Participated · Seed · Jan 2026

Paycrest is building infrastructure that converts stablecoins to local fiat currencies, addressing liquidity constraints that hamper day-to-day payments and remittances in Africa. By smoothing the on- and off-ramp between digital dollars and naira, the startup aims to make cross-border and domestic payments faster and more affordable. The company positions itself at the intersection of traditional finance and web3, attracting interest from both specialised crypto investors and generalist VCs. Its core product centres on providing reliable liquidity pools and settlement rails for merchants, consumers, and other fintechs that need instant conversion between stablecoins and local currency. Although still at the pre-revenue, pre-product-market-fit stage, Paycrest’s ability to secure external financing underscores investor confidence in its technical approach and market opportunity. The fresh capital will be channelled toward product development, regulatory compliance, and initial market roll-out. No operating metrics such as user numbers or revenues have been disclosed.

Participated · Seed · Dec 2024

Founded in 2015 and based in Nigeria, PBR Life Sciences provides healthcare and pharmaceutical data analytics across African markets. Its AI-powered dashboards and generative AI tools deliver actionable insights on pricing, demand forecasting, and product development for clients including pharmaceutical firms such as Sanofi, consulting firms, NGOs, and multilateral organizations. The company participated in the ARM Labs Lagos Techstars Accelerator program. In December 2024 PBR raised $1.0M in a pre-seed round from a syndicate of investors. The funds will be used to enhance its AI infrastructure and support expansion into Ghana and Kenya. The raise positions PBR to scale its analytics offerings across more African markets.

Participated · Seed · Dec 2024

Juicyway builds stablecoin-powered infrastructure for fast, cheap cross-border payments and liquidity for businesses. The three-year-old startup operated in stealth and says it processed roughly 25,000 transactions, $1.3 billion in total payment volume and over $1 billion in cross-border payments from about 4,000 users. Its product offers liquidity pools, real-time market-driven pricing and APIs and web/mobile apps supporting currencies including the Nigerian naira, USD, GBP and CAD. Juicyway counts customers such as Bolt, IHS, Piggyvest, Bamboo, Afriex and Mocoh SA and acquired a similar business early in its growth. Revenues come from processing and payment fees with take rates ranging from 0.2% to 10%, and the company expects to generate additional revenue by earning interest on customer balances. To manage regulatory and AML risk it has obtained money-transmitter licenses in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Nigeria, partners with banks and stablecoin infrastructure providers (Access Bank, Bridge, Lead Bank) and uses Sumsub and senior compliance hires for KYC/KYB/KYT.

Led · Seed · Jul 2024

Intron Health builds clinical speech-recognition technology tailored to African accents and medical vocabulary, and can integrate with existing EMRs. Its algorithm is trained on 3.5 million audio clips (16,000 hours) from over 18,000 contributors across 29 countries and 288 accents, primarily from healthcare practitioners. The tool is live in 30 hospitals across five markets, including deployments in Kenya and Nigeria, and has been shown to cut radiology-result wait times in one West African hospital from 48 hours to 20 minutes. The company plans technical improvements including better noise cancellation, low-bandwidth performance, multi-speaker transcription and text-to-speech, and aims to add decision-support/clinical-intelligence tools for prescriptions and lab tests. Intron was launched in 2020 and is also engaged in speech-research partnerships with Google Research, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Digital Square at PATH to evaluate LLMs across 15 countries. The startup raised a $1.6 million pre-seed round to support product development and expansion.

Participated · Seed · Jun 2022

Afropolitan is a community-as-a-service startup that connects the African diaspora through events, travel, media and online community-building. Founded in 2016 by Eche Emole and Chika Uwazie, the company grew its audience via events and social audio (50,000 Clubhouse followers) and the founders’ combined following of over 200,000. Its core product vision is a phased “internet country” built with community tools including passport NFTs, a DAO and a super app offering remittances, e-residency, incorporation services and learn-to-earn initiatives. The company plans to mint 10,000 passport NFTs to activate its DAO and grant members access to events and physical spaces. Later phases target building seed institutions, subsidiary funds and negotiating for physical land to pursue sovereignty. Afropolitan has raised $2.1M in pre-seed to kick-start product development and community growth.