A new venture capital fund set up to back early-stage technology companies in Southern Africa has reached a first close, securing £5m ($6.7m) in commitments anchored by the family office of British billionaire Stephen Lansdown.
The Botswana Tech Fund (BTF), domiciled in Guernsey and targeting a total size of £50m, said the initial capital will be deployed across a pre-seed accelerator programme and a handful of growth-stage investments in Botswana and neighbouring markets.
The anchor commitment comes from Pula Investments, the family office of the Hargreaves Lansdown co-founder, whose UK wealth management platform now oversees more than £150bn in client assets. Launch Africa Ventures, a Cape Town-based fund manager that has backed more than 170 startups since 2020, has been appointed investment adviser to the vehicle.
The fund is led by two general partners: Martin Davis, the former chief executive of FTSE 250-listed Molten Ventures, and Florence Bavanandan, head of platform and operations at Launch Africa. Davis oversaw the growth of Molten’s net asset value to roughly £2bn before stepping down in 2023, giving the new fund a rare institutional sheen for a first-time vehicle in frontier markets.
“There is a significant opportunity to help close the digital gap between our target markets and more established technology ecosystems such as South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya,” the fund said in a statement announcing the first close. “We look forward to backing ambitious founders who are building solutions capable of driving that change.”
The BTF will pursue a dual-track strategy. An accelerator programme will write cheques of £25,000 to £100,000 for pre-seed companies based in Southern Africa, while a growth tranche will invest between £500,000 and £2m in revenue-generating businesses from seed to Series C stage, including secondary purchases of existing shares. Phase one of the fund will deploy the initial £5m: £1m across the accelerator cohort and the balance into two to four growth deals.
Launch Africa co-founder Zachariah George argued that the region remains one of the continent’s most overlooked venture markets. “The founders building in Southern Africa’s frontier markets are operating in one of the most underleveraged digitisation opportunities on the continent,” he said. “They have been doing it largely without institutional backing.”
Botswana’s internet penetration is estimated at around 80 per cent, among the highest in sub-Saharan Africa. The country ranks near the top of the Ibrahim Index of African Governance and carries an investment-grade sovereign credit profile. The fund has also secured a partnership with the state-backed Botswana Innovation Hub in Gaborone, giving portfolio companies access to office space, deal-flow networks and government innovation programmes.
Yet the region remains a minnow in African venture capital. South Africa attracted the bulk of Southern African funding rounds last year, according to Launch Base Africa’s 2025 report, while Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique together accounted for a negligible share of disclosed deals. BTF is explicitly designed to target that gap.
The fund’s structure is unusual. Launch Africa will run BTF as a “managed account”, extending its own operational infrastructure to third-party capital rather than pooling it into its own balance-sheet funds. The firm says it has deployed $65m across two funds since 2020 and pegs the aggregate market capitalisation of its portfolio at $3bn, though that figure is based on the last round valuations of private companies and is not independently audited.
A first close of £5m is modest against the £50m target, and the fund’s own documents describe phase one as a proof-of-concept deployment. Turning Lansdown’s anchor commitment into a broader institutional book — from development finance institutions, pension funds or funds-of-funds — will be critical if BTF is to scale into later phases and write larger cheques for Series B and C rounds.
The Guernsey domicile offers English-law protections and a tax-efficient gateway for UK and European investors, but also reflects a perennial challenge for Africa-focused fund managers: a dearth of domestic institutional capital, which forces them to seek the bulk of their firepower overseas.
Whether the Botswana Tech Fund can close that loop — raising hard-to-come-by capital to back African founders in markets that remain opaque to most foreign investors — is the test that will ultimately define its success. For now, phase one buys time to build a track record.