Early-stage investment company Founders Factory Africa has secured an additional $114-million in funding to scale its model to better serve founders across the African technology ecosystem.
The additional support from the nonprofit Mastercard Foundation and Johnson & Johnson Impact Ventures, an impact fund within the Johnson & Johnson Foundation, follows on from previous investments into Founders Factory Africa by Standard Bank, Small Foundation and Netcare.
The support will enable the investment company to scale its model and better serve technology-led startups and founders across the African continent.
“We are excited to have new and dynamic funding, which follows on from previous investments into Founders Factory Africa by Standard Bank Group, Small Foundation and Netcare Group,” says Founders Factory Africa co-founder Alina Truhina.
Since its inception in 2018, the company has catalysed the trajectory of 55 tech startups across the continent.
The additional funding affirms Founders Factory Africa's hybrid investment model of combining capital and operational support and will help the early-stage investor further iterate this model by becoming sector-agnostic in its investment with founders who prioritise business fundamentals and will also double down on addressing the gender imbalance in the ecosystem.
The company is also focused on broadening its capital investment offering to include non-dilutive capital, which supports the continent's need for different capital deployment types across the venture maturity curve.
Founders Factory Africa CEO Bongani Sithole says moving Africa forward requires more support for tech-driven and solution-oriented ventures that have the potential to scale and make an impact at speed.
“Our role as Founders Factory Africa is to provide founders with the funding, knowledge, and hands-on venture-building support they need to achieve commercial success and create outsized, systematic impact.”