The Venture Codex

Led · Seed · Oct 2024

Octavia is a Direct Air Capture (DAC) company that designs and operates machines to extract CO2 from ambient air, liquefy it, and hand it to a storage partner for underground mineralization. Founded in Kenya two years ago, it began field carbon capture in February and currently operates two devices with a combined capacity of 50 tonnes per year. The startup plans to build more machines and expects to reach a capture capacity of 1,500 tonnes per year beginning in 2025 when a storage site run by partner Cella Mineral Storage comes online. Octavia cites Kenya’s Rift Valley basalts and abundant renewable energy (notably geothermal) as competitive advantages for low-carbon, permanent storage. The company has a 60-person team (40 engineers), is an XPRIZE Carbon Removal finalist, and reports 12 customers to date, with the Danish marketplace Klimate among its largest clients. Financially, Octavia closed a $3.9M seed equity round and has secured $1.1M in advance sales of carbon credits to help scale operations.

Participated · Series B · Jan 2023

Carry1st operates as a game publisher and a digital commerce platform, using its proprietary Pay1st alternative payments platform and online marketplace to monetize gaming goods. The company develops, licenses, and publishes games and has launched titles such as Africa Glam, Mancala Adventures, SpongeBob Krusty Cook-Off, Ludo Blitz and Mine Rescue. Carry1st has partnered with Activision, Supercell and Riot Games to scale titles including Call of Duty: Mobile and Valorant in the region. Led by CEO Cordel Robbin-Coker, the firm intends to use new funding to support growth of its entertainment businesses and to expand gaming across Africa. Financially, Carry1st has raised over $60M since being founded in 2018. Carry1st publishes, acquires and licenses mobile and social games while operating Pay1st, an embedded monetization-as-a-service platform and the Carry1st Shop marketplace for virtual goods. The company builds and relaunches owned titles (eg, Mine Rescue, Gebeta) and licenses third‑party games, and it runs the CrazyHubs accelerator that produced The President, a top‑downloaded game. Carry1st has commercial partnerships with major publishers including Riot Games (payments partner in Africa) and executed a Call of Duty: Mobile pilot in South Africa. Its Carry1st Shop supports 100+ products across 120 payment methods including bank transfers, crypto and mobile money, and the product was the fastest‑growing last year with users and revenues surging fivefold. Games like The President drove overall revenues to grow roughly 10x year‑over‑year. The company is developing a beta Play1st platform to support web3/play‑to‑earn discovery and community features, while continuing to expand Pay1st and its licensing and publishing business. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in South Africa, Carry1st began as a game studio and evolved into a hybrid publisher that handles distribution, marketing, live operations and monetization for partner studios. The company provides a full-stack publishing solution, including user acquisition, community management and embedded payments that accept bank transfers, mobile money and crypto. Carry1st recently launched Carry1st Shop, an online marketplace for virtual goods such as airtime, mobile data, vouchers and gaming currency. Games revenue has increased 90% month-on-month since the second half of last year, and the marketplace is growing even faster, especially in South Africa and Nigeria. The team of 37 people across 18 countries plans to use new capital to expand its content portfolio, grow product and engineering teams, acquire “tens of millions” of new users, and pursue game co-development and play-to-earn/web3 infrastructure (including on- and off-ramps and crypto point-of-sale). Carry1st operates a full‑stack mobile games publishing platform that handles localization, distribution, user acquisition, monetization and customer experience for partner studios, licensing games on exclusive, long‑term contracts. The company has also developed an in‑house payments product, Pay1st, via partnerships with Paystack, Safaricom and Cellulant to enable local payment methods. Carry1st funds user acquisition and pays partners royalties, and since its seed round has signed seven games with studios including Raketspel, Cosi Games and Ethiopia’s Qene Games. Founded in 2018 with offices in Cape Town and New York, the team has grown from 18 to 26 employees across 11 countries. Financially, Carry1st has raised $9.5M to date, comprising a $2.5M seed and a $6M Series A. The company plans to use the new capital to expand product, engineering and growth teams, secure additional global studio partnerships, and launch and scale titles such as Carry1st Trivia and All‑Star Soccer. Leadership’s longer‑term aim is to build a dominant consumer internet company in Africa by combining social games and payments to catalyze regional digital growth. Carry1st is a gaming development startup that builds and publishes mobile games for African audiences. The company has launched titles including Hyper! and Carry1st Trivia, which reached about 1.5 million downloads and was the number one game in Nigeria and Kenya for much of the year. Carry1st operates offices in New York, Lagos and South Africa and was co-founded in 2018 by Cordel Robbin-Coker, Lucy Parry and Tinotenda Mundangepfupfu. It plans to use capital to sign and finance game developers, expand distribution through mobile-operator partnerships and a Brand Ambassador sales network, and to build a broader tech platform with multiple revenue channels. The company intends to dedicate at least $1 million to user acquisition and scaling its user base. Carry1st positions itself as a regional publisher and app-store-like distribution platform for both African-origin and international games.

Led · Series A · Jan 2022

Lipa Later is a Kenyan fintech that offers consumer financing solutions. The company completed a KES 500 million (US$5 million) privately placed debt issuance. It plans to raise an additional KES 2 billion (US$20 million) in equity and debt to fund expansion in Kenya. Lipa Later is also crowdfunding roughly $1.2 million in exchange for equity at a reported valuation of $30,000,000; the article also references an ongoing ~ $1.34 million crowdfund on Republic. The five-year-old company previously raised about $25 million in equity and debt from investors including Founders Factory Africa Platform Capital and others. CEO Eric Muli said the new funding will enable infrastructure enhancements to make the company’s financing solutions more accessible, and the firm remains optimistic despite weakened VC appetite for growth and late-stage startups. Lipa Later operates a tech-driven BNPL platform that provides consumers with near-instant credit limits using proprietary credit-scoring and machine-learning systems. The company offers a BNPL API that integrates with e-commerce platforms and enables merchants to accept installment payments. It has exclusive partnerships with retailers across its markets, including a regional partnership with Carrefour that charges about 2.3% monthly interest on extended credit. Founded in 2018 and active in Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda, Lipa Later plans to expand into Tanzania, Ghana and Nigeria and to deepen its presence in existing markets. Management said it aims to grow and double its presence in current markets and open three to five new African markets in the next 12 months. The new funding will support product expansion, additional merchant partnerships, and geographic growth across Africa.

Participated · Series A · Jan 2022

SeamlessHR operates in the human-resources technology vertical, providing digital tools and services for HR management. The company raised a $10 million Series A round in 2022, signalling strong investor interest. It has now secured an additional $9 million Series A extension from the Gates Foundation and Helios Digital Ventures. According to sources close to the firm, the fresh capital will be channelled toward accelerating expansion across Africa, a strategy that may include strategic acquisitions. In line with this plan, SeamlessHR reportedly held talks last year to acquire another HR tech startup in Nigeria. No revenue, user, or profitability metrics were disclosed in the articles.