Launch Africa says it has backed 170+ startups across 22 countries. Associate Jeffery Akemu explains how the VC manages support at scale.
Launch Africa says it has backed over 170 startups across 22 African countries.
The firm is splitting portfolio work between a platform and operations function and a portfolio management function.
It also moved associate Jeffery Akemu from platform into investment management as it pushes for exits from its first fund.
Launch Africa is outlining how it manages one of the continent’s largest venture capital portfolios. Launch Africa has backed more than 170 companies across 22 countries in around six years.
The firm says portfolio support is now organised into two tracks. The platform and operations team focuses on work that can be repeated across many startups, like hiring support and introductions to customers and partners. The portfolio management team works company by company, digging into metrics like revenue, burn, and runway, meaning how long the startup can operate before it runs out of cash.
As part of that setup, Launch Africa moved Jeffery Akemu earlier this year from the platform team to the investment management team. At many larger VC firms, platform and investment teams are separate, and staff rarely switch.
The shift comes as Launch Africa tries to “cash in” on earlier bets by securing exits, meaning a sale or secondary transaction that converts shares into cash. At the same time, it is still deploying its second fund and raising a third.
Launch Africa’s first fund invested in 133 companies, making it one of Africa’s highest-volume seed investors. Seed is an early funding stage, usually the first institutional cheque into a startup.
Africa’s venture market is still thin on exits, so portfolio management has become a key skill for funds that wrote many small seed cheques. Supporting founders at scale can help startups survive longer, raise follow-on rounds, and reach acquisition-ready milestones.
For founders, the split hints at what help they can expect from high-volume investors. Some support is centralised through platform, while performance tracking and capital strategy sit with portfolio managers.
For LPs, meaning the fund’s investors, this structure signals a push toward returns, not just deal count. If Launch Africa can convert early portfolio positions into cash outcomes, it could influence how other African seed funds design their own support teams.
Primary Source: Techcabal
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