be on their way to going public/getting acquired. However, the business needs its own sweet time to develop its services and products.

Here, the “the quicker, the better” approach may end up hurting the entrepreneur if his/her product is not ready for the market. Another challenge is to find a venture capitalist firm, which will align with the start-up’s goals. However, if the task gets accomplished, it only helps the company, in terms of dealing with the “the quicker, the better” approach.

Another con is “distraction.” The business leader often gets distracted by the thought of applying for venture capital funding and pitching business plans to investors, rather than getting the products and services ready and customised as per the market demands. Also, the injection of cash also means an infusion of opinions. Ideas, demands, and queries from investors can sometimes distract the entrepreneur from his/her goals.

“It is easy for your judgement to be clouded by money and allow for your goals to change when others are factored in. Of course, this doesn’t happen to every company that gets venture capital funding, but it is just something to be aware of,” Fleitmann concluded.

The post Is venture capital good or bad for businesses? Here are the pros and cons appeared first on International Finance.

The situation was similar in 2008, due to the global financial meltdown. Once again, European technology firms lost far more than their American counterparts. On July 1, 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported that Klarna, a Swedish buy-now-pay-later darling, was attempting to raise fresh capital at less than a fifth of its peak valuation of USD 46 billion. This fuelled fears that the looming downturn and plummeting tech valuations would hit Europe harder than the United States.

Regardless of such instances, Europe’s entrepreneurs and venture capitalists appear considerably stronger than in the past, and far less reliant on foreign expertise and funding. They might even withstand the storm better than their American colleagues this time.

Examine the boom to get a sense of why. Even by frenzied global standards, 2021 was a smash in Europe. According to PitchBook, a data provider, venture capital (VC) investments on the old continent surpassed €100 billion (USD 118 billion) in a single year for the first time. Startup valuations skyrocketed, bringing the number of European “unicorns,” or private companies worth more than USD 1 billion, to around 150 today, accounting for roughly 13% of the global total. Although Europe’s digital ecosystem remains roughly one-third the scale of America’s in terms of venture capital investments, it has more than doubled in size since 2020.

Some of this expansion is a consequence of extra capital flowing into Europe, where startup valuations have trailed behind those in the United States and Asia. According to PitchBook, American VC firms would spend USD 83 billion in European acquisitions in 2021, a threefold increase over 2020. Non-traditional investors, domestic and international, such as hedge funds and corporate venture capital arms, discovered Europe as well, participating in roughly USD 100 billion in transactions, a 150% increase from 2020.

As Klarna’s attempt to raise cash suggests, this overabundance of capital will stop this year in Europe and abroad. Fortunately for European tech, this is not the end of the story. “The European flywheel has taken off,” says Sarah Guemouri of Atomico, a London-based venture capital firm, referring to the premise that success in technology only produces more and more positive results. Flywheels spin at the company level when more users convert into quality service, which attracts more customers, and so on. They can also assist in energizing the entire sector.

You got to risk something to gain something

European venture capitalism appears to be self-sufficient. Another data supplier, Dealroom, examined the lives of 38,000 startup executives in 2021. Almost two-fifths have already worked for small startups and larger organizations, indicating a rising collective experience. Similarly, Mosaic Ventures, another European venture capital firm, observed that two out of every three unicorn founders were repeating entrepreneurs.

European entrepreneurs are growing more ambitious as they gain experience and are better at conveying a compelling story about what they aim to achieve. Nadine Hachach-Haram is the creator of Proximie, a healthcare firm that uses virtual reality to allow surgeons to monitor surgeries remotely. She is on a mission to create a “borderless operating room.”

Avi Meir, the founder of TravelPerk, a business travel management website located in Barcelona, intends to become a hub for “human interactions amongst distant workers,” such as by providing tools for organizing in-person team meetings. Nicolas Brusson, the CEO of BlaBlaCar, which began as a Parisian service to organize shared automobile rides between cities, hopes to transform it into a “multimodal platform” that combines a demand for buses and maybe trains globally. It may appear to some to be marketing jargon, but it is just what investors and prospective employees want to hear.

