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Tag: Partech

  • Partech Africa, venture capital firm secures $300 million

    Partech Africa, venture capital firm secures $300 million

    Partech Africa, a leading venture capital firm focused on the African continent, has successfully closed its latest fund, raising an impressive sum exceeding $300 million.

    This milestone marks a significant achievement in the realm of African tech investment, reflecting growing confidence and interest from global investors in the region’s burgeoning tech ecosystem.

    Read also: Partech closes 2nd fund with new office in Lagos

    Driving Force Behind Partech Africa’s Success

    The success of Partech Africa’s latest fund can be attributed to several key factors. Firstly, the firm’s deep understanding of the African market, coupled with its extensive network and local expertise, has enabled it to identify promising investment opportunities across various sectors, including fintech, e-commerce, healthtech, and more. By strategically aligning its investments with the continent’s evolving needs and trends, Partech Africa has positioned itself as a preferred partner for entrepreneurs seeking funding and support.

    Furthermore, the firm’s track record of successful exits and value creation for portfolio companies has instilled confidence among investors, demonstrating its ability to generate attractive returns in the African tech landscape. This track record, combined with the increasing maturity and scalability of African startups, has attr

    Expansion into Lagos: A Strategic Move

    acted significant interest from institutional investors, leading to the oversubscription of Partech Africa’s latest fund.

    In addition to closing its latest fund, Partech Africa has announced the opening of a new office in Lagos, Nigeria, further solidifying its commitment to the African market. Lagos, widely regarded as Africa’s leading tech hub, offers a fertile ground for investment opportunities, with a vibrant ecosystem of startups, tech talent, and innovation hubs.

    By establishing a presence in Lagos, Partech Africa aims to strengthen its local presence and deepen its engagement with entrepreneurs and stakeholders across the region. The proximity to key markets and decision-makers will enable the firm to enhance its deal-sourcing capabilities, forge stronger partnerships, and provide hands-on support to portfolio companies.

    Moreover, the expansion into Lagos underscores Partech Africa’s long-term vision and confidence in the growth potential of the African tech ecosystem. As the continent continues to witness rapid digitization and technological advancement, Lagos serves as an ideal launchpad for the firm to capitalize on emerging trends and contribute to the development of transformative solutions that address local and global challenges.

    Empowering African Entrepreneurs for Success

    At its core, Partech Africa remains committed to empowering African entrepreneurs and driving socio-economic impact through technology and innovation. With its latest fund and expanded presence in Lagos, the firm is well-positioned to identify and nurture the next generation of African startups, providing them with the necessary capital, mentorship, and resources to scale and succeed on a global stage.

    Through strategic investments and partnerships, Partech Africa aims to catalyze innovation, create jobs, and unlock new opportunities across the continent. By harnessing the collective potential of Africa’s brightest minds and visionary leaders, the firm endeavours to shape the future of tech entrepreneurship in Africa and contribute to a more inclusive and prosperous society.

  • Partech closes 2nd fund with new office in Lagos

    Partech closes 2nd fund with new office in Lagos

    In addition to opening a new office in Lagos and seeking to expand its team, global technology investment firm Partech has announced the final closing of its second Africa fund, Partech Africa II, with a hard cap of €280M ($300M+).

    All major investors from its predecessor fund, as well as top-tier investors, have made their first commitment to the Partech Africa platform and the African VC ecosystem, and the final closing of Partech Africa II has reached €280M ($300M+), following a strong first closing announced last year.

    Read also: QED and Partech back Revio with $5.2M seed

    The parties involved

    Pension and sovereign funds from the United States and the Middle East are among the new types of global institutions that have been able to take advantage of this final closing’s oversubscription. In addition to the early backers of Partech Africa—Orange, AXIAN Investment, and the African Development Bank Group—new strategic investors Dubai Future District Fund (DFDF) and Africa Re are also part of it.

    Forty-plus foreign investors, including family offices, large Development Finance Institutions (DFIs), and commercial investors like South Suez and Bertelsmann, have shown their support for the fund. Among the development finance institutions (DFIs) in this group are KfW, the German Development Bank, the EIB, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a World Bank Group member, FMO, the Entrepreneurial Development Bank of the Netherlands, Bpifrance Investissement, BII, DEG, the UK’s development finance institution and impact investor, and Proparco.

    With initial tickets ranging from $1 million to $15 million on Seed to Series C rounds, Partech Africa II will ramp up its investment strategy across Africa. The goal is to back African founders and companies as they grow in local and international markets. The Fund has made three investments thus far: an e-commerce platform in Senegal, a payment orchestration startup in South Africa, and an Egyptian realty platform. Across the continent, the group plans to amass a portfolio of more than twenty companies.

    General Partner, Tidjane Deme of Partech, has announced that the firm is increasing its team size and geographic reach across Africa. With offices in Dakar, Nairobi, Dubai, and now Lagos, Partech is better able to provide entrepreneurs with hands-on support.

    Besides this growth, Partech Africa is also looking to hire an Investment Analyst in Lagos and a senior profile for “Portfolio Strategy & Operations” to help with value creation and exit planning.

    According to Partech’s most recent 2023 Africa Tech Venture Capital Report, the number of investors involved in the African tech ecosystem has dropped by half, coinciding with the final closing announcement of Partech Africa II. It is more important than ever before to be able to anchor rounds at all stages, from Seed to Early Growth,” Collon said. It furthers our goal of facilitating the establishment of tech companies that will profoundly impact the future of innovation on a global scale and on the African economy in particular.

