Botswana Tech Fund Backs Overlooked African Entrepreneurs

While four African countries gobble up 80% of all venture capital, a new fund is placing its bets on the startups everyone else is ignoring.

The Botswana Tech Fund just closed its first $6.7 million round with backing from Stephen Lansdown, the British billionaire who co-founded a major financial services firm. The fund targets countries like Botswana, Zambia, Namibia, and Mozambique, where talented founders struggle to find even basic startup capital.

The numbers tell a stark story. South Africa alone captured 29% of all African startup funding last year. Meanwhile, the rest of Southern Africa received almost nothing, despite collectively serving tens of millions of increasingly digital consumers.

Martin Davis and Florence Bavanandan, who lead the fund, see opportunity in what they call the "digital gap." Davis chairs a London social impact accelerator, while Bavanandan built the support systems for Launch Africa's 130 portfolio companies.

Their strategy covers three stages. They'll write $135,000 checks to 100 early-stage Southern African startups over five years through an accelerator program. For more developed companies, they'll invest between $670,000 and $2.7 million. They're also buying out early investors in successful African startups, creating exits where few exist.

The Ripple Effect

The fund's location matters as much as its money. Most African venture capital flows through Lagos, Nairobi, Cairo, and Cape Town, creating a self-reinforcing cycle where capital and talent concentrate in the same places.

By planting operations in Botswana rather than routing through Johannesburg, the fund is building deal flow at the source. The team believes digitizing these overlooked economies will spark job creation and give young people reasons to build careers at home rather than becoming economic migrants.

The underlying bet is simple but powerful. Software technology levels the playing field globally. With the right infrastructure and government support, there's no reason the next billion-dollar African tech company can't emerge from Gaborone or Lusaka instead of Cape Town or Nairobi.

Davis puts it bluntly: "The only reason it won't happen is if they haven't got the capital to start." The fund aims to remove that barrier for founders who've been building in the shadows of Africa's tech hubs.

Between 2019 and 2024, nearly half of all venture-backed exits in Africa happened in South Africa, thanks to its deeper capital markets and concentration of buyers. For entrepreneurs elsewhere, that meant either relocating or missing out on growth capital entirely.

Now those founders have another option, and the African tech story just got more interesting.