Investments

We manage early stage investing vehicles that invest through a blended finance approach and target early-stage ventures within the education, health, agriculture, manufacturing, creatives and tourism, climate/energy, transport & logistics and fintech sectors with an Africa growth strategy. We support entrepreneurs making an impact by creating jobs for the youth and women (Gender Lens). We use flexible investment instruments better suited to investing in the African market that recognize challenges such as the lack of exits, smaller ticket sizes, the need to break even quickly. We back our investments with technical assistance and mentorship based on a venture building model.

We invest in credit in two ways, firstly, by targeting and providing financing for fintechs, e-commerce and other platform businesses which need liquidity and financing for consumers and merchants on technology platforms. We do this by providing an API to plug into technology platforms and having the associated liquidity and financing. Evaluation of credit opportunities and management is through a technology platform to manage portfolio costs and also enable investment of different sizes, at scale using credit score and evaluation algorithms that rely on and mine data. Secondly, we provide exposure to syndicated credit investment opportunities by targeting distressed debt, private placements and special situations for larger debt tickets.

We invest in infrastructure and real assets by pursuing a long-term investment strategy with a focus on exposure to infrastructure and real assets aligned to key economic growth sectors and exploited in a sustainable manner. We partner with experienced developers, operators and management teams to back the expertise they have with capital and our own experience from developing, financing, operating and managing infrastructure and real assets. We currently have rights and positions in a number of sectors including the energy and mining sectors.

To align risk with our investors, we trade on our own account currencies, commodities and other securities and instruments on global exchanges and markets. We carry out research and analysis, complete due diligence to guide securities and trading decisions, develop structured products to achieve absolute returns against identified benchmarks and also help with managing risk.