Capital is being amassed and reinvested in the industry. According to PitchBook, European funds have raised approximately €100 billion in venture capital over the last five years. Almost half of it has yet to be spent, leaving European venture capitalists with enough “dry powder” to keep firms afloat even if the crisis continues. European investors also put a lot of money into early-stage firms. According to Dealroom, by 2021, European startups will have received a third of all investments in funding rounds of up to USD 5 million globally, almost as much as their peers in America.

The proportion of “angels,” or high achievers who invest a portion of their tech fortune in other firms, is also increasing. Some people start their own VC firms. Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder of Wise, an international payments service, and three other European innovators launched Plural, a €250 million fund, on June 28th. Lower-level executives have also begun to invest because many European IT workers are paid in part with their employer’s shares. According to Dominic Jacquesson of Index Ventures, a transatlantic venture capital firm, only approximately 10% of shares were granted to employees a few years ago. Because of regulatory changes and increased societal acceptability of stock options in Europe, the proportion is around 17%, not far from the 20% or more that is common in the US.

The digital ecosystem’s structure is also stronger now, although it was previously a scattered collection of odd success stories, like Skype, a video-conferencing site purchased by Microsoft; or Spotify, a Swedish music-streaming software. In a recent report on European unicorns, Credit Suisse investment banker Richard Kersley and his colleagues classified the companies as “enablers,” such as payment services like Klarna and Checkout.com, and “disrupters,” such as Getir, a Turkish delivery app, that thrives by piggybacking on such infrastructure.

In addition to more domestic knowledge and resources, as well as a more robust structure, European enterprises have certain competitive advantages that will be useful in a leaner, post-pandemic environment. One example is their thriftiness. Although private companies are not compelled to reveal such figures, there are indications that their “burn rate,” or the rate at which they spend money raised, is lower, at least among younger startups. It also helps because employing software professionals in Barcelona or Berlin is half the price of hiring them in San Francisco or Seattle.

Unwavering ambition

However, when they grow into unicorns, those distinctions appear to fade. American and European companies raised roughly the same amount of cash before reaching that status: USD 378 million on average, compared to USD 392 million for enterprises that have achieved a valuation of more than USD 1 billion since the beginning of 2021.

Meanwhile, mature firms in Europe are less geographically diverse than their competitors in America, both concerning markets and VC support. Because domestic markets and talent pools in Europe are small and corporations quickly expand outside. Veriff, an Estonian online identification service, recently built a branch in Barcelona due to a shortage of engineers in Tallinn.

As a result, according to Atomico, over 80% of European tech firms have a global reach, compared to the 61% of Silicon Valley-based organizations. Only one in every five European enterprises has a single office in its native country, while slightly more than half have offices in three or even more countries. The ratio is flipped in Silicon Valley. Such variety is advantageous during a crisis.

According to Credit Suisse’s assessment, recession-prone companies such as customer services are far less prominent than in America. Because of the EU’s more open financial regulations, one-third of European unicorns work in fintech, frequently providing payment services to other companies. According to the bank, about a quarter of unicorns might be classified as “sustainable” businesses, which are expected to prosper as the globe becomes more serious about combating climate change.

All of this illustrates why the number of unicorns in Europe has increased this year. PitchBook added 42 new pitches in the first six months, compared to 37 in the same period in 2021. The future quarters will very certainly be more difficult. But so are Europe’s tech firms, which recently raised USD 140 million (the valuation was undisclosed, but approached unicorn territory). That means Mr. Plais, the company’s CEO, won’t be looking for work anytime soon.

The bloodbath is happening

Europe’s tech industry has lost more than USD 400 billion in value in 2022 and the bloodbath is still going on, according to venture capital firm Atomico, reported CNBC.

The combined value of all public and private European tech firms has fallen to USD 2.7 trillion from a peak of USD 3.1 trillion in late 2021, Atomico said in its annual “State of European Tech” report.

