Announcing our investment in Raise! 🎉🎉
Raise is a simple fundraising and equity management platform for Africa.
Team
- Marvin Coleby, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO): Previously a Securities and VC lawyer at Dentons (one of the world’s largest law firms), Marvin worked on VC transactions between seed and series D deals in Silicon Valley, Toronto and New York. He also wrote a thesis on cross-border securities in frontier markets, completed at McGill University Faculty of Law (top-5 global law school) and at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Graduate Ph.D. center.
- Eugene Mutai, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO): A full-stack software engineer, Certified Google Developer Expert and awarded as Kenya’s top software engineer. Eugene has built products at Andela and Tim Horton’s.
- Tina Nyamache, Chief Growth Officer (CGO): Tina leads customer success and operations at Raise. She led Africa’s office for Village Capital and Generation Africa’s due diligence process for Econet Global and Yara. She is currently pursuing her Post-graduate Diploma in Strategy and Innovations at Oxford University.
Problem
African founders lose time fundraising and building their cap tables across their employees, founders and investors. It takes an average of 414 days to raise rounds of capital as an African founder — each day taking away time that should be dedicated towards achieving product-market fit and scale. Simplifying the fundraising and cap table management process solves this problem, making it simpler to distribute equity and raise money faster. However, there are complicated and complex roadblocks that African founders need to navigate to find the right investors and corporate structure to scale.
Solution
Raise drives founders to a faster product-market fit by empowering them with affordable online tools to raise faster and distribute equity to hire talent. Startups can manage electronic cap tables, automate financing contracts like SAFEs and share private deal rooms. They have built a platform where founders don’t need to use a combination of Docsend, Clerky, and Carta. Instead, they get these features blended into one platform and built for African startups with parent companies both in Africa and abroad.
Raise is a web-based interface that enables founders, investors, and law firms to collaborate and leverage digital tools to simplify due diligence and equity management.
“Raise’s mission is to simplify equity and democratize access to assets for Africans across the world, where people have the power to create financial independence for their communities, teams, and families.” - Marvin Coleby, CEO
Market
What made us excited about the market
While there are other companies that seek to achieve similar objectives as Raise, they do not hold the key focus that Raise has on serving African startups, founders and investors. Companies like Carta, Captable.io, and EquityEffect are centered around the European, American and Asian markets, leaving little room for the nuances that exist in the African technology playground.
Raise’s goal is to run private company transactions across its platform on the continent of Africa. Their market focus is on first capturing transactions for African technology companies and the VC asset class, which surpassed $2.4 billion in 2020 (Briter Bridges Africa Investment Report 2020) and grows by 80% on average every year. Venture Capital in Africa is growing to a $22 billion market size over the next five years. From there, Raise will work on onboarding private equity assets which surpassed $20 billion over the last few years.
The Team
Why we believe in/backed this team
The accumulated experience of the founding team shows a unified vision of democratizing financial independence for Africans — this time with tools that simplify buying and selling equity.
One of the first things we noticed about the Raise team when we first met them in 2019 was the depth of expertise they had in the venture capital industry. Marvin, a venture capital lawyer, had built and executed venture transactions for startups and investors from pre-seed to series C. In addition to this, he had led the implementation of venture capital documents throughout Denton, a 400-person law firm. Tina, a venture capital operator, had led African operations and partnerships at Village Capital, an active accelerator and venture capital fund in emerging markets. Eugene, a full-stack software engineer, is a certified Google Developer Expert that invests in private and public companies as well as cryptocurrency-based systems.
We have watched the Raise team grow and have been early adopters of the product, helping them refine its offerings in the time since our initial meeting. The team’s singular mission to simplify fundraising for founders, investors, and law firms across all of Africa is a tough but not impossible task to execute. We really admire this mission and genuinely believe they are the team to execute this.
Traction
At the time of our investment, Raise had already scaled >200 companies, >$150 million in equity on the platform, and created over $90 million worth of valuations. Since then, they’ve gone on to partner with Africa’s largest corporate law firms to continue onboarding users and scale across the continent.
Raise initially set out to understand how blockchain-based digital securities could democratize access to capital across the continent. They started with a simple application for African tech, for companies to store and update shareholder information after their rounds were completed.
The team quickly learned that African founders, investors, and shareholders do not have access to accurate data on prices, valuations, and terms of shares around their own companies. Even worse, the data on cap tables quickly showed how illiquid African venture capital shares were.
So, the founding team of Raise understood that if they could create a platform to simplify share and equity ownership, they could be democratizing access to capital and turning shares into cash for African founders.
Conclusion
Raise is building at a time when African founders are creating many avenues to exit, turning shares into real cash for their teams, founders, and investors. Raise is laser-focused on building Africa’s #1 platform for equity and fundraising.
For Raise, African venture capital and startups are part of its initial go-to-market strategy. They’ll continue building across other industries and classes like real estate, commodities, and debt instruments to accelerate the distribution of digital assets to Africans around the world.
We are excited to be working with Raise, on their journey to building Africa’s #1 marketplace for investing in digital assets.
If you would like to kickstart your fundraising management process, click here to get started with Raise.
At Microtraction, our long term mission is to accelerate Africa’s transition to a sustainable and developed economy. We do this by investing in entrepreneurs who leverage technology, capital, and innovation to try and solve some of the largest problems on the continent. If you are working on solving one of these problems, we should talk!
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