Maker, Not Taker: Africa’s AI Opportunity – Sir John Lazar

Let's talk about Anza Capital.

What's the firm, you know, trying to achieve? And just give me a sense of, you know, who else you're running the business with at the moment?

Yeah, well, I'll start with that.

So we co-founded Enze back in 2019.

There were two other co-founders.

So the managing partner is my wonderful colleague, Mike Mompe.

I've known him going back more than 10 years from work in early stage investing in London.

And he runs the team in Nairobi, which is where our head office is.

So we have a strong team there.

We also have a very good principal in Cairo.

We have presence on the ground in West Africa.

And we also have CTOs in residence that work out of Cape Town and Paris, focusing on North Africa.

So it's a very strong team.

There is a third co-founder who is a friend, a very, very old friend of mine called David Cohen, who i've known since university times in south africa and then oxford who is not involved in the firm day-to-day but is deeply involved in supporting us and very importantly is on the investment committee the overall rubric for enza is to support founders and teams using technology to solve a larger meaningful problem across africa so The technology strand to that is super important for us.

We can talk a bit more about that as we move forward.

And in very, very quick terms, we're investing out of our second fund.

We have about $70 million under management.

We've invested in 47 technology companies across Africa.

We focus on all the major hubs.

So we've invested in Nairobi, Kampala, Lagos, Accra, Joburg and Cape Town, Cairo, and also Francophone West Africa, Abidjan, and Dakar.

We are deliberately multistage, so we've got anywhere from pre-C through series A, sometimes even a series B.

The average check size out of the second fund is about a million dollars first check.

We hold a lot of money back for follow-ons because we feel we need to be able to build a position and support our companies in the long term.

That sort of general strategy means that the sectors we deliberately invest in will be multi-sector, but it will be FinTech and financial inclusion, a lot of logistics and infrastructure, health, education, some climate.

And then obviously, very interestingly, the strong AI thread, the last six or seven companies we've invested in have all been in the AI space.