Fundability vs. Buildability - What African Venture Actually Demands

A conversation with Dotun Olowoporoku of Ventures Platform

A post went viral in my feed recently. The argument: the venture capital model was never built for Africa, $200M+ was lost across shutdowns in 2023 alone, and the right fund simply isn’t coming.

It’s a compelling read. And it’s not entirely wrong.

But I sat across from Dr. Dotun Olowoporoku, Managing Partner at Ventures Platform, last week for The Grinders Table podcast. And what he said was more uncomfortable than “VC doesn’t work here.”

His argument: we’re not failing because the model is broken. We’re failing because we keep applying it to the wrong companies.

“A lot of tech businesses should not be VC-backed,“ he said. “And that doesn’t make them bad businesses.”

That sentence sat with me.

We have glamorised the startup above the SME. And because we, investors, ecosystem builders, journalists, made that choice, smart founders with genuine technology businesses now walk through our doors expecting a venture cheque, when what they actually need is patient capital, an SME loan, or just more time.

VC is a specific instrument. It demands momentum. It demands speed of execution. It demands a business model that can scale faster than the money runs out. When you give that instrument to a company whose natural growth trajectory is gradual, an operationally-led business, a quality-dependent brand, a market that requires deep distribution before it rewards speed, you don’t accelerate them. You break them.

Dotun put it plainly: Dangote built the largest fortune in Nigeria brick by brick. If someone had handed him VC money in the 1980s with the expectation of a billion-dollar exit in five years, he probably wouldn’t have survived it.

That’s not an indictment of VC. It’s an indictment of misapplication.

The post in my feed is right that the shutdowns are real. The $200M+ loss is real. The funding drop is real. But the root cause isn’t that the model failed Africa, it’s that too many people used the model on companies it was never designed for, dressed them up with valuations those businesses couldn’t sustain, and then called it an ecosystem problem when the inevitable happened.

Dotun pushed back on the pessimism, too. Twelve years ago, Africa had zero billion-dollar startups. We now have nine or ten. The exit multiples are different from Silicon Valley, but $50M, $100M, $250M exits are real, achievable, and fundable. The question is whether we’re willing to model our expectations on African market realities rather than importing Silicon Valley assumptions wholesale.

That’s the harder conversation. Not “is VC broken?“ but “are we brave enough to deploy it correctly?“

Dotun also gets into what real portfolio support looks like at 3 am when the regulators are about to kill a company’s business model, how he spotted Tosin Eniolorunda‘s thesis before Moniepoint became Moniepoint Group, and why the AI wave is less like the internet and more like electricity.

Listen to the full conversation by clicking here

If this made you think differently about how capital should work on this continent, share it with one founder or investor who needs to hear it.