LFVC: Early-Stage Venture fund focussed on the global south #emergingmarkets and #frontiermarkets #Africa
New York, USA
Joined October 2014
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African corporate LPs: 7% in 2024 → 41% in 2025.
European LPs: 70% → 21%.
Africa is funding Africa now.
Everyone's celebrating African VC's $4.1B "comeback."
I'm looking at the fine print. 🧵
Meanwhile, international LP appetite remains cautious. FX risk, macro uncertainty, exit timelines.
The funds raising successfully? Deep local networks + sector focus + realistic return expectations.
The real story? Domestic investors now represent 45% of commitments — highest ever recorded.
African capital backing African founders.
That's the durable shift worth watching.
60% of that capital went to just TWO sectors: fintech and energy.
But here's what the headlines miss: much of the "energy" number is debt facilities, not equity.
Venture debt ≠ venture capital.
African VC raised $4.1B in 2025. Cool.
But here's what matters: domestic investors hit 45% of commitments. Up from 23%.
The "foreign capital will save Africa" narrative is dying. Quietly. Good riddance.
Lateral Frontiers VC retweeted
I had a brilliant fintech operator in my office last week, just getting into stablecoins, said something that stuck with me:
“Payments is 60% compliance.”
It’s easy to focus on UI, speed, fees—but the real moat in money movement is trust. That trust is earned through licensing, audits, AML/KYC, regulatory fluency, and operational rigor.
The institutions that have lasted—Visa, Western Union, legacy banks—didn’t just build pipes. They built compliance infrastructure that could scale globally and survive scrutiny.
Stablecoins are now trying to rewire global payments from first principles. The tech is exceptional. The liquidity is real. But compliance? Still catching up.
The mistake would be thinking that great code replaces great compliance.
It doesn’t.
If you want to move real volume through stablecoins—fiat on/off ramps, payroll, commerce, cross-border—you’ll run into the same expectations as any traditional financial institution.
The unlock is this: treat compliance as a product.
Design it, test it, scale it. Build it into the architecture, not as a patch.
Just like security became invisible but essential in Web2, compliance will become the defining layer of trust in Web3 and payments.
The future of stablecoin infra will be won by those who see compliance not as a bottleneck—but as a distribution and defensibility engine.
If you’re building in this space and thinking deeply about how to integrate compliance from the ground up, reach out to me or the team @lateralcap . We want to hear from you.
Lateral Frontiers VC retweeted
Doom and gloom tweets about climate change are annoying and more corrosive than they are helpful. But i think it is important we galvanise enough effort to preserve our environment for the future. 🧵
Lateral Frontiers VC retweeted
Next DeFi🦄= Real Use Cases + Demand + Infrastructure + Ecosystem Build+ Network Effects + Regulatory Clarity
Real use cases = global pain points + cross-border focus
🧑🤝🧑Users = (Pain Points × Smartphone Penetration) + (Unbanked Population × Digital Infra)
Demand = Merchants x Users
Infrastructure = Payment Infra + Local Channel Integration
🌐Network effects = Adoption = User Adoption × Merchant Acceptance
⚖️Regulatory Clarity = Licensing and Registration + Financial Stability and Systemic Risk Management
Stablecoins:
$220bn market cap
Moved $2.5trn in the last 30 days , most b2b
Which would represent 1% of the M2 supply of USD
Has 27m active addresses
Insight 1:
Low user numbers are moving very large volumes.
There's massive room for growth. One of the biggest land grabs in financial services in this wave. Your advantage? be one of the first ones there.
Insight 2:
the primary use case is as the store of value for Crypto. Capitalise on emerging markets.
Insight 3:
Building for a consumer use case has low short-term ROI, high long-term ROI. Stables will expand TAM and utility to existing users. If this is your market, get moving. Everyone else is.
Insight 4:
Trad banks need a stablecoin strategy asap. Fintechs do and will be much more formidable competition that ever.
Insight 5:
USD coins are still dominant and in demand. Treat it as an export. Start manufacturing. Late manufacturers will lose as not all USD coins are equal.
EMs have been seeing a quiet deeptech revolution where founders are building complex tech solutions for local problems, creating blueprints for global impact. This has spread to all industries including renewables, health & biotech, agriculture and financial services.
@obi_emetarom, Co-Founder of @zonenetworkhq, explores the intersection of blockchain and regulation in his new whitepaper, providing insights on how financial institutions and regulators can embrance blockchain responsibly to ensure trust, transparency, and scalability.
Lateral Frontiers VC retweeted
Nigeria’s crypto revolution can be a great blueprint for Africa’s crypto’s movement. Their adoption has been crazy but the features protecting users might be the ones keeping others out.
Lateral Frontiers VC retweeted
VC isn't a science with rigid formulas—it's an art of pattern recognition. Behind every investment is a dance of intuition, lived experience, and subtle signal detection.
A check is transactional, but great venture capital is transformational!