News
Small Foundation is pleased to announce our support for Delta40, a venture studio building and scaling ventures across sub-Saharan Africa.
Across many African markets, constraints extend beyond capital. While funding availability remains limited, a more persistent challenge lies in the quality and readiness of ventures entering the pipeline. Founders are often required to simultaneously build business operations while navigating fundraising, frequently without adequate early-stage support. This dynamic limits the number of ventures that reach a level of maturity suitable for institutional investment.
In this context, venture studios represent a structurally different approach to venture creation. This is particularly relevant in fragmented ecosystems where support infrastructures are limited. Rather than relying on founders to independently assemble the capabilities required to scale, the venture studio model centralises and embeds these functions. The result is reduced early execution risk and an improvement in the quality of ventures entering the market.
“Delta40 stands out for combining capital with the kind of hands-on operational support that early-stage ventures in Africa genuinely need. For Small Foundation, this investment is about more than returns – it’s a deliberate bet on a model that generates real learning about what it takes to build resilient, exit-ready businesses in underserved markets. We believe the venture studio approach can unlock both impact and commercial capital at scale, and we’re excited to help Delta40 prove it.”
– David Maina, Investment Director at Small Foundation
By combining capital with hands-on technical and operational support, Delta40 supports founders from inception to build stronger, more investable companies. Their emphasis on partnerships with corporates and industry stakeholders further strengthens this approach, enabling ventures to access distribution channels, validate products in real market conditions, and establish early commercial traction. Over time, they also create more credible pathways to follow-on investment and strategic outcomes.
For Small Foundation, supporting Delta40 provides an opportunity to better understand how venture support models can address systemic gaps in early-stage ecosystems. It also allows us to test whether improving how companies are built at inception leads to a more robust pipeline over time. We see this as a critical area of exploration for strengthening entrepreneurial ecosystems across sub-Saharan Africa.
“We’re grateful for Small Foundation’s backing in testing and scaling our innovative Fund and Venture Studio model designed for our market context. Their willingness to engage with an unique approach, one that pairs capital with hands-on venture support, is critical in markets where the gap is not just funding, but shared talent and resources ventures require to reach Pan-African scale and exit. This partnership reflects a shared belief that how companies are built and supported plays a role in determining the scale of both their impact and commercial success.”
– Lyndsay Holley Handler, CEO of Delta40
