Enza Capital, a venture capital business that invests in firms that are “organising the offline online” and “digitising key African industries,” has successfully raised a total of $58 million across its two funds.
The company established an early-stage fund in 2019 with the mission to “find, back, and help build category-defining startups” in the pre-seed and seed stages of development. The fund is still functioning and has made investments in firms in the areas of finance technology, logistics technology, health technology, human capital technology, and climate technology. Enza Capital, which now refers to itself as a multi-stage investor as a result of its greater follow-on investments to Series B, will continue to concentrate on the aforementioned sectors in its second fund that was established in this year.
In an interview, Mike Mompi, co-founder and managing partner of Enza Capital, revealed that the firm has made a total of 48 investments across 31 different firms using money from both funds. These investments cover a total of eight different countries and marketplaces across the continent of Africa: Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Senegal, and South Africa.
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The venture capital firm located in Nairobi made an investment from its pilot fund in Guidewheel, a climate technology startup established in Kenya that has now expanded to the United States and Mexico following a Greycroft-led Series A round of funding. One more is Shara, a Kenyan financial technology company. A pre-seed check was issued to the company by Enza Capital prior to the company raising an unannounced Series A round of funding, which was led by Index Ventures. Additionally, the company, which has been in operation for four years, co-led a Series A investment in the Ivorian financial technology company Djamo and the Kenyan insurance technology company Turaco using its second fund.
According to what Mompi indicated during the call, the typical cheque size that Enza Capital writes to its portfolio firms, which include Autochek, Jumba, Craydel, Cloudline, and SeamlessHR, ranges from $250,000 to $5 million. According to the information that can be found on its website, they also have the option to have access to additional follow-on investments from Enza Growth Capital. This is an evergreen, later-stage investment vehicle that the company formed last year with the intention of investing up to $20 million in a single company.
“We have enough money in the bank to be able to write checks of significant value. There are instances when we make early investments as well as follow-on investments in our companies. The managing partner of Enza Capital elaborated on the operation of the various investment vehicles by stating, “Then we have the growth fund, which is mostly a later-stage vehicle, where we can invest at any stage and co-invest with the core funds in existing portfolio companies, thus staying with our companies for a long time.”
About Enza Capital
John Lazar, Mike Mompi, and David Cohen, along with a select group of investors who share their morals and ethics, founded the patient investment vehicle Enza Capital.
When it comes to driving growth and building value for our portfolio companies, Enza is an active and engaged investor with extensive private investment and company operating experience, as well as extensive networks of specialists and talent. Our methods are based on open communication and trust, and our investments reflect our core beliefs.