TLcom Capital LLP

TLcom Capital is a Lagos-Nairobi-London based venture capital firm investing in Tech and Innovation since 1999 across Africa, Europe, Israel and the US.

In June of 2017 TLcom had announced the first close of its TIDE Africa Fund, with $40m of commitments targeting African Tech early to growth stage companies. TIDE Africa is focused on helping the best companies utilising mobile as a platform to serve and solve Africa’s most pressing needs. With mobile penetration being significantly higher than the penetration of financial services, health education, energy and many more utility like services – we see great opportunity in utilising technology to serve these needs in a very affordable and scalable way. The lack of legacy and infrastructure is also an opportunity. In Africa, allowing innovative entrepreneurs in some cases to ignore solutions from the developed world, and build better, smarter and cheaper ways to serve these unmet demand. Instead of taking existing models and adjusting to the African reality, we are more excited about entrepreneurs who have deep understanding of local problems and context, and design ground-up to solve for these.

TLcom currently manages total commitments of approximately $300m in these sectors via a series of dedicated investment vehicles, including the TLcom I and TLcom II funds, other technology portfolios acquired on the secondary market.

Our investment strategy is to identify, back and assist high quality entrepreneurs and management teams with disruptive technologies and business models, compelling intellectual property and deep market knowledge.

We are focusing on companies which already proved a product-market fit, and got some commercial traction with an ability to scale. We can invest from $500k and up to $10m in a single company, typically looking to be the lead investor of the first institutional round. We always look for very scaleable businesses, that can grow quickly and are not capital intensive.

We primarily target companies in the following industry segments: Financial Services / Fintech; eCommerce / Logistics; B2C (including health, education, energy, transportation, media etc.); B2B (focused on mobile centric solutions to SMEs and business tools for businesses);  and reducing the cost of data services (mostly via software).