Nigerian venture capitalists are no longer staying home. Recent funding rounds across the continent shows a quiet but growing wave of cross-border deal-making — driven by a handful of firms with the appetite and the networks to go further.
Last week, Casablanca-based retail-tech startup WAFR announced it had closed an oversubscribed seed round — $4 million. The list of participating investors included Attijariwafa Ventures (the VC arm of Morocco’s largest bank) and Al Mada Ventures (the private equity fund of the Moroccan royal family’s holding company), among others. Tucked into the top echelon of the deal is LoftyInc, a Nigerian VC firm, flying over 3,000 miles across to participate. LoftyInc has been exploring North Africa with some deliberateness recently — Tunisia-based Anava Fund of Funds and Egypt’s MSMEDA are among its limited partners.
Earlier this month, in Cairo, Egypt’s Algebra Ventures and Nigeria’s Ventures Platform continued an increasingly growing rapport with the second leg of Africa Unlocked: The Egypt–Nigeria Startup & Investment Forum — a series of relationship-building events designed to deepen collaboration between two of Africa’s most influential startup ecosystems. The first leg was held in Lagos in April 2025. Two months after that, Cairo-based DisrupTech Ventures announced its first Sub-Saharan African investment in Nigerian agri-tech startup Winich Farms.
These events mark a new chapter for the mainly Nigeria-focused venture capital community, whose players are increasingly looking across oceans and deserts in search of greener pastures — in the face of an unstable economy back home. Recent funding rounds tracked by Launch Base Africa tells the story better in data.
Egypt
Of all the markets drawing Nigerian capital, Egypt has attracted the most activity — and the most variety. Multiple Nigerian VC firms have moved into Cairo-based deals in recent months, across sectors ranging from logistics freight and health insurance technology to Arabic-language AI, making Egypt the most frequented destination for Nigerian capital outside its home market. The country’s growing fintech and logistics infrastructure, combined with a maturing ecosystem anchored by local investors such as Algebra Ventures and Flat6Labs, has created natural entry points for outside investors looking for traction-stage deals.
Ingressive Capital — the Lagos and Delaware-based fund known for its early bets on pan-African tech talent — has been particularly active. The firm backed Nowlun, a logistics freight tech startup that closed a $600,000 seed round, and SehaTech, a health-tech and insurtech startup that raised $1.1 million. LoftyInc, meanwhile, co-invested in Widebot, an Arabic-language AI startup that closed a $3 million pre-Series A round with a syndicate that also included Saudi Arabia’s Keheilan Asset Management.
Egypt has attracted the most activity — and the most variety. Multiple Nigerian VC firms have moved into Cairo-based deals in recent months, across sectors ranging from logistics freight and health insurance technology to Arabic-language AI.
The Egypt pivot is not incidental. Ingressive Capital’s founder has spoken openly about the fund’s continental ambitions, and the firm’s LP base spans the United States and Africa. LoftyInc, for its part, has recently structured its LP relationships to include North African development finance players — a move that provides both capital and local intelligence. Other local investors seem to be following in their wake, too.
South Africa
South Africa comes next. Recently, Nigerian firms — Atlantica Ventures and LoftyInc — co-invested in Salus Cloud, a pan-Africa AI and DevOps startup that closed a $3.7 million seed round. Atlantica Ventures also independently backed NOSIBLE, a South African AI startup that raised $1 million in a pre-seed round.
The South Africa angle is less about the strength of the country’s local startup ecosystem and more about its role as a base for companies with continent-wide ambitions. Salus Cloud, for example, positions itself as an Africa-wide AI company while operating out of Cape Town. Nigerian investor interest, in this case, reflects not a targeted conviction in South Africa as a market, but a preference for AI companies pursuing pan-African scale — even if Johannesburg and Cape Town have offered greater macroeconomic stability in recent years than Lagos.
Still, the co-investment signal matters. When two Nigerian firms show up on the same cap table of a non-Nigerian company, it points to more than overlapping theses — it signals an emerging community of practice among Nigerian GPs, increasingly comfortable exploring foreign markets together.
Ghana
Ghana attracts the broadest spread of Nigerian VC attention in our dataset — defined less by the size of cheques and more by portfolio breadth. Nigerian VC firms have recently been consistently active there, collectively backing companies across trade finance, food technology, agriculture, and consumer platforms.
