Pan-African venture capital firm Enza Capital has completed a first close of $21mn for its third fund, the AI Africa Fund, as it seeks to capitalise on a widening disconnect between the role artificial intelligence is playing in global venture markets and its still-marginal share of African start-up funding.
The Nairobi-, Johannesburg- and Cairo-based firm said on Tuesday that it had raised 35 per cent of its $60mn target for Enza Capital III LP, which carries a hard cap of $80mn. Enza expects to secure further commitments before the end of 2026 and is targeting a final close in 2027, with the first investments scheduled for the same year. The fund will write initial cheques of between $250,000 and $3mn from pre-seed through Series B, reserving capital for follow-on support, and will target financial services, healthcare, enterprise technology, education, agriculture, climate and emerging infrastructure.
The fund’s launch comes against a stark backdrop. AI accounted for roughly 60 per cent of global venture investment in 2025, but African AI start-ups captured only a fraction of that capital. Deal-level data compiled by Launch Base Africa shows that AI remains a minority pursuit for investors on the continent: only about 30 of all transactions tracked so far in 2026 carry an explicit AI label — roughly one in seven deals — totalling around $93mn. The median disclosed AI round is about $1.9mn, with an average of $4.5mn. Concentration is extreme: clinical AI company Healthleap alone accounts for 41 per cent of disclosed AI funding, and the top five deals account for 74 per cent.
The broader picture is one of retrenchment. Launch Base Africa’s analysis shows that disclosed investment into African AI companies fell by more than 90 per cent between 2025 and the first half of 2026. In 2025, at least 28 AI-focused African start-ups raised money, with total disclosed funding of at least $170mn. By the first half of 2026, disclosed AI funding had collapsed to approximately $16mn, and the number of rounds had roughly halved. No large US venture capital firm has led an African AI round so far this year. The investors still writing cheques are, for the most part, smaller and more specialised: local angel networks, impact-focused vehicles and a handful of specialist funds.
Mike Mompi, Enza’s co-founder and managing partner, argues that AI changes the underlying economics of serving African markets. “For decades, businesses have struggled to serve large parts of Africa’s population economically,” he said. “Fragmented markets, limited infrastructure, expensive distribution and shortages of skilled professionals have made many otherwise valuable solutions commercially unviable. AI fundamentally changes that equation. It reduces the cost of building technology, delivering services and reaching customers, opening markets and opportunities that were previously difficult to address.”
Enza’s thesis is not that African founders will compete with OpenAI or Anthropic in building frontier models — the capital required is too large. Instead, the firm is betting on what it calls the “constraint advantage”: AI systems adapted to African conditions, such as voice tools that handle Pidgin and code-switching, smaller models trained on local data, and computing that functions where connectivity is patchy. The firm has already backed 11 AI-native companies, including Aethex AI, which builds local-language models for West Africa; Hakimu AI, a legal-tech venture using previously unpublished Supreme Court filings to train a small language model for East African courts; and Lua AI, the first African AI business to pass through Y Combinator’s Fall 2025 batch. Enza says 11 of its 49 portfolio companies are AI-native, with a further cohort of AI-enabled businesses.
The firm’s track record offers both promise and a cautionary note for the new fund. Founded in 2019 by Mompi alongside Sir John Lazar, the former Metaswitch chief executive, and David Cohen, a former Farallon Capital partner, Enza has deployed $58mn across its first two funds into 49 companies spanning 10 African countries. Its first realised exit came in 2025, when South African hospital group Netcare acquired a controlling stake in Quro Medical, an AI-enabled healthcare company that provides hospital-level care at home through remote monitoring. Enza had led Quro’s $1.1mn seed round in 2021; the company had raised approximately $2.45mn in total before the Netcare transaction, which PitchBook values at $6.77mn. The exit is a modest but tangible data point in a market where exits remain scarce, and it illustrates the kind of AI-enabled, sector-focused business Enza intends to target: not a pure software play, but a company using technology to reshape the economics of an essential service.
Yet the obstacles facing the fund’s prospective portfolio companies are considerable. Launch Base Africa’s data underscores the growth-capital gap that defines the continent’s AI ecosystem. South Africa, Egypt, Kenya and Nigeria together hold about 97 per cent of disclosed AI funding, leaving the rest of the continent with only a sliver of capital. About two-thirds of funded AI companies apply AI within an existing sector — health records, banking, customer service, education, agriculture — rather than building horizontal AI platforms.
Enza is not alone in identifying the gap. The Nairobi International Financial Centre is developing a $250mn technology and AI fund, though it remains at a planning stage. Former Vodacom executive Romeo Kumalo and Gil Oved plan a $200mn pan-African AI fund; Sygnia founder Magda Wierzycka is preparing a fund for South African AI start-ups; and Egypt’s Aria Ventures has launched a $1mn deep-tech fund. A cluster of accelerators and seed-stage vehicles, including Norrsken Africa Seed, Microtraction and Catalyst Fund, provide smaller cheques at the earliest stages. But few dedicated, multi-stage AI funds of Enza’s proposed size exist on the continent, and the firm’s ability to reach a $60mn–$80mn final close will be a test of whether limited partners — many of them development finance institutions and family offices with competing demands — are willing to back a specialist AI strategy in a market where early-stage capital is contracting.
For Mompi, the case rests on a simple proposition: AI lowers the cost of building and distributing solutions in markets where those costs have historically been prohibitive. “We believe this will create a generation of highly valuable companies that transform African economies,” he said. Whether that generation can be financed at scale — and whether Enza’s $21mn first close marks the beginning of a broader wave of African AI fundraising or a lone bright spot in a difficult market — will become clearer as the fund approaches its 2027 final close.