Ventures Platform, one of Africa’s most active seed-stage venture capital firms, has closed its second institutional fund at $84 million, just $23 million short of the total raised by all six African venture funds that closed in 2025.
The fund, VP Pan-African Fund II, brings in four new 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—alongside a consortium of new family offices.
The new investors join limited partners from the $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 will allow Ventures Platform to increase its stake in startups, as it is 1.8 times the size of Ventures Platform’s first institutional fund, which closed at $46 million in December 2022. Still, it will back roughly the same number of companies with much bigger cheques, targeting entry stakes of 10% to 12%.
That ownership target reflects how African venture capital actually returns money, according to the firm. Secondary sales have become its most reliable route to liquidity. In a secondary sale, an early investor sells part or all of its stake to another investor, rather than waiting for the company to be acquired or go public.
“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 runs three entry strategies—pre-seed, seed, and pre-Series A—and has modelled a first cheque of up to $3 million, with an average ticket around $1.5 million, Aina said. Series A is where the fund stops, and it will follow companies it already backed into that round, but it rarely writes a first cheque in that round.
The reason for the larger cheques stems from what Aina describes as the single biggest lesson from the last fund. “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.”