When Rob Heath, now a partner at the African VC firm HAVAÍC, reflects on his childhood in South Africa, he laughs at how far removed his early aspirations were from the world of startups and high-risk investments.

“Venture capital wasn’t just an alien concept — it didn’t even register as a possibility,” Heath says. “I grew up in a household where stability was everything. My parents were teachers, and success meant good grades, a steady job, and a predictable career path.”

Heath’s early career followed the script he was handed: chartered accounting at Deloitte, a stable profession with clear progression. But instead of gravitating toward corporate finance, he chose the entrepreneurial services division — a small, scrappy team that worked directly with business owners.

“I wanted to see how companies were built from the ground up,” he recalls. “Auditing financials was one thing, but understanding why some businesses thrived while others collapsed was far more interesting.”

That curiosity led him to leave the corporate world and co-found an online travel startup in the UK — just months before the 2008 financial crisis decimated the industry. The venture failed, but the experience was transformative.

“We were undercapitalized, caught in legal disputes, and completely unprepared for a global recession,” Heath admits. “But that failure taught me more about resilience than any MBA ever could.”

Years later, a chance WhatsApp message from a stranger would pull him into venture capital. Intrigued by a departing member of a group chat, Heath looked the person up on LinkedIn, struck up a conversation, and within months, joined HAVAÍC as a partner.

“Nearly a decade later, I can say that shift into VC was one of the best decisions of my life,” he says. “All those seemingly random experiences — auditing startups, failing as a founder, even my parents’ emphasis on education — shaped how I evaluate investments today.”

Unlike traditional VCs who prioritize market size and traction, Heath leans heavily on founder resilience and operational grit — traits he learned the hard way.

“I’ve seen brilliant pitch decks from founders who crumble under pressure,” he says. “Now, I look for scars. Have they failed before? Can they adapt when everything goes wrong? That’s what separates good founders from great ones.”

This operator’s mindset is increasingly common among Africa’s top VCs, many of whom have firsthand experience building — or breaking — businesses on the continent.

Like many of Africa’s most influential venture capitalists, Heath’s journey into the high-stakes world of startup investing was anything but conventional. His story — marked by detours, failures, and an unrelenting curiosity — mirrors the continent’s evolving VC landscape, where personal and professional histories profoundly shape investment philosophies today.

The Entrepreneur’s Son

For Ian Lessem, another HAVAÍC partner, the path to VC was more intuitive — but no less unconventional. The son of entrepreneurs, he always knew he’d end up in business, but a pivotal moment came during a law internship when a senior partner pulled him aside after a client meeting.

“She said, ‘You’re sitting on the wrong side of the table,’” Lessem recalls. “That was the moment I realized I didn’t want to advise businesses — I wanted to be in the trenches with them.”

He pivoted to investment banking, joining Standard Bank’s African expansion team at a time when few financiers saw the continent’s potential.

“I knew nothing about banking,” he admits. “But I traveled to Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana — places where the rules were being written in real time. That’s where I learned how capital moves in emerging markets.”

In 2016, Lessem co-founded HAVAÍC, betting on African tech when most institutional investors still viewed the continent as too risky.

“We weren’t following a Silicon Valley model,” he says. “We were building something tailored to Africa’s realities — where infrastructure gaps create opportunities, where founders bootstrap out of necessity, and where exits don’t always look like IPOs.”

Today, HAVAÍC’s portfolio includes some of Africa’s most innovative startups, from fintechs serving the unbanked to logistics platforms optimizing cross-border trade.

“Our edge comes from having lived through Africa’s business cycles,” Lessem says. “We’ve seen booms, busts, currency crashes — you name it. That history informs every investment we make.”

At Nigeria’s Oui Capital, Managing Partner Olu Oyinsan left a prestigious role at Ingressive Capital to launch his own fund — only to see one of his earliest investments, Moniepoint CEO Tosin Eniolorunda, become a limited partner in Oui’s second fund.

“That was my full-circle moment,” Oyinsan says. “It’s why I moved back to Africa — to create these kinds of stories.”

Why Africa’s VCs Are Among the World’s Best

Oyinsan, whose previous VC experiences now inform the 98% rejection rate for every stack of applications his firm receives, argues that Africa’s structural challenges — currency volatility, regulatory ambiguity, and scarce data — force VCs to be sharper than their global peers.

“Early-stage investing here is equal parts science and art,” he says. “You bet on founders, but you also need to read markets, politics, and culture.”

He points to startups like Moniepoint, which succeeded not just because of its product, but because its founders understood Nigeria’s informal economy in ways outsiders never could.

For Hiba MRANI ALAOUI, the leap from corporate finance at Natixis and Southbridge to founding seed-stage VC firm Witamax wasn’t just a career shift — it was a homecoming. After cutting her teeth in New York structuring leveraged buyouts for Natixis’ Coverage and Leverage Finance division, then advising financial institutions at a Parisian consulting firm, she returned to Morocco with a mission: to build the funding infrastructure she wished had existed for earlier generations of Maghreb entrepreneurs. “At Southbridge, where I launched our accelerator program, I saw brilliant founders struggling not for lack of vision, but for lack of access to smart capital,” she recalls. This realization — honed through four years of hands-on ecosystem building — transformed her from dealmaker to architect of Morocco’s startup future.

Now at Witamax, the investment vehicle she established with Southbridge and Axxam Family Office, MRANI ALAOUI applies her cross-border expertise from Natixis, her operational know-how from Southbridge, and her consulting experience to seed-stage investing. “In African VC, we’re not just evaluating startups — we’re helping construct an entire financial infrastructure,” she explains, referencing Witamax’s unique position at the intersection of institutional rigor and entrepreneurial hustle. Having witnessed FrenchTech’s rise at Station F and New York’s financial machinery firsthand, she’s now orchestrating a similar revolution in Casablanca: “When I look at our portfolio, I don’t just see companies — I see the future architects of North Africa’s digital economy being built with global standards and local insight.”

The collective narratives of these African VCs paint a compelling picture. They are not products of a single, established pipeline. Instead, they are individuals whose varied pasts — grappling with financial crises, navigating complex corporate structures, working across diverse industries and cultures, facing personal challenges, and being driven by a deep-seated purpose — have equipped them uniquely for the demands of African venture capital.

Rob Heath sees the impact daily: “I now get the variety of experiences and challenges I sought in the earlier part of my career from the founders I meet and the hurdles we face alongside our portfolio companies.” He believes their active support, stress-testing strategies, and focus on sustainable growth are crucial. “Far from chasing the next unicorn, VC is about being part of the journey as founders build real, sustainable businesses that create lasting value.”