P1 Ventures, an early-stage, Pan-African venture capital firm, has completed the final close of its first $50m institutional fund and welcomed African conglomerates, family offices, and partners at global VCs, alongside the World Bank’s IFC. 

Senior advisors include Index Ventures’ founding team member, Bernard Dalle and Emil Michael, former Uber CBO who scaled it globally. 

Bernard Dalle (pictured), Senior Advisor at P1 Ventures, said: “A new generation of visionary African founders is emerging, creating opportunities across the continent and beyond. Africa VC is fast becoming an asset class that globally minded investors cannot afford to ignore.” 

P1 Ventures is a high-conviction investor on a contrarian mission to ensure capital across Africa is as widely distributed as its entrepreneurial talent. With African venture capital dropping for the second consecutive year, and global funding in decline, foreign investors are either retreating from the region or focusing on “safe bets” – tried-and-tested business models in established hubs like Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt, and South Africa. 

With over $60m now in AUM, P1 Ventures builds on a year of strong momentum in which it completed its largest-ever deal; co-investing as the only African VC alongside Accel into Morocco-based Nuitee’s $48m Series A round.

Africa’s potential comes from the unique advantages it has over developed markets. In developed markets, job protectionism, legacy regulations, and infrastructure can all hinder adoption. By contrast, adoption is supercharged in Africa, and other emerging markets, by necessity. 

In fintech, Africa’s mobile-first population has made it a world leader in digital banking, with mobile money leapfrogging traditional card infrastructure. 

Regulatory advances are also fueling the rise of stablecoins. In AI, automation is addressing Africa’s continent-wide productivity and skills gaps, while offering vast opportunities to make sectors such as hospitality, future of work, and healthcare, more efficient and affordable. Africa’s low-income nations are rapidly replacing subscriptions with pay-per-use models to make tech more accessible, and its mobile-first population is primed to adopt scalable solutions. 

This demand for disruption creates tremendous scope for African founders to import global “Uber-for-X” style business models to local markets. 

This was a key focus of P1 Ventures’ first proof-of-concept fund, which backed Algerian super app Yassir (now serving 8 million customers across six markets and raising a $150m Series B), and fintech Chari (the first Moroccan company to achieve a $100m valuation, secure a PSP license, and acquire a bank). 

Yet as these innovations take hold and, as the ecosystem matures, so too does the opportunity. And while importing global models, in fintech especially, remains a focus for P1 Ventures, the fund is setting its sights on something even bigger: the global mega-trend of AI. 

P1 Ventures is expanding its vision to back companies that are boldly “Built in Africa for the World”. 

Founded by an increasingly strong entrepreneurial talent pool from all corners of the continent, these companies are moving beyond importing models. They’re leveraging the continent’s innovation, with AI’s ability to transcend borders and sectors, to export their solutions on a global scale.

Examples include: Morocco’s Nuitee, an AI-powered hotel booking platform; Egypt’s Gameball, a gamified loyalty and customer engagement platform; South Africa’s Salus, a one-click software deployment solution for enterprise and SMBs; and Egypt’s StakPak is an AI copilot for non-DevOps engineers.

Hisham Halbouny (pictured), Managing Partner at P1 Ventures, said: “From game-changing fintech to pioneering AI applications, we’re uniquely positioned to identify opportunities and support their growth. Great companies are often built in tough times and today’s founders are more frugal, focused, and realistic about valuations. We believe this may be the greatest vintage ever.”

P1 Ventures currently boasts a proprietary deal flow database of c. 10,000 Pan-African companies. 

Its use of AI allows its team to match local expertise to deep market data and spot winners early-on, track trends, and identify talent. 

This not only supercharges deal flow, but brings huge value-add to portfolio companies as they scale. 

Its portfolio has, to date, created 6,000+ jobs across 20 countries, and impacted the lives of more than 10 million people. 

For every dollar invested, the P1 portfolio raises 35x follow-on capital. This tech-powered approach has also allowed P1 Ventures to identify and expand into key markets like Francophone Africa – a hub that is home to Tunisia’s InstaDeep (one of Africa’s largest exits), Senegal’s Wave (the region’s first unicorn), and P1 Ventures’ own Nuitee. 

Mika Hajjar, Managing Partner at P1 Ventures said: “We have strong conviction there will be billions of USD of value created by global companies that have been ‘made in Africa’. From Dakar to Nairobi, Cairo to Cape Town, we’re seeing founders combining local insights with global ambition. These entrepreneurs are not just solving Africa’s problems – they’re creating models that the rest of the world can learn from.”