    About Partech Africa

    Partech Africa is one of Africa’s top venture capital funds that focuses on supporting tech startups. Its headquarters are in Dakar, Senegal. Startups in Africa are reshaping many industries through the application of technology; Partech Africa invests in seed and series C equity rounds in these companies.

    Africa Startups Debt Financing Hit $1.55B In 2022

    About Partech

    Partech is an international technology investment firm with branches in Berlin, Dakar, San Francisco, Dubai, Lagos, and Nairobi. The headquarters are in Paris. Everyone on our team is free to think as they like. Efforts are not limited by passing fads, fad methods, or established practices. We are firm believers in the transformative power of solidarity, standing shoulder to shoulder with the founders whose ventures we fund as we strive for common goals. 

    From the seed stage all the way through to growth, we back entrepreneurs by providing them with capital, operational expertise, and strategic support. We began in San Francisco forty years ago and now manage a portfolio of two hundred companies across forty countries and four continents, with a total asset under management (AUM) of €2.5 billion. 

  • QED and Partech back Revio with $5.2M seed

    QED and Partech back Revio with $5.2M seed

    QED and Partech are providing financial support for the South African payment orchestration platform Revio, with a seed investment of $5.2 million.

    The landscape of payments in Africa is still rather fragmented, with a number of different payment operators offering a variety of payment solutions to customers as well as enterprises. Payment failures are unavoidable due to this fragmentation for various reasons, including invalid cards, inactive accounts, and high dispute rates.

    Revio, a startup based in South Africa, is one of the very few companies now working on payment orchestration to solve this fragmentation. After realising how much time and human work businesses spend collecting payments across numerous providers and engaging customers on outstanding and failed payments, Ruaan Botha, the co-founder and CEO of the fintech company, revealed that he was inspired to launch the company after hearing this information.

    “Digital payments are growing rapidly across Africa, projected to reach $146 billion in 2023, before taking into account almost $500 billion in mobile money transactions,” Botha revealed.

    “However, there are unique market challenges and opportunities in how payments are made and collected on the continent. The most glaring is the immense fragmentation of the payments ecosystem, with more than 280 licensed payment service providers, 42 currencies and the unique consumer payment cultures that exist.”

    Read also: Revio Connects Businesses To Payment Methods To Reduces Payment Failures

    How the fund will improve Revio’s operation

    The young startup, which has been in operation for two years, offers businesses assistance in optimising their order-to-cash lifecycles and resolving challenges that arise from using a variety of payment methods by utilising its application programming interfaces (APIs). The most recent piece of news is that the company has successfully raised $5.2 million in seed capital in order to bolster its efforts in combating these missed payments, which are responsible for digital firms losing billions of dollars in annual recurring income.

    Revio has been successful in acquiring finance on two separate occasions in the past year, as seen by the current investment round. It was announced in November that the company had received pre-seed capital totalling $1.1 million from investors, including Speedinvest, Ralicap, and Everywhere VC. In the seed round that was led by QED, these investors issued follow-on checks, and they were joined by the growth-stage pan-African VC Partech.

    According to Nicole Dunn, co-founder and chief operating officer of Revio, the participation of QED and Partech, which are typically known for their growth-stage investments, in Revio’s seed round is a testament to the relevance of its product (Partech Africa invests in Series A and B deals, and this is QED’s first seed check in an African startup after Moniepoint’s pre-Series C and Remedial Health’s Series A).

    The impact of Revio in Africa

    When a company has operations in a number of countries and welcomes a diverse range of payment methods, the utilisation of payment orchestration systems becomes an increasingly critical component of the business. 

    Revio and other comparable startups, such as MoneyHash, which is based in Egypt, perform the same function for the African continent as Primer, Spreedly, and Zooz do for the United States and Europe through their respective application programming interfaces (APIs).

    Revio has developed a lifecycle called order-to-cash, which is also known as an end-to-end payment value chain. This lifecycle may be used by merchants to collect income from their customers. These retailers link to more than 70 payment methods and service providers through its application programming interface (API), which grants them access to transaction routing, automated failover and retries, and real-time customer engagement workflows. These features all contribute to an increase in payment success rates.

    In addition, Revio has just recently introduced a revenue recovery use case based on the realisation that the failure of payment in Africa is not always the result of technical difficulties; it may also be the result of inadequate funds or an abandoned authorization. This realisation led to the development of Revio’s new use case. 

    To this aim, the platform drives real-time action using channels like as email, SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications to re-engage customers in the process of checking out and to offer them a more convenient means of payment (cash or flexible payment plans).

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    The future goal of Revio

    According to Dunn, Revio, which has seen its income expand by a factor of 1,000% over the course of the previous year, also wants to target worldwide retailers servicing the African market during the subsequent phase of its development. She stated that the company had begun contact with a handful of these merchants in order to have a better understanding of what it would take to effectively service them. 

    This is mostly happening as the company builds capabilities around cross-border reconciliation settlement. The newly invested funds will allow the company to strengthen its technological capabilities in this respect and grow its workforce by recruiting talented people from both inside and outside of the continent.

    Gbenga Ajayi, partner and Africa lead at QED Investors, remarked: “We have a strong conviction that payments in Africa hasn’t been fully solved. Revio is building a platform that can unlock increased e-commerce and digital payment activity on the continent and help global and local merchants reach new customer segments.” 

    “We are excited to back the exceptional team that has proven they can execute even in tough market conditions and localize very strongly to win enterprise customers.”