How to Invest Where the Market Doesn’t Exist Yet

Kola Aina, founder of Ventures Platform · Venture Valley

Kola Aina is the founder of Ventures Platform, a Nigeria-based venture capital firm investing in early-stage African startups, with offices in Lagos, Abuja, Cairo and Abidjan. He returned to Nigeria from the US in 2009, bootstrapped an edtech company called Emerging Platforms and used its profits to start angel investing. Ventures Platform launched in 2016 and has raised a $46 million first institutional fund and closed $64 million of a second fund targeting $75 million. Its portfolio includes Paystack, acquired by Stripe, and Moniepoint, a Nigerian unicorn.

Summary

Aina built Ventures Platform step by step from his own angel checks, self-funded accelerator cohorts and syndicates before raising institutional money once the Paystack exit proved African startups could return capital. The firm backs "market-creating innovations" that make goods and services affordable to people who can't consume them today, a thesis drawn from Efosa Ojomo's The Prosperity Paradox. He says it runs as a commercial fund, having returned four vintages at 1.5 to 4 times their money. He values domain expertise, character and focus in founders, and warns against copycat startups and stretching across countries too early. These signals are from a Venture Valley interview with Kola Aina.

1. A Definite Optimist. An accident at about 13 affected Aina's memory, and he says it left him with low regret: he moves on quickly from losses and focuses on what's next. He compensates by writing and documenting obsessively. He cites Peter Thiel's four quadrants and says Nigeria has too few definite optimists. Living there, he says, you either stay optimistic or want to leave, and he started investing to help make things better. ▶ 4:13
   
   Quote: “We have way too many definite pessimists and indefinite pessimists ... for a country those people are like a weight pulling sort of the country down.” (Kola Aina, ▶ 6:01)