Partnering with founders building Africa's intelligent infrastructure. Research-led, early-stage, long-term.
Lagos | Nairobi | SF | Paris
Joined August 2016
- Tweets2.1K
- Following328
- Followers5.5K
- Likes2.1K
DFS retweeted
Congrats to @shogz_snr, Dami, and the @ShigaDigital team!
We @dfsventures were the first institutional backers of Shiga and it's been great to have @tether lean in.
Since, we've seen one leg of our thesis start to emerge: that crypto in Africa must (and will) evolve beyond wrappers and move into true financial infrastructure.
Tether WDK Brings Self-Custodial Finance to Africa and the GCC with Shiga
Learn more: tether.io/news/tether-wdk-br…
DFS retweeted
Congrats to Samuel, Ben, Alex and the @pipeopshq team!
It took us @dfsventures some time to find a cybersecurity team we felt had truly grasped the fundamental shift that has occurred in the last 18 months.
Even during our discussions with the team, we saw the OAI-HuggingFace incident rattle the industry alongside the proliferation of 0day attacks. Cyber vulnerability is at an all-time high and clients require proactive, AI-native solutions.
Like much in the Global South, this shift puts pressure on critical infra buildout. There will be no renewed industrialization without digital safety. And that digital safety simply cannot be imported.
We believe @pipeopshq is a team that's evolved into one who's commitment to protecting Africa's digital domain had pushed them to the frontier of what's needed on the continent and beyond.
We are thrilled to see our portfolio company @terraindustries leaning into the same mission alongside longtime co-investors.
We back founders chasing previously unimaginable ambition who are willing to face the hard questions head-on. Excited for this team.
techcabal.com/2026/09/18/ter…
DFS retweeted
@terraindustries is excited to lead a $1M strategic investment in Aeon, with participation from @TechProd_Arch (Flutterwave CEO)
Aeon is a Nigerian startup building sovereign cyber defense for Africa
Cyber is a critical frontier of defense, with growing cyber attacks from..(1/2
RT @mrstephendeng: Congrats to the @ChipMangoHQ team!
@dfsventures has been working with this team for some time. Ola and Jovan understand…
DFS retweeted
Congrats to @_KingNath and @Max_Sengu!
An absolute generational company for the continent and beyond. More importantly, a much needed one for this wave of industrialization.
Throwback to an article I wrote about Terra after our initial investment: longtail.substack.com/p/terr…
@terraindustries raises additional $18M bringing our total seed to $52M. This round was done by existing investors @8vc, @SilentVentures, @svangel, Nova Global, Belief Capital, and Grant Gordon
We're also opening our first global office in London for our Ops and AI teams (1/2)
DFS retweeted
When we started investing in African stablecoin startups in 2023, one of our core theses was that we don't know what would happen re: regulations, but that the technology was so effusive that it would force a K-shaped result.
At that time, it was taboo to even say the word "stablecoin" in a central bank meeting. But amidst the ridicule, the crackdowns, the refusals, the userbase just kept growing.
Today, we have portfolio companies who are moving billions a year, crossing 8-figure revenues, and getting licensed. More importantly, they've unlocked productivity for an untold amount of African businesses.
Our thesis is now at a milestone. African governments have been forced to the table and are now testing how to regulate, tax, and monitor these flows. Development finance is starting to come onboard (which is the signal for consensus).
This shifts our ecosystem into a new phase of compliant institutionalization (a global trend), but also into dangerous territory where heavy-handed regulation/greed will drive volumes back into the shadows.
Crypto is allergic to control and over-aggression does not shut off the flow. It simply drives the other side of the K-shaped result.
DFS retweeted
We @dfsventures wrote the first institutional check backing Alon and James.
Early on, the team faced questions around the size of their entry market. Since, they've been disproving all doubters with every monthly update.
Incredibly excited for what's next.