Future Africa recently backed Liquify, a Ghanaian trade finance startup that closed a $1.5 million seed round from a syndicate that included Launch Africa (Mauritius), 54 Collective (South Africa), and Digital Africa (France). Nubia Capital — one of Nigeria’s more active micro-funds — went broader still, placing bets across several Ghanaian startups: EATO in foodtech and AI, Fertitude in womentech, and Phundit in fintech.
Ghana shares linguistic, cultural, and commercial ties with Nigeria that few other African markets can replicate. Its local currency has also been relatively more stable than Nigeria’s. For some Nigerian funds, these soft-infrastructure advantages are critical in building conviction from a distance.
Kenya, Tunisia, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Cameroon — Clear Signals
Five other markets attracted significant Nigerian VC investment during the review period, each pointing to a distinct strategic logic rather than incidental exposure.
In Kenya, Future Africa participated in the early-stage funding of Lori Systems, a trucking and logistics platform operating across East Africa, in a $2 million round led by Delta40. The investment appears opportunistic. After facing a cash crunch and falling short of earlier high-growth targets — including a 95% valuation collapse — Lori transitioned from an asset-heavy, direct-lender model to a more sustainable approach as a tech-enabled logistics facilitator. Its renewed focus on software licensing, partnerships, and operational efficiency made the company more attractive for a bridge investment.
In Tunisia, LoftyInc co-led the late-seed round for Nucleon Security, a France–Tunisia–based cybersecurity and AI company that raised $3.5 million. The deal is notable both for LoftyInc’s LP ties to North African capital and for marking a Nigerian fund making a substantive bet on deep tech in a market with a relatively small but increasingly capable engineering base serving offshore markets.
In Senegal, Platform Capital — the Lagos-headquartered investment and advisory firm — made a strategic investment in Senmixmaster, a creative-tech and AI audio company. While the deal was modest and its terms undisclosed, it reflects Platform Capital’s broader thesis spanning fintech, and other sectors across both Anglophone and Francophone markets.
Ivory Coast also enters the picture via a recent investment by Oui Capital, the pan-African VC firm with Nigerian roots. Oui Capital led a $3.5 million seed round for Cauridor, an Abidjan-based payments infrastructure startup tackling inefficiencies in cross-border transactions across Francophone Africa.
Ingressive Capital also recently backed Cameroon’s Reasy, a trade finance platform, in a $1.8 million round to improve cross-border payments, logistics, and compliance services for SME importers.
These investments indicate a broader point: Nigerian VCs pursuing foreign investments, particularly in fintech, are not necessarily following geography. They are following the problem. Cross-border payments within the CFA franc zone remain a large, persistent, and under-solved challenge — one that attracts capital regardless of where a startup is formally domiciled.
The Bottom Line
Collectively, the data reveals a venture capital community in transition — albeit a cautious and selective one. Despite the recent activity, cross-border investments are still the exception; the overwhelming majority of Nigerian VC portfolios remain domestic. This outward expansion is also concentrated among a distinct group of firms.
What distinguishes these firms is not just capital, but infrastructure. They have cultivated LP relationships that leverage non-Nigerian capital (frequently development finance) and GP networks that extend far beyond Lagos.
The overwhelming majority of Nigerian VC portfolio companies remain Nigerian. Cross-border activity is still the exception, not the rule — but it is accelerating, and it is deliberate.
The macroeconomic backdrop matters too. Nigeria’s naira has been under sustained pressure since the 2023 float, compressing local fund returns and making dollar-denominated deals in more stable markets relatively more attractive. For fund managers running USD-denominated vehicles, deploying into Egypt, South Africa, or Ghana — where the currency risk profile is different — is not just a diversification play. It is, increasingly, a defensive one.
Whether this constitutes the beginning of a durable trend or a cyclical response to domestic headwinds remains an open question. The deals are real. The relationships being built — through forums, LP structures, and co-investment syndicates — are real. What comes next depends on whether the exits justify the cross-border thesis. That part of the story has not yet been written.
Data sourced from Launch Base Africa’s funding tracker. This analysis covers disclosed funding rounds featuring Nigerian VC firms investing outside Nigeria. For the purpose of this analysis, a Nigerian VC firm is defined as a venture capital fund manager that is either headquartered in Nigeria, led by a predominantly Nigerian founding and investment team, or maintains its primary operational hub within the country, regardless of its legal domicile (e.g., Delaware or Mauritius).