Digital Africa has launched the Digital Africa Seed Fund, targeting €30M to €50M for seed cheques across 20 countries, including overlooked markets.
Digital Africa has launched a new seed fund aimed at early stage African startups.
Digital Africa launched the Digital Africa Seed Fund (DASF) on 12 May 2026 at the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi. The programme says the fund is targeting between €30 million and €50 million.
Digital Africa Seed Fund will invest in seed stage startups, meaning companies that have an early product and need capital to hire, ship faster, and find repeatable revenue. It plans to write cheques from €300,000 to €2 million into about 30 tech startups across roughly 20 African countries.
The fund says it will focus on markets that are often ignored by private venture capital, especially outside the four biggest startup hubs on the continent. It also named six priority sectors, artificial intelligence, fintech, healthtech, climate tech, space, and digital infrastructure. Digital infrastructure includes the underlying building blocks like connectivity, cloud, data centres, and payments rails.
Digital Africa operates under Proparco, the private sector arm of Agence Française de Développement, and works with the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs and the European Union. Its earlier pre-seed programme, Fuzé, has backed more than 70 startups across 16 African countries. DASF is positioned as the next step for those companies before they may qualify for Proparco-led Series A activity, which is a later funding round used to scale.
Digital Africa said three institutional backers have confirmed interest, the European Commission via DG INTPA, the West African Development Bank, and Proparco. Ticket sizes from these investors were not disclosed.
African seed funding is still concentrated in a few countries and networks, which leaves founders in smaller and Francophone markets with fewer options. A fund designed to deploy across 20 countries could widen access to larger seed cheques, not just small pre-seed grants.
Execution is the key risk. Investing across many markets adds complexity, from sourcing deals to legal and regulatory work. The next three years of deployment will show whether Digital Africa can move from supporting pre-seed startups to building a consistent seed-stage pipeline at scale.
Primary Source: Techinafrica
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