Afridigest Week in Review: A Sendy send-off

Emeka Ajene

Aug 14, 2023

∙ Paid

Welcome back, old & new friends 👋🏽!

📌 Thanks to those who shared feedback about my thoughts on Ghana’s Dash yesterday. 🙏🏽 Très intéressant. As always, feel free to ping me by mail, WhatsApp, etc. It’s always a treat to hear from you.

If you’re new here: welcome — this Week in Review is sent on Mondays, the Fintech Review goes out on Sundays, the Content Corner or Intelligence Brief goes out on Wednesdays, and an original essay occasionally goes out on Saturdays. (But please note: Wednesday & Saturday content is very much in flux right now.) For past essays and digests, visit the archive & Afridigest.com.

And with that said, let’s get into it!

Week 32 2023: Aug 6-12

📢 African startups that have raised less than $250K are invited to apply before August 31st to the OST Grow investment readiness program.

🔦 Equity & Debt Fundraises

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💰 Investor Activity

Antler, the global VC firm, venture builder, and accelerator with an East African subsidiary, announced the launch of a $60M fund focused on North Africa & the MENAP region. It’ll be co-led by Dr. Jonathan Doerr who some of you might remember was the Managing Director of Jumia Nigeria a decade ago.
Egyptian early-stage venture capital firm Flat6Labs launched the Makers ConTech Innovation Program. It’s an accelerator program focused on growing construction tech in the Middle East starting with Egypt, then Saudi Arabia, then the broader MENA region.
Climate-focused pre-seed investor and accelerator Catalyst Fund is among the four new PE & VC asset managers receiving funding from the Prosper Africa Catalytic Investment Facility. The facility offers $250K to $1M in catalytic grants to funds and other organizations in sub-Saharan Africa.
P.S. The close of Knife Capital’s Fund III made various headlines this week, but if you recall we covered it in Week 27.

🕵️‍♀️ In case you missed it

NEWS

South Africa, host of this year’s BRICs summit, published a list of 23 countries that have applied to become members of the bloc.
Meet the 30 African healthtechs selected to receive grant funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-backed i3 program.

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👀 Visual of the Week

THE GLOBAL MARKET DOWNTURN IN NUMBERS

VC investments in Africa fell by 43% in the first half of the year compared to H1 2022 — in line with global figures.

Here’s what the African Private Equity & Venture Capital Association had to say:

“Finally falling prey to shifting market forces, venture investments in Africa fell by 43% YoY in 2023 H1. This is against a backdrop of relatively strong fundraising by African VC fund managers in 2022. VC investors thus appear to be adopting a cautious approach to capital deployment, given the significant degree of market uncertainty which shows no signs of immediate resolution.”

2023 Q1-Q2 Venture Capital Activity in Africa. PDF.

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🐤 Tweets of the Week

On what’s coming & how to respond:

On whether the average tech professional in Nigeria(/Africa) is ballin’:

And a public service announcement to investors:

Bonus:

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🗣️ Community Corner and Opportunities (Send to submissions@afridigest.com)

🎰 OPPORTUNITIES

African tech hubs and accelerators that work on edtech are invited to submit expressions of interest before August 27th. The Mastercard Foundation Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning is looking for partners to implement the Mastercard Foundation EdTech Fellowship.
Early-stage African blockchain startups are invited to apply before November 30th to the 6th batch of the CV Labs accelerator program. CV VC may invest up to $135K in exchange for 7% equity (and/or 4% future token supply) of selected startups.
Pre-MVP African founders are invited to apply before September 22nd to the Amazon Web Services Build accelerator program to get product development support.

The last word

💭 Just my thoughts

Here’s the news of the week:

After ~9 years of operations, over $20M in funding raised, and a peak valuation of over $80M, Kenyan logistics platform Sendy is shutting down/‘being acquired.’

And there’s no shortage of hot takes here.

If you’re not a fan of venture capital, you can shoehorn Sendy’s story into a ‘VC-is-bad’ narrative.

If you want to turn it into an indictment of Kenyans and/or the Kenyan business environment, that lane is wide open.

And if you want to use the Sendy news to push a diversity agenda, I suppose you can do that too.

But for me, while I appreciate discussions (like this one) that try to make sense of this from a business-building perspective, there’s really only one take that resonates right now:

It’s gotta be hell to work on something for close to a decade and see it come to an end like this. But I hope that when the team is ready, they share lessons & advice from the experience.

I can’t help but think of this tweet from Week 27’s newsletter here: “VCs get to make 5+ bets a year and founders get to make 1 bet every 5+ years.”

And sexy as it might be to invest and pick winners (plural), the commitment that’s required to build a winner is different.

Regardless of the outcome, much respect to the men & women in the arena.

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