Ventures Platform, one of Africa’s most active seed-stage venture capital firms, has closed its second institutional fund at $84 million, leaving it $23 million short of the total raised by all six African venture funds that closed in 2025.

The new vehicle, VP Pan-African Fund II, adds four institutional backers: the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development; Norfund, Norway’s development finance institution; the Dutch family office Alphatron; and the Ashesi University Foundation. They join a consortium of new family offices.

The latest investors are alongside limited partners from the fund’s $64 million first close in November 2025: Nigeria’s iDICE programme; the International Finance Corporation; Standard Bank; British International Investment; Proparco through the EU-backed Choose Africa programme; Egypt’s micro, small and medium enterprise development agency (MSMEDA); AfricaGrow; and Alder Tree Investment.

The second fund is 1.8 times the size of Ventures Platform’s first institutional fund, which closed at $46 million in December 2022. Despite the larger pool of capital, the firm expects to back roughly the same number of companies, but with substantially larger cheques and target entry stakes of 10% to 12%.

According to the firm, that ownership target reflects how African venture capital actually generates returns. Secondary sales have become its most reliable path to liquidity. In a secondary sale, an early investor sells part or all of its stake to another investor rather than waiting for an acquisition or an initial public offering.

“What we’re looking to do is invest with much deeper conviction, so much larger ticket sizes,” Kola Aina, the firm’s founding partner, told TechCabal in an interview. “We’re looking to target entry ownerships of between 10 and 12%. And then we want to be able to have reserve capital to double down on our winners.”

Ventures Platform now operates three entry strategies: pre-seed, seed, and pre-Series A. Aina said the firm has modelled a first cheque of up to $3 million, with an average ticket of about $1.5 million. Series A is where the fund stops, although it will follow existing portfolio companies into that round. It rarely writes a first cheque at Series A.

Aina said the move toward larger cheques comes from what he sees as the most important lesson from the last fund: entry ownership matters because company valuations only rise over time.

“Entry ownership is everything, because the stock only gets pricier,” he said. “If you’re coming into the company, you’re super supportive of the company, but then you don’t own enough of the company; at exits, it hurts when you get there.”

He said that lesson became clearer after the firm’s liquidity events. Ventures Platform has leaned on secondary sales, and the math of secondaries is unforgiving for small positions. If a venture capital firm owns 10% of a startup at pre-seed and later increases that stake to 15% or 20% by doubling down, it can sell half of the position at Series B, realise liquidity, and keep the rest for upside. If it owns 3%, there is little to sell.

That thinking also shapes Fund II’s exit strategy. Aina still sees strategic acquisitions as the primary goal and described initial public offerings as “somewhat mythical.” Ventures Platform’s research shows that 73% of African venture exits happen through acquisitions. Because the firm enters companies so early, it expects secondaries to account for a meaningful share of liquidity. Without naming companies, Aina said Fund I already shows promising signs of near-term liquidity outcomes.

Where did the money come from?

The fund’s limited partner base is weighted toward development finance and sovereign capital, a mix that some investors believe can influence a fund’s strategy. Aina pushed back on that view, pointing to Standard Bank, the largest bank in Africa, as a commercial LP, along with several European family offices and a university foundation.

He added that private capital, especially European family offices, makes up a larger share of Fund II than it did of Fund I.

“Africa only gets less than 2% of venture capital, and we need a lot more venture capital, not less,” he said. “So personally, as a fund manager, I’ll take capital from anywhere I can get it, as long as it’s not misaligned with my strategy.”

Aina argued that a diverse LP base is the only practical way to raise capital at scale for Africa today, given that capital allocators still assign the continent what he described as an unjustified risk premium.

“If you actually look at the performance, Africa is not any more risky than some of these other markets. But the reality is that there is a perception issue,” he said.

He said the sovereign backers are especially meaningful to him. iDICE, the Nigerian government’s digital and creative enterprise programme, is an anchor LP in the fund and, according to Aina, wrote one of the largest individual cheques.

“The shape of the world today requires that countries line up behind the kinds of innovations that they believe that people need for sustainability,” he said, linking the investment to a global environment he sees becoming more insular.

Ventures Platform is raising and deploying dollars in markets where local currencies are losing value. Aina said the firm treats devaluation as a structural feature of investing in Africa, something to plan around rather than try to hedge away.

The response is built into the firm’s portfolio construction in three ways. First, it pursues geographic diversification. Ventures Platform recently hired an investor in Abidjan for Francophone West Africa and has a team member in Cairo, giving the portfolio exposure to a basket of currencies.

Second, it sets a growth threshold high enough that a company must outpace both devaluation and inflation to qualify. Third, it looks for businesses whose models naturally generate foreign-exchange revenue or spread risk across currencies.

“We are assuming that we could have even more devaluation in the future, and we’ve baked that into our investing strategy,” Aina said, while noting that reforms in markets such as Nigeria have brought relative stability over the past couple of years.