Raise, a financial technology company that provides fundraising solutions via a digital platform has launched an end-to-end fundraising platform to help ventures in Africa raise funding.
Raise will allow founders and investors to launch a private virtual deal room, run fundraising simulations and issue compliant electronic share and convertible certificates. This simplifies the fundraising process, making it easier to track and close deals remotely in Africa.
According to Marvin H. Coleby, co-founder, CEO and securities lawyer: “The impact of COVID-19 on the African VC space was unexpected. It’s going to make it harder to close deals for African founders. At Raise, we’re founders – and we’re here to support founders. We’re releasing the public beta to support the ecosystem’s transition to the new norm of remote investing.”
Open for entrepreneurs in Nigeria, Delaware, The Bahamas, Mauritius, Kenya and Nigeria, Raise aims to bring security, transparency and simplicity to the African VC space – and to make the fundraising process easier and simpler for everyone.
Raise was founded in 2018 by co-founders Marvin Coleby (CEO) and Eugene Mutai (CTO). In early 2020, the firm launched its private beta to a waitlist of companies. The firm says since January 2020, the companies on its platform are transacting a volume of $20+ million USD.
Notable partners and customers include Helium Health (recently raised a $10m Series A. Nigerian venture capital firms Microtraction and Chrysalis Capital.
Notable advisors include Kenfield Griffith,(CEO of Ajua (formerly mSurvey), backed by TLCom, Safaricom Ventures and Kapor Capital), Nichole Yembra (Managing Director of Chrysalis Capital and former CFO of a $80m Nigerian PE firm) and Dominic Rebelo (Senior Partner, Corporate and M&A, of the African Legal Network). For a full biography of Raise’s advisors and team, see the media kit.
The Raise team is led by Marvin H. Coleby (Co-founder and CEO, VC lawyer from Dentons, the world’s largest law firm), Eugene Mutai (Co-Founder and CTO, Google Developer Expert and full-stack engineer), and Tina Nyamache (Chief Growth Officer, led Village Capital’s Africa office and traded securities on the Nairobi Stock Exchange).
Advisors and partners are directly involved in the creation of the product and iterations and had this to say:
“Raise helps African companies inspire trust with the global tech ecosystem. We’ve seen the data about how it takes African startups 400+ days to raise funding and a lot of the delays come in the due diligence process. With Raise, companies can proactively load all the data investors usually want to see, cap tables, formation documents, metrics, etc, which simply inspires more confidence and simplifies the fundraising process,” said Nichole Yembra, Managing Director of Chrysalis Capital which manages fundraises for startups like Helium Health and Flutterwave.
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