‘Why invest in Africa’ series, The Founder
We venture into the 2nd episode of our ‘Why invest in Africa’ series, The Founder.
To dig deeper into The Founder’s episode we sat down with Michael Mutie, to explore what it takes to be a founder of a successful startup. Michael is an Investment Manager at Launch Africa Ventures, based in Kenya, Ghana and Mauritius. In addition to capital raising, allocation, strategic enterprise & corporate partnership development, Michael assists in portfolio management for the fund’s 140+ ventures, run by a powerful community of 200+ founders and spread across 20+ African countries.
Launch Africa Ventures partners with exceptional founders and provides them with access to early-stage investment capital, corporate and follow-on investor networks, partnerships, talent, and capacity building opportunities.
IA: Can you tell us about your work and what the main challenges Launch Africa is aiming to solve?
Michael: Launch Africa Ventures is focused on Investing, growing and scaling the next generation of African technology startups. We’re a leading Pan-African VC fund solving the significant funding gap in the Seed and pre-Series A investment landscape in Africa. With a decade-long track record of venture building alongside some of the smartest founding teams in Africa, we back startups across multiple sectors, regions, and products that tackle the most meaningful challenges on the continent.
IA: You’ve built an empowered community of 200+founders- this is quite unique, which benefits do you see coming from this?
Michael: We’ve built a strong connected community of exceptional founders across 23+ markets in Africa. Through the various linkages that we’ve enabled within the portfolio, we’ve seen firsthand the power this connected community has unlocked at scale; mainly through partnerships, market access, commercial opportunities, knowledge sharing, peer-to-peer learning and community support.
This is essentially one of the benefits that set Launch Africa Ventures apart from any other institutional VC fund in Africa. At Launch Africa we’re not only building Africa’s next generation of technology companies, we’re also building Africa’s next generation of business relationships.