Every year, international travellers spend billions of dollars on African safaris, luxury lodges and holiday experiences. Yet before much of that money reaches the businesses providing those experiences, a portion is lost to payment processing fees, foreign exchange charges and the cost of moving money across borders.
For African tourism operators, getting paid can be surprisingly expensive.
TurnStay, a South African fintech that helps travel businesses accept payments from international guests, believes that problem has been overlooked for too long.
Alon Stern, TurnStay’s chief executive officer (CEO) and co-founder, said the three-year-old startup processed over R1 billion ($60.6 million) in travel payments during the first six months of 2026.
techcabal.com/2026/08/03/tur…
RT @mrstephendeng: Here's some quick thoughts on K3 as it relates to AI builders in frontier markets like Africa.
1. First, K3 weakens the…
This quoted post is unavailable.
DFS retweeted
We design for the worst possible conditions because that is where our systems will be tasked to operate.
Yesterday, we put that principle to the test. Our team ran an all-weather trial on two of our aerial systems, the Archer VTOL fixed-wing and the Kama FPV. Through steady rain and winds reaching 40 km/h, both aircraft held the sky.
The Sahel is unforgiving; so is our testing.
DFS retweeted
"African startups can't build infrastructure."
Terra: We're standing up the largest dedicated drone production facility in Africa. We're doing it now.
This is a seed stage startup. The edge of what's possible is changing.
[@dfsventures is an investor in Terra]
DFS retweeted
Spiro raised another $215m in equity. They've now raised over $500m in disclosed capital across equity & debt; $350m of that since my last post.
Compared to other 2-wheeler EV competitors, they have raised from 10x to 90x more.
They have raised a multiple of their peer group combined and now represent ~80% of the core disclosed capital.
When I say we believe African venture is trending towards neo-infrastructure, this is what that might look like. Fundamental solutions, concentrated & blended capital, underwriting enormous platforms.
Forget unicorn valuations, we're talking billion+ in funding.
Spiro is not an example of a traditional VC play in Africa. It is closer to the OPay 'brute force' playbook.
They might say their competition is gas bikes, but it's been known for a while that they're crushing the competition. How? They were literally built differently:
Spiro was previously M Auto in India, founded in 2019 then bought by parent company Equitane in 2022. Numbers vary, but Equitane had put in ~$65m in equity to unlock another ~$100m+ in debt.
There is no world where a company that (at the time) had less than 6k bikes on the road and 130 swap stations would raise 9 figures in debt if not for a parent company with $4 billion in AUM and the resulting deep personal network into infrastructure funds.
To put this into perspective, they raised $165m+ in debt/equity to put 6k bikes out there or ~$25k per bike. But this allowed them to eat enough of the market to now target 100k bikes for $250m capital, a 10x reduction to $2.5k per bike.
Meanwhile, their competitors were trying to do this on $5m seed raises and have 10x less the number of bikes on the road; a gap that keeps increasing as verticalization and economies of scale start to crush the hard asset cost floor even further in favor of Spiro.
Now, what will be built on top of this new infra is a different matter entirely.
DFS retweeted
It seems to me that we're seeing a new generation of African startup that can only be described as 'neo-infrastructure."
They aren't laying roads or powerlines, but alongside a renewed shift towards sovereignty by governments and industrialization-as-impact by the global development regime, there's a set of AI-native teams out there building the intelligence on top of this next gen of infra.
We've seen several real signals towards this trend. Neo-remittance startups like @NALAmoney growing into full-stack payments with an intelligent treasury layer.
Neo-prime startups like @terraindustries hardening critical infra security across the continent with AI-first hardware during a time of unstable geopolitics.
Neo-procurement startups like @matta_trade stabilizing critical material supply chains with systems-level coordination driven by data discipline.
Like we saw with real-world stablecoin usage, it's very likely that African markets offer some of the most significant wedge opportunities for these kinds of solutions given how existential and unsolved the problems are.
In a world where global trade is increasingly fragile, I am increasingly bullish on teams that bring stability to Africa's industrialization efforts; those who buffer productivity against volatility.
