Founders Factory Africa secures $114M USD to fund start-ups

We are excited to announce that Founders Factory Africa (FFA) has secured an additional $114 million in funding to scale its model serving founders across the African tech ecosystem.

The additional support from the Mastercard Foundation and Johnson & Johnson Impact Ventures, an impact fund within the Johnson & Johnson Foundation, follows on from previous investments into FFA by Standard Bank, Small Foundation and Netcare.

“We are excited to have new and dynamic funding, which follows on from previous investments into FFA by Standard Bank Group, Small Foundation and Netcare Group,” says Alina Truhina, co-founder of FFA.

The support will enable FFA to scale its model and better serve technology-led start-ups and founders across the African continent. Since its inception in 2018, FFA has catalysed the trajectory of over 55 tech start-ups.

The additional funding affirms FFA’s hybrid investment model of combining capital and operational support and will help the early-stage investor further iterate this model by:

• Becoming sector-agnostic in its investment with founders who prioritise business fundamentals, and will also double down on addressing the gender imbalance in the ecosystem.
• Broadening its capital investment offering to include non-dilutive capital, supporting the continent’s need for different capital deployment types across the venture maturity curve.
• Strengthening FFA’s internal capacity to continue to provide its portfolio of start-ups with the best venture-building support on the continent.

“Come build with us,” says FFA CEO Bongani Sithole.

“Moving Africa forward requires more of us to support tech-driven, solution-oriented ventures that have the potential to scale and make an impact at speed. Our role as Founders Factory Africa is to provide founders with the funding, knowledge and hands-on venture building support they need to achieve commercial success and create outsized, systemic impact.”

Small Foundation is delighted to see our partner FFA receive this recognition and additional support. We are excited to see what can be achieved with this extra capital by the strong and experienced FFA team. We are particularly interested in the opportunities for agtech this will help create.

We look forward to continuing to work with FFA, the ventures, Standard Bank, Netcare, and to working with the new partners of Mastercard Foundation and Johnson & Johnson.

Press release originally posted on Medium.