By Andualem Sisay Gessesse – Dream Venture Capital (VC), the company engaged in accelerating the next generation of ecosystem-building African investors, is set to hold 14 investment networking events across the world in 2024.
“The key objective of the multi-country roadshow is to facilitate more collaborative connections between investment ecosystem stakeholders, to encourage more interest in the African investment space among individual and institutional capital allocators and to raise awareness of Dream VC’s investment training programs,” said Mark Kleyner, Co-Founder & Programs Director, told New Business Ethiopia.
“Dream Venture Capital (VC) has very ambitious plans for 2024, kicking off the year with an announcement of 14+ major investment networking events across Nigeria, Egypt, Tunisia, the US, the UK, Germany, Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, and more,” he said. The investment networking events set to take place in the coming few months by Dream VC also include gatherings in Toronto, Paris, Berlin and London, among others.
“This year, Dream VC aims to match the past 100% revenue growth year on year, with a strong demand for venture capital training and Dream VC’s various B2B capacity-building offerings. Dream VC’s ambitious targets involve maintaining the high post-program employability rate and successfully scaling up both the institute and advisory to break into new markets. With a current reach in 30 African countries, Dream VC ambitiously aims to solidify a presence in North Africa as a key aim for 2024,” Mark said.
According to Mr. Kleyner the major achievements of Dream VC over the past years include:
• It has received 4000+ applicants for its programs and maintained a ~ 4% average acceptance rate
• Its programs have featured over 80+ Venture Capital speakers from top VCs both in Africa and from around the world
• Its alumni have joined over 60+ Venture Capital funds, started multiple new angel networks and set up investment syndicates, with a net asset under management of $6.6bn (USD)
• its alumni network is now spread out over 30+ countries
• It has directly trained over 25 entrepreneurship support organizations and over 15 new fund managers
Limited Partners (LPs) (investors who invest in VC funds, or give money to fund managers, to manage on their behalf. LPs give money to “GPs” (who are the general partners who actually manage funds) and these “GPs” then invest in startups – this is how VC works).
Opportunities and Challenges
Venture Capital investments in Africa are still proportionally low as compared to investments in most other markets around the world, according to Mark. “Many industries, both fundamental infrastructure, core technology plays, and key sectors are yet not “solved” – challenges and issues with anything from core transport services to more complex internet products are common in any of the 54 African markets. Ergo, there are many opportunities across all major tech verticals for new startups to take up significant market share,” he said.
Mark says, this opportunity in turn means that fund managers can benefit from financing this growth. “As African countries’ economies mature, more challenges will emerge, and more startups will rise to face them. As such, it’s unlikely that the VC opportunity in Africa will decrease – rather – it will likely keep increasing in the coming years. A notable trend to follow will be to see whether we will see a re-emergence of interest from institutions first “trying out” African-focused investments, especially once interest rates fall in Europe and North America”.
Meanwhile the sector still faces many challenges. “There are many challenges around expanding the buy side market with the VC space in Africa. Three that come to mind are – managing the frequency of new fund managers, ensuring global connections remain, and embracing collaboration,” says Mark.
He argues creating more VCs must be done sustainably. “An increasingly common concern in the past few years in the African VC space was managing the rapid rise in entrepreneurship with the inadequate supply of investors to support and enable new entrepreneurs to successfully fundraise. Now the story is similar in VC,” he says.
“Creating many new funds, and upskilling a new generation of fund managers should be done sustainably, and responsibly with new capital allocators entering the market as limited partners to also support such new funds – otherwise fundraising for VCs, and as a result, for their investee startups, is harder. Until and unless we start to see an increase in domestic institutions supporting funds – with a stronger presence from banks, telcos, and service companies – fundraising for VCs, and hence seeing many more funds in Africa, will remain a challenging target.”
He says to many international institutions, pension funds, and funds of funds – African VC is still often seen as an impact story outside the continent. “Many international institutions don’t understand the nature of investing in African funds let alone African markets directly. To grow and foster a stronger private sector environment, it’s important that knowledge exchange continues and the African VC space continues to attract strong foreign follow-on capital.”
“Finally, collaboration remains a great opportunity – but also a challenge. Many aspiring fund managers choose to try to raise and deploy a fund on their own and often struggle to put together an industry-beating team. More collaboration and team-ups are key to seeing cross-continental teams form, bringing in complementary experience and different exposure to North/East/West/South/Central Africa – for new fund teams,” Mark suggests.
Having worked across multiple continents including areas with widespread support networks in place for aspiring investors like the US & Europe, the founding team of Dream VC sought to create the same for Africa. Dream VC aims to break down the traditional access barriers into venture capital and specifically unlocking the untapped potential of investing ‘on the ground’ on the continent. In Africa, being an investor is so much more than just distributing capital – one must embrace the hard reality. Over the past few years Dream Venture Capital has been delivering comprehensive training for both investors and founders alike.
Those interested to be part of one or some of the global road-shows organized by Dream VC can express their interest using this link.