The figures once again underscore what has been a rough year for tech. Once richly-valued technology companies have seen their shares come under pressure from global factors, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and tighter monetary policy. Expect the news of staff downsizing and other cost-cutting measures in the coming months.

The United States Federal Reserve and other central banks are raising rates and reversing pandemic-era stimulus to stave off soaring inflation. That’s prompted investors to reassess their positions on lossmaking tech companies, whose values typically rest on the expectation of future cash flows.

“It’s been a tough year — war in Ukraine, inflation, interest rate hikes, geopolitical tensions all across the continent. It’s the most challenging macroeconomic environment since the global financial crisis,” Tom Wehmeier, a partner at Atomico.

In Europe, some companies have seen precipitous drops in their market values. Klarna, the Swedish buy now, pay later group, slashed its valuation by 85% from USD 45.6 billion to USD 6.7 billion in a so-called “down round.” Shares of music streaming service Spotify, meanwhile, have fallen over 60% in 2021.

Overall venture capital funding of European startups is expected to drop to USD 85 billion by 2022 end, according to the Atomico report, which is based on quantitative data and surveys in 41 countries. That is down 18% from the more than USD 100 billion European startups raised in 2021.

It was nevertheless the second-highest amount ever invested in the European tech ecosystem to date, Atomico said. European tech investment shattered records in 2021 as participation from U.S. investors surged to new heights.

The year 2022 has seen a reversal of that trend, with foreign investors largely retreating. The number of active US investors in “mega-rounds” of USD 100 million or more dropped 22% from 2022. And that’s not good news at all for the tech sector.

The post Are EU startups built to last? appeared first on International Finance.

The financing transactions decreased by 14.4%, from 4,388 in 2021 to 3,755 in 2022.

According to Aurojyoti Bose, Lead Analyst at GlobalData, the sharp fall in venture capital funding value is a sign of the cautious mindset of the investors.

He continued that the average capital size of venture capital projects launched in China during 2022 decreased noticeably.

Regarding the number and value of venture capital investment deals, China is the largest Asian-Pacific market and one of the top four international markets. In 2022, it represented 14.1% and 13.6% of the total value and volume of VC funding worldwide.

However, out of the top four markets—the US, the UK, and India—China had the worst fall.

Other significant international markets, including the US, UK, and India, had a fall in VC funding value of 40.8%, 24.3%, and 38.2%, respectively, year over year, according to GlobalData.

However, the scene is completely different for the new energy and semiconductor industries, which are expected to be stand-out performers in 2023 after landing the biggest deals of 2022.

Investment in China’s new economy sector, made up of tech-driven industries, slipped 46% to 745 billion yuan (USD 110 billion) in 2022, according to market intelligence firm ITjuzi. Data from CB Insights shows a similar trend, with venture funding in the country down by more than half to USD 47 billion in 2022.

Big Tech companies, identified as major drivers of tech and internet funding in China, have been slowing down since the COVID outbreak. Tencent Holdings and ByteDance backed 93 and 21 companies in 2022, respectively, down significantly from the 259 and 64 deals they made in 2021, according to data compiled by local tech blog LeiNewspaper.

“The capital market was hesitant under the shadow of the pandemic,” ITjuzi analyst Zhi Jiaming informed the South China Morning Post.

A combination of China’s economic slowdown, COVID-19 restrictions that were only eased in 2022 December, and recent crackdowns on the tech sector have dampened investor confidence.

Beijing pledged in 2020 to prevent the “disorderly expansion of capital”, which was followed by two years of unprecedented regulatory crackdowns on the country’s biggest tech firms, covering business activities from content and data security to mergers and acquisitions.

However, the business environment is expected to improve in 2023. The Central Economic Work Conference, an annual meeting of China’s top leadership that concluded on December 16, 2022, said that the Xi Jinping government will look to internet platforms to play a role in reviving the country’s slowing economy.

The good news for investors in 2023 is “the ease of pandemic controls and Beijing’s vow to make economic development a priority. But the tech giants will continue to reduce their external investment this year, and it takes time for the economy to recover before investor confidence recovers,” ITjuzi senior analyst Wu Meimei said.

