Launch Africa, the pan-African venture capital firm with more than 180 portfolio startups, has returned $2.5 million to investors in its first fund after completing 11 exits, joining the small group of African investors that have actually returned liquidity to limited partners (LPs).
African venture capital has had a returns problem. Funds were raised aggressively between 2018 and 2022, deployed across hundreds of startups, and then hit the same wall as the rest of the global venture market in 2022, when exits began drying up.
According to Carta, the cap-table software firm, only just over half of 2020-vintage funds had returned any capital to LPs by the end of 2025, and roughly 15% of the nearly 2,900 US venture funds made their first distribution only during 2025. In Africa, the picture has been worse.
Speaking at the Africa Prosperity Summit in November, Ventures Platform’s Kola Aina estimated that around $20 billion has been committed to African VC since 2020, against a benchmark expectation of $40 to $60 billion in returned capital by 2035. The gap is wide, and it is now the central conversation in African private capital.
However, that conversation is slowly starting to shift because a handful of firms have begun returning money. In January 2025, Oui Capital, an early-stage VC firm, told its LPs it had returned its $4 million debut fund in full, after partially exiting its $150,000 stake in Moniepoint for $8 million when the Nigerian fintech became a unicorn.
Launch Africa Ventures has now joined this small group of firms generating realised DPI. The Mauritius-domiciled, pan-African early-stage fund said it has returned roughly 7% of paid-in capital on the $36 million vehicle. Of the 11 exits, five were full, and six were partial.
Eight were secondaries to other VCs and growth-stage investors, and three were trade sales or management buyouts. The largest realised multiple was 5x; no position came in below 1x.
The exits span seven sectors, five in fintech, plus one each in payments infrastructure, agritech, logistics, B2B commerce, HR software, and employee wellness and six countries: South Africa (three), Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Tanzania, and Egypt.
The exits make Launch Africa’s first fund distributed to paid-in capital (DPI)-positive, putting it ahead of more than half its global peers from the same vintage. DPI is a term used to measure the total capital that a private equity fund has returned thus far to its investors.
In our conversation, Launch Africa managing partners Zachariah George and Janade du Plessis explain why they chose to begin returning capital in year five rather than waiting for the fund to end, why their fund one no-follow-on strategy actually made these exits easier, and what they have changed about portfolio construction in fund two.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Of the 11 exits, how many were secondaries, and how many were full exits or partial exits?
Janade du Plessis: From a partial versus full perspective, out of the 11, five were full exits, and six were partial exits. Of those, we can say one was a proper M&A; the exit in Egypt was a majority takeover, where someone bought 50% plus one of the company. Across all 11, the split between secondaries and non-secondaries was about eight secondaries and three trade sales or management buyouts.
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