Investor Update 2021 Q4 - Wuri Ventures Access Fund

Overview

Our goal with the Wuri Ventures Access fund is to provide investors access to the fast growing African startup market. Investors get exposure to a diversified portfolio of carefully selected startups across a range of industries and geographies. Over the period of 2 years we expect to make up to 20 investments from the Access Fund.

Investments made through our Access Fund follow the same discipline as investments we will make in our institutional fund. We spend each day sourcing deals, networking with other investors, and researching the latest trends across the continent.

The Wuri Ventures Access Fund, a quarterly rolling fund hosted by AngelList, launched officially on August 8th, 2021, and investments were started in Q4.

Thesis

We continue to focus on our four pillars for investing in African startups:

1) Liquidity: We believe that liquidity in the private capital markets is an increasing function as companies grow from early stage fundraising through to full retail investing. As a result, we need to see indications that the company is able to attract the attention investors who share our perception of value in the equity of the company.

2) Real Economy: We believe that technology is a source of competitive advantage enabling companies to disrupt incumbents in all segments of the economy. McKinsey estimates that consumption by business and consumers on the continent of Africa surpasses $4 trillion. As a result, we think that technology should be applied to segments of the economy for which there is already demand and cashflow. And the size of the real economy markets in Africa surpasses the size of Advertising markets which sustain classic “internet” businesses in silicon valley.

3) Multi-country Scaling: The fragmentation of the African continent into 54 countries, means that realizing the full scale of the continent requires scaling across borders. We require that startups have the capacity and intention to scale to multiple countries in Africa as a way to increase the size of the market and to provide a measure of diversification of country risk.

Investments

The following are the investments for Q4 2021 for the Wuri Ventures Access Fund.

For the investment period described we spoke to a total of 44 companies, from 12 countries, of which 68% where African led teams and 52% of teams had women founders. The startups covered 14 sectors including Fintech, Media, FMCG Distribution, EdTech, Mobility and E-Commerce. From this pool of startups we closed 3 investments for the Access Fund in Q4.*

The investments from this quarter include Cauri Money, who's founder, Lamine Tall, was a member of our Fellows Program, where we work with talented founders over a period of 3 months. We helped the company to raise its first pre-seed round from a range of strong investors.

We discovered Kotani pay through a database of Unicef grant recipients, where the company won two grants totalling $150k prior to their seed round of $800,000.

Finally, Norebase has attracted a strong group of well known and connected angel investors in Nigeria. We beleive they have the potenital to be like a Carta for the region, where they will work with a majority of the other startups in the region looking to expand geographically.

Each of these investments are Pre Series A investments at attractive valuations, and we have a strong sense of their ability to execute to reach their milestones enabling them to attract downstream funding.

Thanks for being part of our community!

Tijan Watt and Jerome Cretegny, Co-founders and General Partners, Wuri Ventures