Wu Meimei also expects the tech start-up investments to revive in the 2023 second half.

The post China’s startup funding: Biggest victim of COVID, regulatory crackdowns appeared first on International Finance.

The former World No. 1 in an interview has said that the company will primarily help founders and business leaders from underrepresented backgrounds. On its website, SV said, “At Serena Ventures we envision a world in which genius isn’t stifled by a lack of resources. A future in which historically overlooked people and markets are empowered for a more inclusive economy. Today we’re excited to share that we’ve raised an inaugural fund of $111M to continue pursuing our mission.”

Serena has been a vocal advocate of increasing diversity in the technology space. According to the official website, 76% of the funding has gone to founders from underrepresented groups, 53% of the funding has gone to women leaders.

“In an ecosystem where solo women founders receive 2% of venture funding and Black founders receive 1.2%, we break the mould. We don’t require founders to come from historically underrepresented backgrounds, yet 76% of our portfolio founders do. We bet on the best founders, period,” the SV website elaborated.

Serena already is an active angel investor with interests in top brands like Daily Harvest and MasterClass. SV has already invested in the in-vogue sectors like Web3, fintech, and edtech.

Incidentally, Serena has expressed her disappointment with The New York Times for their huge gaffe. The NYT had published a story on their newspaper edition about the initial round of funding of SV but carried a photo of Serena’s sister and another tennis star Venus to accompany the text. Venus is not related to Serena Ventures. She tweeted, “No matter how far we come, we get reminded that it’s not enough. This is why I raised $111M for Serena ventures. To support the founders who are overlooked by engrained systems woefully unaware of their biases. Because even I am overlooked. “

Her foray into investing as a venture capital firm is not surprising as she is already a board member of Poshmark and Momentive and runs her own clothing line. She also is a minority stakeholder of NFL team Miami Dolphins among other multiple interests.

The post Serena Williams backed-venture capital firm raises $111 million funding appeared first on International Finance.

They are also planning to open up a shop in Bangkok and the investment will also help the company to reach its goal to become a super app for property investors.

Speedhome CEO, Wong Whei Men told the media, “This investment signals promising support from the market towards SPEEDHOME. This fund will help us kick start our regional expansion in Bangkok and accelerate our efforts towards making SPEEDHOME as the region’s super app for property investors. Having esteemed investors like Allianz Malaysia and Gobi Partners to join us is a vote of confidence towards our vision to offer holistic technology-driven solutions for the property industry.”

Among the challenges faced last year, Speedhome managed to often the adverse impact of the pandemic on the property industry with the help of its Virtual Viewing and Homerunners service. Speedhome also recorded more than 160 percent year-on-year growth in Gross Written Premium (GWP) contribution to Allianz Malaysia in 2020 compared to 2019. This provided the much-needed stability that helped the company grow amid the testing times faced especially last year due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

To date, Speedhome has over 575,000 app downloads and over 700,000 tenant enquiries in total. As consumers are becoming more and more aware of their spending habits, this number is only expected to grow further in the coming years.

Image credits- The Malaysian Reserve

The post Speedhome raises $1.7 mn in Series A funding for tech advancement appeared first on International Finance.

The investors that participated in the funding round for Rangers Protocol include names like Pantera Capital, Frameworks Venture, Huobi Ventures, Blockchain Fund, Alameda Research, Hashkey Capital, Spark Digital Capital among others. These venture firms have also made some big investments in crypto.

The company describes itself as a provider of “virtual worlds blockchain infrastructure,” that allows entrepreneurs and creators to build on top of the platform in a permissionless environment. The company also provides a cross-chain protocol, non fungible token protocol, and Ethereum Virtual Machine which is a compatible system.

Along with renaming the company from Rocket Protocol to Rangers Protocol, the company also had a protocol upgrade that included a new NFT platform. The team behind developing this platform believes that the NFT market will see a huge boom very soon. MixMarvel, an incubator established by Rangers Protocol, believes the NFT market will eventually go on to include large-scale human collaboration. According to market experts, the NFT market is projected to double by October as the demand for digital collectibles continues to grow.

