Launch Africa’s playbook for managing one of Africa’s biggest VC portfolios

At large venture capital firms, staff are typically split between two functions: the investment team and the platform team. While both teams interact often, they work separately, and only rarely do employees switch teams.

The investment team sources and selects the startups the firm backs, then manages those stakes over time, while the platform team helps the portfolio companies hire staff and introduce them to customers and partners, among other things.

That difference makes a switch rare for smaller firms, but for a VC firm like Launch Africa, which has built a portfolio of over 170 companies across 20 African countries in six years, that scale creates a problem most funds never face: how do you manage 170 companies across different sectors and countries?

One of its answers was to split the work into two: a platform and operations team that drives value across the whole portfolio at scale, and a portfolio management team that goes company by company into the numbers, the projections, and the runway.

Another was to transfer Jeffery Akemu, an associate for almost two years, from the platform team to the investment management team earlier this year.

His switch comes as Launch Africa seeks to cash in on bets made through its 2020 first fund by securing startup exits and returning capital to investors, while simultaneously deploying its second fund and raising a third. The firm’s first fund, which invested in 133 companies, makes it one of the highest-volume seed investors Africa has produced.

In our conversation, Akemu explains how Launch Africa’s model assigns each team member startups to manage by geography and sector expertise and how it classifies its portfolio companies, and what separates platform support from portfolio management at a fund this size.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Launch Africa describes its model as high-volume but still hands-on. How do you actually support founders in depth, and where does the model force you to make trade-offs?

The backbone of our portfolio management at Launch Africa Ventures is the coverage model. Each team member is allocated as the asset manager for 10 to 15 companies most of the time. Those team members are the go-to for those companies in terms of reporting, value-added support, and strategic insights.

The coverage model ties to a couple of things: your geography, where you are based, what you have done before, and whether you have expertise in that sector. For example, if you used to work in insurance, you will find that more insurance companies are assigned to you. I am based in Nigeria, so I get more Nigerian companies within our portfolio as part of my coverage. That is the micro level.

On the macro level, it works through the platform and operations team in collaboration with portfolio management. We look at, on a portfolio scale, what partnerships exist and what gaps the portfolio companies need filled. Over time, we have been able to build a suite of credits that we offer to our portfolio companies, amounting to about $1.5 million. No single company can use all of those credits, because some of them compete.

If you are building on AWS, you cannot simultaneously build on Azure. What we try to do is get the broad base of partnerships available to our companies, cutting across sales and marketing, design, cloud computing, how to adopt AI, and internal operations.

We also host workshops for our portfolio companies twice a month on different topics, based on the needs of our portfolio. In the past two weeks, we held one around the benchmarks investors are looking at in 2026 and how our companies can best position themselves for that. We have one coming up next week on startup legal essentials, basically what to look out for in your contracting and how to ensure your intellectual property is more defensible. Companies can come to us and tell us they want to upskill in a particular area, and we put together a workshop for them and the rest of the portfolio.

Primarily, we try to add value through four pillars: access to networks, access to partnerships, access to talent, and access to upskilling. Under the network pillar, we help our companies access enterprise relationships. We have built relationships with some of the leading banks and telcos on the continent, and we try to match portfolio companies to be either suppliers to them or customers of them. One we have been working on is a tier-one bank out of Southern Africa, where we are in the early stages of two companies working with them.

We have done something similar in East Africa, and we have banking relationships in Nigeria, though, in transparency, a commercial one has not yet been unlocked there through us. We have also worked with MTN in the past. We also look for areas of synergy within our own portfolio. As part of our approach to late-stage secondary transactions, we have relationships with the Flutterwaves, the Andelas, and the Mooves, and we see how our earlier-stage companies can collaborate with those later-stage companies in ways that are significant for both sides.

You recently switched from platform and support to portfolio management. Why did it happen, how did it happen, and how has it been?

Some of it is an evolution in how I see the next steps of my career, and some of it is based on the expertise I bring to the firm. By training, I am an economics and finance major, and somewhere along the journey, I started becoming a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) charterholder. I am still taking my second-stage exams.

I have always been interested in the inner workings of companies. Platform and operations are mostly focused on driving value at scale—getting companies the right partnerships, advisors, onward investments, and suppliers. Portfolio management is more intricate, working one-on-one with companies on their strategy, their projections, and how it all makes sense. Given my background, I found myself drawn more to the numbers.

We did an internal team reallocation to look at the expertise we have on hand and where it is best utilised. Different people thrive in different fields. It is a mix of where your interests are, what the company needs, and where the company believes you have the potential to add value at scale.

While I was in platform and operations, I engaged primarily with my coverage companies and then the portfolio at scale. In portfolio management, you engage one-on-one with a broader base of companies. I look at the numbers from everybody’s coverage companies through our reporting system, and if I have questions, I reach out to the founders.