22 investments in first 7 months of 2021 made by Japanese VC Kepple Africa Ventures

Kepple Africa Ventures, founded in December 2018 by Ryosuke Yamawaki and Takahiro Kanzaki, has offices in Nairobi and Lagos and invests in early-stage software businesses on the continent with seed investments ranging from $50,000 to $150,000, with an average of $100,000.

In December, Disrupt Africa said that it had invested in 36 African digital startups in 2020, making it the continent’s most active business in terms of the number of startups funded and that it had made another 22 investments in the first seven months of 2021.

Kepple now has 92 firms across 11 markets in its portfolio as a result of these investments. It co-invested with other investors in the majority of the projects, with some of them becoming public and others still to be revealed. You’ll be kept up to date by Disrupt Africa!

TeamApt, Buycoins, and Bitnob, as well as e-commerce fulfillment platform Sendbox, mobility platform Moove Africa, sports news and content studio ATHLST, and Sudo, an API platform that allows developers to issue physical and virtual debit and credit cards, are among Kepple’s 2021 investments in Nigeria.

Egypt has another five, with NowPay and MoneyHash being two of the fintech firms. Taggaddod, a garbage collection platform, Wasla Browser, a browser-based shopping service, and Minly, which connects celebrities with their followers, are the other three.

South Africa is represented by Omnisient, a data collaboration business, and FloatPays, a finance platform, while Senegal is represented by Paps, a logistics startup, and CoinAfrique, a fintech startup. Kenyan Wi-Fi service Mawingu Networks, Kenyan finance company WapiPay, Ivory Coast-based e-commerce platform Afrikrea, Chinese content service Transsnet, remote team collaboration tool PingPong, and fintech firm PawaPay have all received funding from Kepple thus far in 2021. (UK).

“Our due diligence is exceptionally quick compared with other VCs. We’ve completed some of our deals within two weeks from end to end,” he said.

Kepple is largely focused on seed-stage prospects and is tech-oriented but industry neutral. It is primarily focused on East and West Africa. It does, however, occasionally participate in larger rounds, as in the case of Kenyan logistics firm Sendy, which it assisted in raising funds from Japanese investors such as Yamaha and thus gained the opportunity to contribute to its recent bumper investment, and the TeamApt round it co-invested in this year.