OneBio Venture Studio, a Cape Town-based investment firm focused on commercialising life sciences, has reached a R100m ($6m) first close of its second fund. The firm is targeting a final close of R300m ($18m) by mid-2027 as it seeks to scale the continent’s nascent biotechnology sector.
The fundraising effort marks a notable development in an African venture ecosystem that has historically directed the vast majority of its capital toward financial technology, e-commerce, and logistics. Backing “deep tech” and biological sciences remains a formidable challenge on the continent, primarily due to the heavy capital requirements and prolonged research and development cycles involved.
Led by partners Michael Fichardt, Nick Walker, and Gian-Marco Melfi, OneBio operates at the intersection of biology and technology.
The capital injection provides OneBio with a critical runway to expand its operational footprint beyond South Africa into markets such as Nigeria, Kenya, and Egypt, while continuing its mission to translate laboratory research into viable commercial enterprises.
The hybrid machine
Unlike traditional venture capital firms that primarily allocate capital to external startups for portfolio diversification, OneBio operates a hybrid model. It functions as both a venture fund and a venture studio, actively assembling and manufacturing biotech companies from scratch.
The strategy is conceptually similar to that of US-based Flagship Pioneering — the venture firm behind Moderna — but executing such a model in Africa requires navigating severe infrastructural constraints. Biotechnology startups on the continent face a dearth of wet-lab infrastructure, fragmented regulatory environments, weak clinical trial ecosystems, and a highly illiquid exit market with few regional acquirers.
Furthermore, the venture studio model inherently demands higher operational control and capital concentration per company. In biotechnology, where product validation cycles can span up to a decade and early-stage cash burn is notoriously high, this structural concentration amplifies financial risk.
An analysis of OneBio’s portfolio to date highlights both the ambition of its model and the frictional realities of the African deep science landscape.
The firm has made 16 investments and recorded eight portfolio exits. However, a closer look at the data reveals the attrition rate typical of early-stage science: six of those 16 investments resulted in shutdowns, including WNNR Biotech, Tryad, Gourmet Grubb, MyBiome, and PharmaHealth Technologies.
Despite the high early attrition rate, OneBio has demonstrated technical competence in manufacturing scientifically viable companies. Several active portfolio assets provide clear signals that sector-wide commercialisation, while difficult, is possible.
A notable outlier is LifeQ, a health and biometrics wearable technology company that generates consistent revenue and has established global relevance. LifeQ has raised more than $47m across two funding rounds. Another bright spot is CapeBio, a revenue-generating biotech firm that successfully leveraged the tailwinds of pandemic-era diagnostic testing to establish market footing.
The firm is also continuing to build its early-stage pipeline. In July 2025, OneBio co-led a R29m ($1.6m) pre-seed round for Altera Biosciences, a pre-clinical startup developing a universal donor cell platform aimed at improving transplant medicine. Other active ventures currently scaling under the OneBio umbrella include microbiome startup Biomine, precision fermentation company Immobazyme, and genomics database builder Bixbio.
OneBio’s fundraising push coincides with a broader structural shift in African venture capital. As investors increasingly confront the continent’s market inefficiencies — such as a lack of seasoned founders and fragmented talent pools — the venture studio model is gaining unprecedented traction as a tool to bypass early-stage volatility.
Across the continent, builders are attempting to engineer startups internally. In Côte d’Ivoire, Mstudio, backed by Ring Capital’s recent $50m fund, accounted for 68 per cent of all disclosed pre-seed and seed rounds in the country from 2023 through 2024. By taking a 32.5 per cent ownership stake at the pre-seed stage, Mstudio engineered five of the country’s top ten funded startups in 2024, including B2B financial technology firms doo! and Danaya.
Similar models are proliferating regionally. Delta40, which launched in 2023 and is expanding aggressively into Nigeria, pairs venture building with a newly closed $20m multi-asset fund targeting energy, agri-tech, and fintech. Adanian Labs is operating hubs across five African nations with an ambitious mandate to build 300 startups by 2029.
In niche sectors, Kenya’s Purple Elephant Ventures recently secured a $5m seed round to scale tourism-technology startups, while Nigeria’s Resilience17 (formerly Berrywood) and Fast Forward are taking highly operational approaches to scaling AI and enterprise software, respectively. In South Africa, Aions provides a compelling survival study: nearly shuttered in its first year, it secured enterprise development backing from Telkom and has since built 11 startups, proving the model’s resilience in volatile environments.
For OneBio, securing the first $6m of its target fund provides validation from limited partners who subscribe to the long-term thesis of African life sciences. The firm has established that it can bridge the gap between academic research and corporate formation.
However, the definitive test for OneBio — and the broader African venture studio ecosystem — will be the next phase of the investment lifecycle. Investors will be watching closely to see whether these heavily engineered, science-led companies can scale revenues globally and, ultimately, deliver the elusive liquidity events required to sustain the asset class.