A venture capital firm backed by Egyptian billionaire Mohamed Mansour and the World Bank\u2019s private investment arm will seek out tech opportunities in emerging African hubs after closing its first $50 million institutional fund.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
P1 Ventures LLC plans to deploy roughly 50% of its funds in French-speaking countries in North, West and Central Africa and other emerging hubs, according to Hisham Halbouny and Mikael Hajjar, its co-founders and managing partners. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The remaining capital will be deployed in South Africa\u2014as well as Nigeria, Egypt, and Kenya.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Venture capital activity in Africa is concentrated in those so-called big four markets, which collectively accounted for 67% of the continent\u2019s $2.2 billion in equity funding deals in 2024, according to a Partech Partners report.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe believe that talent is distributed, but capital is not,\u201d Halbouny said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The company has built an in-house data science tool to source investment opportunities and its database includes more than 10,000 companies across the continent, Hajjar said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It has more than $60 million in assets under management and will focus on investing in artificial intelligence, enterprise software and fintech startups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Last year, P1 Ventures invested in an Accel-led $48 million series A round for Nuit\u00e9e, an infrastructure provider for the hotel and travel industry that originated in Morocco. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It also backs the super app Yassir, which started in Algeria and offers on-demand services for ride-hailing, banking, food, and grocery delivery, as well as the Ivorian fintech startup Djamo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mansour first invested in P1 Ventures during its institutional fundraising round, Halbouny, who was previously a partner at the magnate\u2019s family office, said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Egyptian billionaire is the chairman of his family\u2019s diversified conglomerate, which has businesses including McDonald\u2019s Corp. restaurants and General Motors Co. dealerships. <\/p>\n\n\n\n His family office has invested in tech juggernauts like Airbnb Inc and Spotify Technology SA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In addition to Mansour and the International Finance Corp., P1 Ventures\u2019 investors include pan-African telecommunications, financial services and energy company Axian Group Ltd., Anish Acharya, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and Bernard Dalle, a former partner at Index Ventures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A venture capital firm backed by an Egyptian billionaire plans to invest millions in four African countries, which includes South Africa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":810896,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9872],"tags":[1850,21668,853],"class_list":["post-810895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-bloomberg","tag-p1-ventures","tag-south-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=810895"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810895\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":810897,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810895\/revisions\/810897"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/810896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=810895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=810895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=810895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}