AfricInvest and Cathay Innovation Partner to Launch $168 million Pan-African Startup Fund

Africinvest, a Tunisian-based private equity firm has partnered Cathay Innovation to launch the Cathay Africainvest Innovation, a pan-African fund dedicated to startup investing.

The new investment pool aims to raise $168 million in funds. Cathay Africinvest is not out to fund seed stage startups. Instead, the fund targets high growth African startups looking to raise Series A to C stage round of investment.

“We’ll look at investment across several countries in Africa. We’ll focus on areas such as fintech, logistics, AI, agtech and edutech,” says Denis Barrier, co-founder of Cathay Capital.

The new fund will leverage Africinvest’s strong presence and experience working in several African countries. These countries include Tunisia, Algeria, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Kenya. Interestingly, this will be Africinvest’s fourth Pan-African fund. The firm raised 272m euros in 2016 for its Africinvest Fund III.

The Cathay Africinvest fund will also benefit greatly from Cathay Capital’s links with tech hubs and tech ecosystems across China, the US and Europe.
The fund team will provide selected companies with high value-added support by mobilizing its “multidisciplinary expertise and networks” with the various ecosystems.

The plan is to facilitate partnerships and help accelerate startups’ geographical expansion.

“Our combined objective is to provide support to a new generation of African companies in cutting-edge fields, with the ambition to grow them regionally and globally,” says Aziz Mebarek, co-founder of AfricInvest.

Now there’s no disclosure of when the fund would become active. However, Mr Barrier shared that investment into the new fund could begin by the second half of 2019.

The Cathay Africinvest fund is the latest move in the direction of locating startup capital within African countries. For long, private equity firms had preferred to make their investments from funds based outside the continent and managed by largely non-Africans.

In recent times, there has been serious resolve for funds to be hosted locally and managed by Africans.