FirstCheck Africa announced that it has received a $2 million commitment from TLcom Capital, an Africa-focused Venture capital firm, to its $10million Debut Fund. It also announced that Eloho, one of its founders, has joined TLcom Capital as a Partner, adding to her existing day-to-day role as Co-Managing Partner at FirstCheck Africa
This commitment increases FirstCheck’s available funds to $12 million thereby allowing it to invest in more female-focused high-growth, technology-driven startups.
Launched in 2021 by Eloho Omame, founding Managing Director of Endeavor Nigeria and Odunayo Eweniyi, COO and co-founder of PiggyVest, FirstCheck Africa is female-focused Angel fund that helps female founders get the financial, social and belief capital to build category-defining companies. It invests in pre-seed and seed-stage startups with at least one female founder or co-founder.
In August 2021, the angel fund invested $25k each in 4 female-founded companies – Foondamate (South Africa), Healthtracka (Nigeria), Tushop (Kenya), and Zoie Health (South Africa). In the last 18 months, FirstCheck Africa has invested in 10 female-led startups in four countries. Its portfolio companies have been accepted into three global accelerators (including Y Combinator), and a number have raised sizeable follow-on rounds, with FirstCheck Africa as the first or second institutional investor on their cap tables.
With this debut fund, the company says it will now invest up to $250k as high conviction first checks into early-stage rounds for female-led startups. The company remains sector-agnostic and focused on technology-enabled companies that are solving important problems in large markets.
According to the company in a statement, “We’re a small fund with big ambitions, and we’ve designed our portfolio strategy with our founders’ needs in mind. Access to capital is a primary and complex challenge for female-led companies. As a mission-oriented early-stage, female-focused fund, it’s critical for like FirstCheck Africa to invest meaningful capital to give the young companies in our portfolio sufficient runway to focus on traction and pursue disciplined fundraises when the time comes. We’ve constructed our debut fund’s portfolio to make targeted investments at pre-seed, keep the capacity to make follow-on investments when the most promising of those companies are ready for seed capital, and retain the flexibility to invest in some companies at the seed stage, where a female-led company might have already raised an institutional round.”
“FirstCheck Africa’s mission is to advance equity, capital and leadership for a generation of women in Africa through technology and entrepreneurship. We will continue to focus on making it easier for ambitious African women to raise early-stage venture capital by writing checks, being female-led companies’ earliest believers and building our platform to attract resources to accelerate their efforts,” it adds
