Serial entrepreneur Opeyemi Awoyemi has partnered with Omolara Awoyemi and Jake Bright to launch a new platform called Fast Forward to build and back African companies. Fast Forward is a venture studio and early-stage fund.
According to the company, Fast Forward Venture Studio works alongside dynamic entrepreneurs advancing ideas it believes will scale to impact 10M+ people and achieve >$10m ARR in 3-5 years, backing up to 10 companies annually—with priority on platform and infrastructure plays—in sectors including (but not limited to) B2B, Fintech, eCommerce, Edtech, Healthcare, Logistics, Deep Tech, SaaS, Future of Work, and Blockchain.
The Studio selects up to 10 ideas annually—with priority on platform and infrastructure plays—in sectors including (but not limited to) B2B, Fintech, eCommerce, Edtech, Healthcare, Logistics, Deep Tech, SaaS, Future of Work, and Blockchain.
Opeyemi summarised how the Studio works:
A venture Studio is not a fund. We are more of builders than investors. So we are incentivized as your 3rd/4th cofounder. We have a separate early stage fund that participates in pre-seed rounds (we don’t lead rounds). Founders first – founders own min of 80% of the venture from day 1. We are first check in the venture studio companies. We take in pitches at concept stage. We also come up with ideas and recruit exceptional talent to cofound with us. We are obsessed about Market-Product-Timing fit: we work on opportunities where timing can be validated. We want to ensure our founders focus on sharp problems whose time has come and not make too many mistakes (you’ll still make some!). We help with hiring, growth, gtm and more importantly initial opportunity validation 10 companies yearly, $100k to be invested per founding team. For investors, we offer faster time to liquidity based on an open ended structure – so investors don’t have to wait for 7-10 years to see returns.
Opeyemi Awoyemi was one of the co-founders of online jobs site, Jobberman and Whogohost, a bootstrapped hosting platform. In 2016, he partnered with Olufunbi Falayi to set up a N200m FastForward Student Innovation Fund to support innovation and the innovators in schools. So it would seem he has expanded the fund to another level.
After leaving Jobberman, Opeyemi became a senior technical product manager at Indeed and tried his hands at setting up Moneymie, a digital bank and transaction platform for migrants to provide products including dollar accounts, cross-border transfers, savings and investment products, enabling migrant users to save in multi-currency investments, monitor income and expenditures, exchange, move and grow money around the world. He shut down the retail service of the company to focus on cross-border payments and payouts for its business users.
Omolara Awoyemi previously worked as country manager of Jumia’s fintech arm in Nigeria and was a senior program manager at Facebook. Jake Bright is a former Africa correspondent for TechCrunch
Fast Forward also has a separate early stage fund that invests in scalable tech-enabled companies at pre-seed stage. The syndicated fund selectively invests $20,000-$50,000 in some companies from the studio. Some of the startups in the studio include Bumpa, AltSchool, TalentQL, Dojah and Sendchamp.
