African VC returns are up

Launch Africa Ventures has done the thing the venture industry waits years for and rarely sees on the continent: it has returned real money to its investors.

The firm, co-founded by Zachariah George, has made the first distribution from its 2020-vintage Seed Fund I. About $2.5 million has gone back to investors, roughly 7 percent of the capital committed to the fund, drawn from eleven completed exits: five full acquisitions and six partial sales on the secondary market, the best of them returning around five times the money put in. It is enough to tip the fund into positive DPI, the measure that counts cash actually handed back rather than paper gains.

That distinction is the whole point. Venture portfolios are full of markups that look impressive in a deck and evaporate in a down round. A distribution is different, because it is money an investor can spend. In a market that has spent two years being told African technology was a mirage, a small, early fund quietly returning cash is the more persuasive answer.

It is also not the only one. Oui Capital returned its first capital to investors on the back of a Moniepoint exit in 2025, and Saviu Ventures made distributions twice in the same year. Set against the global picture, the number looks better still: Carta's benchmark of nearly 2,900 American venture funds found that only just over half of the 2020 vintage had returned any capital at all by the end of 2025, and 15 per cent of those made their first distribution only in that year, as Launch Base Africa set out. A small African fund is ahead of half of its own global vintage rather than behind it.

The scarcity is what gives each one its weight. Between 2015 and 2023 there were just 426 venture exits across the entire continent, according to the African Private Equity and Venture Capital Association. Nobody should read a run of distributions as a turned corner. Read it instead as the first evidence that the asset class can do the one thing it had never been asked to prove.

It is a good result for George, and a timely one for a continent’s technology scene that could use the reminder. ■