Abuja-based venture firm Ventures Platform — an early backer of Paystack and Moniepoint — has closed its second institutional fund at $84 million, beating its $75 million target. The raise is notable less for the number itself than for the context: the six African venture funds that reached final close in all of 2025 raised roughly $107 million combined, so this single fund comes within $23 million of that entire year’s total.
Who’s in it: The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Norfund, Alphatron and the Ashesi University Foundation joined as new limited partners. They sit alongside first-close investors IFC, Standard Bank, British International Investment, Proparco (via the EU-backed Choose Africa programme), Egypt’s MSME Development Agency, AfricaGrow, and Alder Tree. Nigeria’s government also took a position — through its Investment in Digital and Creative Enterprises programme — marking the first time the state has backed a VC fund directly.
The structural shift: Ventures Platform is narrowing its mandate to pre-seed through pre-Series A, targeting 10–12% entry ownership with first cheques up to $3 million (average ~$1.5 million), and will generally stop following portfolio companies at Series A. Founding partner Kola Aina has framed this as a lesson learned from the fund’s heavy reliance on secondary sales for liquidity — small initial stakes get punished by secondary-market math.
Why it matters for the region: African venture funding remains well below its 2021–22 peak and exit routes are thin, so a raise of this size — with two DFIs (EBRD, Norfund) coming in fresh and a sovereign LP for the first time — is a real signal about which managers institutional capital still trusts, not just a fundraising headline.