Pan-African investor P1 launches $50m fund

BREAKING NEWSSeptember 26, 2023 at 10:58 AM UTC

P1 Ventures, a Pan-African Seed VC fund has completed the first $25 million close of its second fund worth $50 million. The fund will back startups serving in e-commerce, fintech, insurtech, health tech, and SaaS and AI industries.

Founded in 2020 by Mikael Hajjar and Hisham Halbouny, P1 Ventures describes itself as “a high-conviction investor that intentionally focuses on a small number of exceptional African founders and companies building transformational software businesses with regional and global potential”.

Since its launch, P1 Ventures has invested in 29 early-stage companies across 10 countries including Money Fellows in Egypt, and Reliance Health in Nigeria where P1 has a presence.

Key Takeaways

For every $1 invested, P1 claims its portfolio companies have gone on to raise 35x more follow-on capital on average, showing how profitable its investments are. Its inaugural investment was in Yassir in Algeria – a super-app operating in Francophone Africa that recently announced the closing of $150 million in a Series B funding round. The firm’s new focus on AI is crucial at a time when funding for the sector in Africa fell 98% compared to H1 2022, per available data. AI could expand the African economy by $1.5 trillion by 2030—about 50% of its current GDP—if it is able to take over 10% of the global market.