The GFA Journey to Investor Readiness
Why GetFundedAfrica created an Investor Readiness Program
To raise money from investors, you need to understand what investors want.
We have created a self-paced, video-based, investor readiness course that can be completed in a few hours or at your convenience. Resume from where you stopped.
GetFundedAfrica’s journey to creating an investor readiness program has guided us through an interesting journey so far.
Our goal remains helping African companies raise venture capital for growth & job creation which has led us to a point where we are putting finishing touches to a self-paced, video-based program on investor readiness.
Note: You can pre-enroll today to get a special offer or keep reading to get the full story of our journey to investor readiness
From side-project to solving a problem
Late last year, Tunji (my co-founder) and I started seriously discussing the idea of how to get more investments into African companies. We settled on a social project – a blog to aggregate information about venture capital investment flows into Africa.
We had come to the conclusion that since small and medium sized businesses are the engine room of economic growth, African companies need venture capital in order to grow, create jobs and solve Africa’s greatest challenges.
What do venture capital investors want?
We started GetFundedAfrica in January 2020 and within weeks of launching we started seeing investment trends. To investigate further, we leveraged analytical resources from our co-owned market research firm (Afriscaper) to further analyze the stories we were aggregating.
What we realized was, by measuring specific metrics, GetFundedAfrica would be able to positively influence the amount of venture capital investment in Africa even though we were not an investment firm.
As our media aggregation outreach grew, some venture capital firms reached out to GetFundedAfrica with mandates to find African companies in specific industries. Leveraging the database constantly being updated by our data team, we developed simple algorithms that could match African companies to venture capital firms.
To scale things up we decided to undertake a survey of venture capitalists/impact investors and also held one-on-one sessions to understand the bottlenecks of venture capital investments in Africa. To date, we have tracked over $10billion in fund raising & investment activity, the bulk of which is in Venture Capital deals in Africa (including VC fundraising); actively track investments in over 30 African countries; and have built relationships with dozens of venture capital firms.
Over 90% of the investors in our network have cited investor-readiness as the biggest barrier to venture capital investment in Africa.
What is “Investor Readiness”?
Being ‘Investment Ready’ essentially means that potential Investors believe that you are worth investing in and that you are ready for the next step. If gaining investment is crucial to the growth of your business, you want to ensure that you are prepared.
GetFundedAfrica’s Investor readiness program
GetFundedAfrica is laser-focused on helping African companies raise venture capital and by extension investor readiness is one of the big barriers to funding we are tackling.
We have put together a self-paced program (enroll here) which you can watch at your own pace and provides an understanding of how venture capital works and what you should do to get venture capital investment.
With this program, you will learn
• How venture capital works (and how it’s different from a bank loan)
• How to prepare for fundraising (a six-point plan)
• How to prepare investor-ready documents
• Specific vocabulary investors use
• Tips on pitching to investors
Why you should sign up for this course
• Completion of the course represents necessary first-steps in a GFA process, that culminates in your venture getting included into a pool of companies that get matched with our venture capital investors
• It is short and straight to the point. The lessons in this program take just a few hours to complete
• Even if you are very busy, the program is self-paced so you can view the video at your convenience and resume from where you stopped.
• We have leveraged economies of scale to ensure the program is affordable
• Even if you decide not to seek venture capital funding, you will gain an understanding of how investors think and this may be useful to you in other areas of life
GetFundedAfrica’s investor readiness course will be launched on 1st August 2020 starting with Nigeria. Dates will be announced for other African Countries.
If you enroll today, you get a 25% discount. Note also that a portion of the enrollment fees goes to our investment arm which invests in startups across Africa. We are also seeking affiliates to partner with us, kindly email tunji@getfundedafrica.com. Your support is appreciated!
Debola Omololu
Co-Founder, GetFundedAfrica