More on this soon.
DFS retweeted
We welcomed H.E. José Bamóquina Zau, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Angola to the Federal Republic of Nigeria, alongside Defence Attaché Colonel Venutura Miguel and senior Embassy officials, to Terra Industries' Pax-1 facility in Abuja to examine how indigenous defense technology can anchor Angola's long-term security sovereignty.
DFS retweeted
.@terraindustries's seed marks the beginning of a new narrative for African tech.
We're exiting an ecosystem driven solely by the promise of population growth and externally-defined social impact into one where the continent must justify its competitiveness in the AI era.
We believe that @_KingNath @Max_Sengu and team have operationalized a compelling vision to harden Africa's most important infrastructure around energy, critical minerals, and food production.
Excited to have supported this team as one of its earliest investors and to have doubled down this round.
Welcome @8vc @Lux_Capital @novaholdings Valor Equity Partners and others plus a special shoutout to @ulonnaya who's joining the team.
Announcing @terraindustries $11.7M round led by 8VC, the VC by Palantir founder @JTLonsdale
Alex Moore, Board Director at Palantir, also joins Terra’s board
@Max_Sengu & I started Terra to give Africa the technological edge needed for resource protection & counterterrorism
(1/3)
DFS retweeted
.@PartechPartners Africa's 2025 report is also out - one of the best!
Equity: $2.4b (+8%)
Debt: $1.6b (+63%)
Total: $4.1b (+25%)
> 39% of overall funding is debt; growing at almost 8x the rate of equity.
> Fintech down 12%, Cleantech up 99%
> Renewed concentration into Top4 (+14% of all funding)
> Seed most constrained (-4%), Series A (+21%) & Growth (+29%) are recovering.
> Conversion from early to A has fallen: 2019 vintage (24%; ZIRP), 2020 onward (6.5%), a 73% decline.
My extrapolation is a hollowing out of the early-stage equity pipeline as funds move to bigger fund sizes and tickets. Lower conversion from that pipeline to Series A+ means we will run into more of a bottleneck this year where it'll be the pressure for funds to deploy vs. the level of de-risking they expect.
The dominance of debt places further signal to de-risk, as our startups will mold their businesses to the shape of available capital.
What I see is an ecosystem that's systematically cutting risk out of its identity. This is a bet against power law distribution and must be discussed hand-in-hand with the exits question.
DFS retweeted
Amazing!! Kudus to @fastbuka on of the teams from #StellarSurgeinLagos by @TheDFSLab! #proudmoment and love to see the integration with @Link_IO
DFS retweeted
As we celebrate with @Benji_Fernandes and his team today, I wanted to reflect a bit on @TheDFSLab & @NALAmoney's 8 year partnership to this point.
We often see fundraises but less about the ups and down to each of these milestones. Onwards.
medium.com/dfs-lab/1-built-o…
DFS retweeted
I have to say, @TheDFSLab know African payments more than majority of the VC funds investing in the region.
I’m super grateful for them taking a bet on us, I’ve spent countless hours on the phone with @mrstephendeng discussing many many many difficult decisions I have had to make as a founder.
Here’s to many more years, it’s just the beginning.
Check out this article here ⬇️
As we celebrate with @Benji_Fernandes and his team today, I wanted to reflect a bit on @TheDFSLab & @NALAmoney's 8 year partnership to this point.
We often see fundraises but less about the ups and down to each of these milestones. Onwards.
medium.com/dfs-lab/1-built-o…
DFS retweeted
I went for an event today and I love it @StellarOrg @TheDFSLab , proudly prepping @web3ladies as usual🌹🌹🌹
DFS retweeted
I wanna say the BIGGEST Thank You to GOD.
For such a successful event presentation for @HavilahHq, @Havilahacademy and @RehobothApp and to be supported by @benxcharles.
We were more than glad to share time with @StellarOrg and @TheDFSLab at the Stellar Surge event in Lagos.
