• Chari

  Participated · Series A · Oct 2025

  Founded in 2020 by husband-and-wife team Ismael and Sophia Belkhayat, Chari began as a mobile marketplace enabling corner shops to procure fast-moving consumer goods directly from distributors. The company has since evolved toward a banking-as-a-service model, using its recently obtained payment-institution licence from Bank Al-Maghrib to embed digital payments, credit, and other financial tools inside its merchant app. More than 20,000 small retailers across Morocco, Tunisia, and Côte d’Ivoire now use Chari’s platform, making it one of the region’s largest informal-retail digitisation plays. With a “super app” approach, Chari aims to transform these mom-and-pop stores into grassroots financial access points for underbanked communities. Future plans include opening its in-house financial rails to third-party developers, positioning the startup as a regional fintech enabler across Francophone Africa. To date, Chari has raised roughly $17 million in venture funding, which supports both its commerce logistics operations and the build-out of its fintech infrastructure.

• Nucleon Security

  Participated · Seed · Sep 2025

  Nucleon Security designs and deploys automated, intelligent cybersecurity solutions based on agentic AI, with a platform that spans the full defense cycle. Its product suite includes a Zero Trust endpoint detection and response (EDR) system, a sovereign managed detection and response (MDR) service, Malprob AI for advanced malware analysis, and ScorX for alert prioritization. The company already supports over 100 clients across Africa, including organizations in Tunisia, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, and Madagascar. Founded in 2019 in Morocco, Nucleon aims to industrialise its agentic AI Zero Trust platform and make proactive cybersecurity accessible across the continent. The firm plans to use new capital to accelerate international expansion and deepen R&D on its Zero Trust solutions. The company positions its automation as a response to a chronic shortage of cybersecurity professionals and rising global cybercrime costs cited in the article.

• Workpay

  Participated · Series A · Aug 2024

  Workpay offers cloud-based HR, payroll, and benefits solutions tailored to African businesses, serving both single-jurisdiction firms and companies with cross-border employees. Its product set includes payroll, time and attendance tracking, performance management, and modules to layer financial services such as insurance and partner lending/savings. The company has expanded from an initial payroll focus into a fuller HR stack in response to customer needs. Workpay says it serves more than 1,000 customers across 20 African countries and added nearly 500 businesses in the past 16 months. Its revenue grew 1.5x in the first six months of 2024 and the company is on course to double revenue by the end of the year. Leadership includes co-founder and CEO Paul Kimani and co-founder/COO Jackson Kungu. Workpay is a Kenyan, YC-backed full-stack HR and payroll startup founded in 2019. The platform enables employers to pay salaries in local currencies across Africa (and via partners outside the continent), file taxes, process employee benefits, and manage time, attendance, and leave. An employee-facing app lets workers view payslips, request expenses, and apply for leave. Workpay is launching a payroll engine and an API for accounting firms, and is building a marketplace while adding financial services such as investment linkages, medical and asset insurance, and earned-wage access. The company says it has been doubling revenue annually since 2021, serves nearly 700 customers, and handles about $200 million in total payroll value annually. WorkPay is a Kenya-based cloud HR management and payroll solution serving SMBs in Africa. Its platform includes time tracking and salary disbursement tools designed to eliminate ghost workers and reduce inefficiencies tied to cash payments. The company processes payrolls for more than 25,000 employees in Kenya and serves over 300 SMBs on its platform. WorkPay recently raised US$2.1M in seed funding to fuel growth. Management plans to use the investment to scale HR and payroll tools to more SMBs and expand to enterprise clients across East Africa.

• BFree

  Participated · Equity · Feb 2024

  Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Lagos, BFree builds post-loan infrastructure to acquire, assess and recover non-performing loan portfolios across Africa. The company uses machine learning to profile defaulting borrowers, predict repayment capacity and customise engagement through automated bots and self-service portals while avoiding punitive measures such as late fees or blacklisting. To date it reports having handled over $740M of distressed loans and interacting with roughly 6.6 million borrowers, serving more than 30 financial institutions across Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya. BFree has shifted from offering SaaS collections tools toward actively buying written-off or delinquent loans and managing recoveries internally. The startup is exploring technical extensions including blockchain and DeFi tools to streamline secondary debt trading. Its current financing mix includes equity and multiple debt facilities that the company is deploying to scale NPL acquisitions and ethical recovery operations.

• Waspito

  Participated · Seed · Nov 2023

  Waspito is a Cameroonian healthtech platform that functions like a social network for healthcare, letting users instantly connect with verified doctors over video. The service also arranges home sample collection by partner laboratory technicians and delivers medication, and integrates with hospitals for continued care. Patients can pay through multiple options, including insurance, and join anonymous disease support groups on the platform. Founded by Jean Lobe Lobe at the start of 2020, Waspito emphasizes instant consultations rather than scheduled bookings to improve access. The startup reports about 650,000 users, 950 onboarded doctors and 60,000 consultations to date. It is piloting a hybrid model of mini-clinics in Ivory Coast (within La Poste branches) to reach offline patients and plans rollouts in Cameroon and Senegal, while eyeing Senegal and Gabon for further expansion; it recently secured a $2.5M seed extension to support scaling.

No current team members are available.