For nearly two decades, Africa Finance Corporation (AFC) wrote cheques for bridges, ports, mines, and subsea cables. Now, the $19 billion Africa-focused development finance institution is doing something its own board initially resisted: betting $100 million on African venture capital.
Future Africa, the early-stage venture capital firm, and LightRock Africa, an impact investment firm, have received a combined $40 million anchor commitment from AFC, making them the first firms to raise capital from an unlikely backer of African venture capital.
Begna Gebreyes, the head of AFC’s technology division, is leading this pivot into tech investing for one of the largest Africa-focused development financial institutions.
Future Africa, the fund led by renowned tech founder and investor Iyin Aboyeji, is getting $15 million, and LightRock Africa will get $25 million as the first deployments from a $100 million fund the AFC has earmarked for African venture capital.
While the AFC has previously backed African startups, it is the first time that the AFC is investing directly into an African tech venture capital firm, a pivot from writing cheques for bridges, ports, mines, and subsea cables.
The investment comes as funding from development finance institutions (DFIs), historically the largest source of funding for African venture capital, fell to new lows in 2025, with only 27% of total commitments coming from DFIs.
Africa-focused fund managers raised just $107 million across six final closes in 2025, an 87% year-on-year drop by value, according to the African Private Capital Association.
Established in 2007 and headquartered in Lagos, AFC has total assets of $19 billion. The DFI’s board, as Gebreyes recalls, initially pushed back on the idea of investing in African venture capital firms, telling him they sat on the board of an infrastructure developer, not a VC business.
But Gebreyes, an Ethiopian banker who joined AFC 12 years ago as a sector-agnostic private equity product specialist, helped convince them to reconsider their decision.
Investing in tech stemmed from an observation Gebreyes and colleagues made around 2021: that what would actually make the continent competitive was digital services such as fintech, e-commerce, e-logistics, e-government, and e-health.
Supporting those services would drive traffic onto the subsea cables AFC had financed and content into the data centres it was building. It would prime the pump for the infrastructure that the corporation’s traditional projects were designed to close, while bridging the same infrastructure gaps.
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