Rangers Protocol, in a statement said that Polkastarter, a cross-chain decentralised exchange has also conducted an in-depth cooperation with the company as their strategic partner. Presently, the company is planning to establish several community organizations in the near future, including the Ecosystem Governance Foundation, Developer Community and Pioneer Investment Alliance. All these communities will help support a ‘fair and open environment for pioneer developers’.

The post China-based Rangers Protocol secures funding to expand in the digital asset market appeared first on International Finance.

Founded in 2004, the platform provided by the company can scan corporate company networks which help identify assets like servers, routers, workstations, printers, monitors, and installed software. This lets the IT personnel and managers a single point of information for all their hardware, software and users across the country. The platform also helps make blind spots visible, thereby ensuring that licensing and the software are up to date. It also helps to improve the security of the software by making all the endpoints visible.

Lansweeper CEO Dave Goossens told the media, “You can’t manage, protect, optimize, or secure what you don’t know you have — first you need accurate visibility into your IT estate.” Lansweeper’s main aim is to minimise risk by offering insights into the IT infrastructure with the help of real-time inventorising. The company can also detect assets instantly after they connect to the company network and they don’t require any software installation.

Goossens added saying that their users receive a complete end-to-end date overview of their IT estate which helps them spearhead all their network-related activities, project, and decisions. Additionally, Lansweeper has an impressive set of clients that include IBM, Allianz, Samsung, Nestlé, and Maersk. In 2018, the company received a major investment from a private equity firm named Dovesco.

Image credit: Venture Beat

The post Lansweeper acquires $158 mn funding to launch a new cloud platform appeared first on International Finance.

Evolving ecosystem leads to success and exit
And as the ecosystem continues to evolve, there will be big successes. Exits are beginning to happen. Two Nigerian bloggers put it this way in The Chicken or the Exit: The continent only just had its first unicorn. China had its first unicorn in 2010, and it took five years for it to get to five unicorns; the year after that, it had twenty. Ecosystems develop very slowly, and then all at once. “All at once” could arrive in leading African markets by 2030, but there is work to be done to get there at all. In an effort to further honest dialogue, I humbly offer some ideas for each stakeholder group in the format of actions to keep doing, stop doing, and start doing.

As the saying goes, “follow the money.” It all starts with the Limited Partners (LPs) who invest significant resources into venture capital funds. LPs can keep investing courageously into the ecosystem. However, LPs can stop expecting risk-adjusted market-rate returns on short time horizons. Thinking beyond the traditional metrics, such as financial return over a fixed 10-year term, will enable more aligned capital to reach the best companies. LPs can start dedicating a small percentage of their assets under management to exploring new structures and models, such as revenue-based instruments, permanent capital vehicles, different carry structures, and closed funds with optionality to convert to longer-term structures.

General Partners (GPs) are often stuck in the middle. They must attract LPs to invest in their funds, and thus are constrained by LP global expectations. However, as they work to invest in entrepreneurs, the “on the ground” realities are often more challenging than expected. GPs can keep being creative about making first funds work by generating revenues from grants, concessionary capital, and building other revenue lines. GPs need to stop relying on others to lead rounds and build the internal capability to lead or co-lead. GPs — especially well-established ones with track record– are best positioned to start new funds with innovative structures using new models.

For entrepreneurs and incubators
Entrepreneurs can keep grinding, learning, pivoting, and adapting. However, they can stop taking money with unacceptable strings attached. It is a tough decision, but sometimes no money is better than misaligned money. Also, stop measuring success by funds raised. Start investing one hour a week to learn more about investing “hot spots”: stronger governance, the fundraising process, fundraising options, and investment due diligence.

