Pan-African investment firm Renew Capital has launched a new venture program aimed at startups building embedded finance solutions across the continent.
Announced today at the GITEX Africa 2026 summit in Marrakech during a joint investor event with AfricaNext BPI, the “Renew Venture Lab: The EmFi Series” is targeting founders who are leveraging alternative data to build credit products for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
The launch comes as the continent grapples with a persistent structural challenge: while SMEs account for roughly 90% of all private sector businesses in Africa, the vast majority operate completely outside the formal banking system. In sub-Saharan Africa, fewer than 20% of these businesses can secure a loan from a traditional financial institution.
Renew Capital is anchoring its new program on the premise that this exclusion is driven by underutilized data rather than inherent borrower risk. The resulting gap has created a $330bn untapped credit market.
The pivot from traditional banks to tech platforms
Rather than relying on legacy banks to close this funding gap, the EmFi Series is heavily focused on non-financial tech platforms — such as B2B e-commerce, logistics, and SaaS companies — that already process daily transactions for SMEs.
By tracking inventory, sales, and cash flow, these tech companies sit on a growing data footprint that can be leveraged to assess creditworthiness. The integration of AI and machine learning into these datasets is increasingly allowing startups to build proprietary underwriting models and offer embedded loans directly to their merchants.
“Africa’s most important financial story is not being written by banks,” said Matthew Davis, co-CEO of Renew Capital. “It’s being written by tech founders who know their small business customers better than traditional lenders. The EmFi Series exists to help those founders build new financial products for their customers, and to back the best of them with real capital.”
Program structure and institutional backing
The EmFi Series operates as a virtual, competitive program. It is designed to move beyond general startup advice, offering specialized modules on building embedded finance infrastructure, developing functional credit models, and managing lending books at scale. The curriculum will be delivered through a mix of self-paced learning and live sessions with global embedded finance practitioners.
Renew Capital, which has been investing in African startups for over a decade, noted that its investment team will actively monitor the cohort. Founders and executives from the firm will use the program as a pipeline to select top-performing companies for potential equity investment.
The initiative also highlights a continued reliance on development finance and state-backed entities to underwrite ecosystem support in the region. At a time when global private venture capital deployment has faced headwinds, the EmFi Series is being backed by Tamwilcom (Morocco’s state-backed guarantee institution), Global Affairs Canada, and NORAD (the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation).
Applications for the program opened on April 9 via the firm’s Venture Lab portal, with an early consideration deadline set for April 30.