P1 Ventures completes the first $25M close of its second fund

Pan-African Seed VC fund P1 Ventures has completed the first $25 million close of its second fund.

Founded in 2020, P1 Ventures is a high-conviction investor focused on a small number of exceptional African founders and companies building transformational software businesses with regional and global potential. The firm works alongside founders it invests in across fintech, e-commerce, healthtech, SaaS and AI.

The team

P1 Ventures's founder and general partner Mikael Hajjar is an engineer and Stanford MBA graduate who has held leadership roles at Fortune 500 technology companies Areva, Google and Zum. He started angel investing in Africa in 2014 and learned his craft from the "Elon Musk of China," William Li.

Co-founder and general partner Hisham Halbouny previously served as a Partner at Man Capital — an early investor in Uber, Airbnb, and Bolt — and has built and scaled businesses across Africa, Nigeria, Kenya and Egypt. Prior to that, he was Managing Director at EFG Hermes, the region's largest investment bank.

P1's advisory committee comprises investors and operators who have made a global impact with investments — including Bernard Dalle, a founding team member of Index Ventures; and Emil Michael, the former Chief Business Officer at Uber.

The track-record

Since its launch, P1 Ventures has invested in 29 early-stage companies across 10 countries, including Yodawy, Egypt's largest online medication and pharmacy benefits platform; Money Fellows in Egypt; and Reliance Health in Nigeria, where P1 has a presence. The firm's inaugural investment was in Yassir in Algeria - a super-app operating in Francophone Africa.

Such is the success of P1 Ventures' focused, early-stage portfolio construction that for every $1 invested, P1 Ventures' companies have gone on to raise 35x more follow-on capital, on average. This achievement stems from the deep value add that P1 Ventures brings to its portfolio companies beyond capital. This results from decades of living and working across the continent and the partners' multi-stage, multi-sector experience.

On the record

"Coming from a relatively small economy inspires us at P1 Ventures to go off the beaten path and back the underdogs. We love ambitious African founders who build products and services addressing a regional, if not global, customer base," said Mikael Hajjar. "Combining our deep local knowledge, our strong data orientation and our experience as investors, we can identify unique opportunities and help entrepreneurs become global winners."

"Every globally minded asset allocator has been actively seeking exposure to the continent. We've witnessed similar inflexion points in other regions, such as Europe and Latin America, where leading VC firms like Index and Kaszek Ventures have emerged," added Hisham Halbouny.

The context

About 65% of the world's remaining arable land is in Africa, creating a significant opportunity to scale up agriculture, address food security issues, and combat climate change.

Africa was one of only a handful of tech ecosystems to see increased VC funding in 2022, when global VC funding fell by 35%. The continent has experienced the fastest VC growth globally, with almost $6bn deployed in African startups in the past year alone.

African founders have also been capital efficient, where over $10bn of enterprise value has been created across only 12 technology companies - including P1 Ventures' Yassir. Over 10 years, less than $20bn of VC has been invested across the entire continent. However, some $3 trillion of consumer spending is forecast for the region.

By 2040, Africa is expected to be home to 12 cities of more than ten million people. Over the next two decades, more than 500 million people will migrate to its cities, creating the largest total number of urban dwellers in the world. By 2050, one-third of Africans will be under 35, emphasizing the rapid digitisation of the continent and the opportunities for startups across all sectors.