Incubators can keep up-skilling great talent in cohorts. However, incubators can stop thinking about training as knowledge transfer. The transformative part is unlearning mindsets. Also, incubators can start onboarding more mentors with entrepreneurial experience. The corporate types are good for technical know-how, but not relevant for the daily decisions entrepreneurs face. Incubators can also differentiate further, focusing on specific niches of entrepreneurs. Angel networks are an important part of the ecosystem—keep investing in groups and learning from one another. There are more and more groups popping up all across Africa. There are even “accelerators” specifically to upskill angel investors. Angel groups do need to respect the entrepreneur’s time and to stop saying “no” to entrepreneurs by not saying anything. Start working on ways to de-risk early projects and to encourage investment by considering co-investment funds or first-loss vehicles.

Governments can keep adopting new regulations that facilitate entrepreneurship, lower the risk of capital, and stabilise the business environment. Too often, governments need to stop thinking about innovation as a defensive zero-sum game to be taxed. Start thinking more bottom-up, not top-down. Governments can leverage existing private sector assets and strengths to build upon. Tunisia’s start-up act is a good baseline. Big corporates also have a role to keep building out their corporate venture arms and investing in deals. However, corporates need to stop trying to use their venture arms to steal ideas, intelligence, or tech. Also, too many big corps get complacent and just think about turf protection.

Start thinking about innovation as a core strategy for survival, not as a nice-to-have side programme. All of us can keep being clear about what we are doing and what we are not. We all need to keep building deeper trust, focusing on long-term partnerships, and not “doing deals.” Also, as an ecosystem at large, we need to stop paying too much attention to the hype, click-bait and superficial stories. Let us get to the real, more layered narratives. We can start being more open about mistakes and pivots. We are all learning, and in the end, a rising tide will lift all boats.

The post What is next for African VCs? appeared first on International Finance.

VCA’s board Chair Tokunboh Ishmael, told the media, “Africa’s VC industry continues to grow from strength to strength and we expect 2020 to be another strong year despite global macroeconomic headwinds. The continent’s VC ecosystem showcases the best of African innovation and entrepreneurship, which has the potential to be a key source of solutions to Africa’s intractable problems and a gamechanger for the continent’s development trajectory. AVCA remains committed to supporting the VC industry by charting its growth and providing authoritative research on the asset’s fundraising, deal, and exit activities.”

It is reported that 21 percent of venture capital deals were achieved by African-owned companies established outside the continent. However, most of these companies have provided services to African consumers.

More specifically, fintech and information technology sectors have received a significant number of venture capital deals. This accounted for 19 percent of the total volume of venture capital deals. That said, consumer discretionary and industries accounted for 18 percent and 12 percent of the deals, while healthcare, communications and consumer staples collectively accounted for 19 percent of the deals in the last 6 years.

The post Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa sees 613 VC deals in 6 years appeared first on International Finance.

Franc was established in 2018 by Sebastian Patel and Thomas Brennan. The startup is a robot-advisor largely focused on helping people who are new to equity funds in the market.

The startup is currently operating in South Africa. It is reported that another South African fintech startup AuthGate is seeking to raise capital. It is a self-funded startup and is preparing to raise its first capital, media reports said.

Fintech is rapidly evolving in the country and more international investors are considering to put their money into new startups. It appears that Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa have attracted $3.9 billion venture capital deals during the period between 2012 and 2019, media reports said.

In fact, a report titled Venture Capital in Africa: Mapping Africa’s start-up investment landscape noted that 2019 was the best year for venture capital investments in Africa since 2014. In this context, AVCA’s board Chair, ‘Tokunboh Ishmael, told the media, “Africa’s VC industry continues to grow from strength to strength and we expect 2020 to be another strong year despite global macroeconomic headwinds. The continent’s VC ecosystem showcases the best of African innovation and entrepreneurship, which has the potential to be a key source of solutions to Africa’s intractable problems and a gamechanger for the continent’s development trajectory. AVCA remains committed to supporting the VC industry by charting its growth and providing authoritative research on the asset’s fundraising, deal, and exit activities.”

The post South African fintech Franc raises $300,000 in seed funding appeared first on International Finance.