(BTF)<\/a>, based in Botswana, has launched with a \u00a350 million mandate to invest in technology and tech-enabled businesses across Southern Africa, targeting companies from pre-seed stage all the way to Series C. It is a wide mandate by design the fund’s stated goal is to address multiple gaps in the regional funding stack simultaneously, rather than focusing on a single stage where capital is already relatively abundant.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe money behind it carries some credibility. The fund is anchored by Pula Investments, the family office of Stephen Lansdown, co-founder of UK financial services company Hargreaves Lansdown. Lansdown built one of Britain’s most successful retail investment platforms before stepping back from the business, and the involvement of his family office brings a level of anchor capital seriousness that distinguishes BTF from the accelerator-adjacent vehicles that often populate this space. Day-to-day management of the fund falls to Launch Africa Ventures, one of the continent’s most active early-stage investors, with Martin Davis as Managing Partner and Florence Bavanandan as General Partner. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The investment thesis operates across two tracks. The pre-seed accelerator arm will deploy between \u00a325,000 and \u00a3100,000 per cohort company, paired with operational guidance and market access support. The growth programme is more substantial, offering between \u00a3500,000 and \u00a32 million per deal for revenue-generating businesses from Seed through to Series C, covering both primary rounds and secondary transactions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That secondary mandate is a nuanced addition worth noting. Liquidity has long been one of African venture’s most persistent structural problems. Early investors and founders routinely wait years sometimes a decade for an exit event that may never come on the terms originally expected. By explicitly building secondary market activity into its remit, BTF is acknowledging that reality and positioning itself to offer partial exits to early backers who need to return capital to their own investors. That kind of liquidity engineering is still relatively uncommon in the region, and if executed well, could make BTF a useful partner not just for founders but for the broader ecosystem of angels and seed investors who preceded it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The fund’s rationale for focusing on Botswana and Southern Africa leans on the country’s governance credentials, relatively high internet penetration, and its position within the Southern African Development Community. Botswana is also home to the SADC Secretariat and has partnered with the Botswana Innovation Hub to support BTF’s activities on the ground. As of early 2024, Botswana had achieved 98.2% 4G coverage and 41.89% 5G coverage, with mobile penetration exceeding the total population at 4.43 million subscriptions an infrastructure baseline that compares favorably with far more talked-about tech hubs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The broader ecosystem context supports the timing, at least directionally. Southern Africa saw growing early-stage depth in 2025, as infrastructure and climate investments increasingly adopted regional operating models rather than single-country strategies. That shift toward regional thinking building for SADC rather than for one city is exactly the playbook BTF appears to be running. African startups raised $554.5 million in Q1 2026, with development finance institutions and established Africa-focused VC funds driving most of the early-to-growth stage activity. There is capital moving through the continent, but it remains heavily concentrated in a small number of markets and sectors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The fund’s own framing positions Southern Africa’s digital infrastructure as mature, but the application layer the software businesses built on top of that infrastructure as still largely un-built, and therefore a generational window for investors prepared to move before valuations reflect the opportunity. That is a pitch investor have heard before about various African markets, but in Southern Africa’s case it is grounded in something observable: the region has connectivity, relative political stability, a growing middle class, and an SADC free trade agreement that theoretically enables regional scale. What it has lacked is the consistent flow of patient early-stage capital to match that structural potential with actual companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whether BTF can close that gap depends on execution as much as thesis. Launch Africa Ventures brings a credible track record of writing early cheques across the continent, but Botswana is a small, thinly documented startup market, and finding deal flow at volume will take active community building, not just capital deployment. The secondary mandate adds structural sophistication, but it also adds complexity sourcing secondaries requires a different network than sourcing primaries, and doing both well simultaneously is genuinely hard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What is clear is that the launch adds meaningful signal to a market that has often been overlooked in conversation about Africa’s technology future. Southern Africa is not Lagos or Nairobi, and it probably never will be. But the infrastructure is there, the governance framework is arguably stronger, and the competition for deals is considerably lighter. For a fund willing to do the harder work of market development, that combination is not a disadvantage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Most venture funds targeting Africa gravitate toward the same four markets Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Egypt. It is a rational instinct. That is where the density is, where the exits have happened, and where international investors feel on solid enough ground to write cheques. But a new fund launched this week is making a deliberate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31579,"featured_media":10113,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[83],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[452],"class_list":{"0":"post-10112","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tech"},"authors":[{"term_id":452,"user_id":31579,"is_guest":0,"slug":"estherspeaks","display_name":"Esther Speaks","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/cdcaf0f94087bbfcad372d974a1a697382dc93112457104ff6535cf4984ea4de?s=96&d=mm&r=g","0":null,"1":"","2":"","3":"","4":"","5":"","6":"","7":"","8":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/villpress.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/villpress.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/villpress.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/villpress.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31579"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/villpress.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10112"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/villpress.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10114,"href":"https:\/\/villpress.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10112\/revisions\/10114"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/villpress.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/villpress.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/villpress.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/villpress.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10112"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/villpress.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=10112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}