FirstCheck Africa: 2021 In Review

We started FirstCheck Africa about this time last year to write early-stage checks for startups founded or co-founded by exceptional women. We’ve made strong progress.

This is our year 1 update.

We’re invested in Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa and Egypt. We did our first follow-on and made our first two seed-stage investments. We’ve also tweaked and evolved our model: we’re now a pre-seed and seed-stage fund with the capacity to write checks of $25K and above. We’re better able to serve female founders that way. We’ll keep pushing until we’re the preferred early-stage investor for diverse founding teams on the continent.

We’re especially proud that our young fund has already been a catalyst for other funds in Africa which are starting to explicitly prioritise diversity by sharing their portfolio stats. Women in tech should have better access to capital, and FirstCheck Africa will keep holding African investors accountable. 100% of the companies in our portfolio have one or more female founders!

It’s progress, but we’re not too quick to pat ourselves on the back. Headlines and PR narratives may be up, but for women in Africa, capital is still constrained. For female-founded or co-founded startups, 2021 was a mixed experience.

Continue reading on our website.