In just three years, the Abidjan-based venture studio has quietly engineered a takeover of the country’s tech scene. According to its latest internal data, Mstudio now accounts for 68% of all disclosed pre-seed and seed rounds in the country since 2023. To put that in perspective: if you are a tech investor entering Côte d’Ivoire today, there is a two-in-three chance you are talking to an Mstudio company.
The figure is striking in any market. In one as young and thinly capitalised as Côte d’Ivoire’s, it is almost without precedent. But buried within Mstudio’s own data is a more revealing pattern: the type of founders it consistently backs — and what that says about how venture creation is being structured in Francophone West Africa.
Mstudio was founded by Cédric Mangaud and Leslie Ossete with a thesis shaped by local constraints. Côte d’Ivoire’s economy remains heavily informal, its senior tech talent pool is shallower than in Lagos or Nairobi, and its domestic investor base is limited.
The response was not to replicate a Silicon Valley accelerator template, but to build a venture studio calibrated to the realities of Francophone West Africa: longer company-building timelines, heavier operational support and early commercial discipline.
Each portfolio company receives an in-kind investment valued at €500,000 — covering engineering, product, finance and operational support from a 14-person multidisciplinary team — in exchange for 25% equity. This is paired with a €250,000 cash investment from a co-investment vehicle managed with European impact investor Ring Capital, for a further 12.5% stake. In total, Mstudio takes 32.5% ownership at pre-seed.
Entry begins with a three-month entrepreneur-in-residence phase, during which founders receive €15,000 to test an idea. Revenue generation by the end of that period is required to unlock the full investment — a mechanism designed to compress pre-seed timelines that have historically stretched beyond a year in the region.
The numbers: steep curves, ambitious projections
Mstudio tracks portfolio performance across five metrics, from 2023 through projected figures for 2026.
Metric2023202420252026 (proj.)Funds raised (cumulative)€0.15m€1.13m€3.30m€11m*Portfolio valuation€6.0m€16.8m€32.1m€49.2m*Revenue (cumulative)€2.25m€5.35m€8.65m€13.3m*Direct jobs created3078104200*Startups financed481012*
Source: Mstudio internal data. 2026 figures are projections.
Cumulative capital raised across the portfolio grew from €150,000 in 2023 to €3.3m in 2025, with the studio projecting a jump to €11m this year— a figure that implies either significant deals already in the pipeline or optimistic modelling.
What stands out is the parallel rise in revenue. Cumulative revenues grew to €8.65m by 2025, suggesting that portfolio companies are generating commercial activity rather than simply absorbing capital. Job creation, meanwhile, has followed a linear rather than exponential curve — a sign of capital discipline, and one that aligns with the expectations of development finance institutions active in the region.
Profitability remains limited. Of the ten active startups, one has reached breakeven, while five are described as “on track” to do so within the year. For pre-seed and seed-stage companies, that ratio is unexceptional — but it places pressure on the studio’s more ambitious forward projections.
Who Mstudio is building — and who it isn’t
The studio’s portfolio spans fintech, agri-tech, identity infrastructure, digital commerce and mobility — sectors aligned with Côte d’Ivoire’s economic structure and regional opportunities.
But a closer look at founder profiles reveals a consistent pattern. The majority of founders in Mstudio’s portfolio are either foreign nationals or diaspora Ivorians — individuals educated abroad and professionally shaped in European markets.
This is not incidental. Mstudio’s sourcing strategy explicitly pairs international fundraising and operational experience with local market knowledge. Founders with European networks and institutional fluency are matched with local co-founders who bring regulatory understanding and on-the-ground execution. Its Diaspora Connect programme, a talent-scouting initiative, reinforces this. To date, the programme has attracted 200 candidates from 25 foreign universities and 20 businesses, with 35 successfully retained.
The logic is pragmatic, at least on paper. At seed stage, investors back people as much as ideas. A founder able to navigate Paris or Brussels capital markets and present credibly to the region’s scarce venture investors is a different fundraising proposition than one without that exposure.
The trade-off is structural. Rather than surfacing large numbers of locally trained founders, the model imports profiles deemed fundable and embeds them in the Ivorian market. Whether this builds durable local entrepreneurial capacity or primarily channels international talent through local opportunities remains an open question.
Co-founder Ossete recently explained the logic better: “Abidjan is not Nairobi or Lagos. The tech talent isn’t as developed… Together, it’s the best of both worlds.” The studio is not waiting for a deep local tech talent base to emerge — it is recruiting the profiles it needs from elsewhere and pairing them with local co-founders who provide what no diaspora or foreign founder can acquire quickly.
Mstudio’s dominance is its greatest asset and its most significant risk. For international investors, the studio is a trusted gateway into a market that would otherwise be difficult to access. For the Ivorian ecosystem, it is a structural vulnerability.
If two-thirds of formal early-stage investment flows through one platform, the health of the entire market is disproportionately dependent on that platform’s continued viability.
The Bottom Line
Ossete and Mangaud have built something significant in a market that offered few natural advantages. The diaspora formula they have applied is effective at attracting international capital, but whether it is sufficient to build an enduring local startup economy — rather than a well-structured conduit for international profiles — remains to be seen.
The ultimate test will be whether these companies can survive once the studio’s support structures are withdrawn, and whether the institutional infrastructure Mstudio has assembled can eventually be replicated by those without a foreign degree. For now, Côte d’Ivoire’s most consequential early-stage bet is the studio itself.