Catalytic funding for your organisation

Who We Invest In

We provide catalytic, concessional capital to pioneer firms: new corridors, new products, new business models. Our investments are early-stage and high-risk, designed to get new ventures off the ground that wouldn’t otherwise attract commercial capital.

We are open to investing in early-stage companies as well as specific catalytic investments to support new ventures within established companies.

We invest across two sectors.

Labour Mobility

We back companies that move African workers into high-productivity jobs abroad. Common company types include:

• Placement agencies: connecting workers to employers in destination countries.
• Language schools: teaching the destination-country language to a level that meets visa and employer requirements.
• Training schools: building the technical and vocational skills employers in destination countries need.
• Financing companies: covering the upfront costs of training, relocation, and visa processing, repaid through income share agreements or similar mechanisms.

We’re particularly excited about businesses that open up new corridors, or that crack a new model in an existing corridor.

Export Manufacturing

We back manufacturing companies that produce high value-add goods for export, meaning a meaningful gap between the cost of input goods and the cost of the output. We’re not focused on simple agri-processing or other industries where there is only a small value-add.

The companies we want to fund are ones that push out the productivity frontier of the local economy: first movers in a new export good, with high learning and start-up costs to overcome, and a catalytic effect on the wider sector once they succeed.

Additionally, we’re particularly excited about industries that are labour intensive and where labour cost makes up a significant share of the cost base and value-add.

We’re also open to investments in key supply chain bottlenecks, or other infrastructure that has a catalytic effect on export manufacturing more broadly.

How we work with companies

We provide catalytic capital to existing organisations with a credible path to creating significant income gains for Africans in export manufacturing or international labour mobility. This includes both for-profit businesses and non-profit organisations.

Our investment structure. We typically invest in two stages:

• Scoping investment ($0–$100k): An initial investment to validate a specific opportunity, for example testing a new geography, a new worker pathway, or a new product line.
• Scale-up investment ($100k–$1m): Where the scoping phase clears the bar, we follow on with a larger investment to scale the proven model.

Depending on your stage of development and the nature of the opportunity, it may make sense to move directly to a scale-up investment without a prior scoping phase.

Instrument flexibility. We are flexible on structure, investing across equity, debt, and revenue-based financing, and in exceptional cases, grants. We invest at concessional rates in high-risk ventures. Where possible, we prefer instruments that return capital sooner, even at a lower rate of return, so that funding can be recycled into new ventures, though we are careful not to create pressure that could undermine the growth of an organisation that is still in its early stages.