Sabou Capital secures Mastercard Foundation Africa Growth Fund investment to back SMEs

Sabou Capital secures Mastercard Foundation Africa Growth Fund investment to back SMEs

Sabou Capital, a Nigeria-based impact fund investing in tech-enabled small and medium enterprises (SMEs), has secured an undisclosed anchor investment from the Mastercard Foundation Africa Growth Fund.

The capital will be deployed to early growth-stage companies across the agriculture, healthcare, logistics and mobility, fintech, and climate tech sectors in Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, and Nigeria. The Mastercard Growth Fund is a $200 million fund of funds focused on African-owned investment vehicles that invest in women-led and gender-diverse enterprises.

The investment is a boost for Sabou Capital, which targets a gap in Africa’s funding landscape where revenue-generating SMEs are locked out of growth capital because they cannot meet investor standards.

“We target secondary cities and regions that mainstream capital bypasses,” said Surayyah Ahmad, partner at Sabou Capital. “Many of these businesses are investment-ready: the revenues are there, the model works, and the market is real. Yet they are excluded because they lack the investor-readiness infrastructure required by conventional capital.”

While fintech continues to dominate Africa’s funding environment, capital is gradually spreading into other sectors like logistics, agriculture, healthcare, and climate tech, industries that are related to supply chains.

African startups raised $575 million across 58 deals between January and February 2026, with the logistics and transport sectors emerging as the most-funded sectors in February. The agritech sector, which struggled to hold investor interest in 2025, also began to show tentative signs of recovery in that window.

Sabou’s focus on such sectors leans directly into that change by backing companies in secondary cities where markets are active, but capital remains scarce.

The fund said that it will disburse ticket sizes ranging from $300,000 and $2 million, and targets a final close by the third quarter of 2027, focusing on businesses that have moved beyond the idea stage with consistent revenue but still struggle to meet the requirements of institutional investors.

Sabou noted that it pairs funding with hands-on support, such as its pre-investment technical assistance programme, which helps founders tighten their financial reporting to build the documentation they need to attract follow-on capital. It also added that its post-investment support focuses on operational growth and climate resilience.

“What we see across markets is not a lack of viable businesses, but a mismatch between how capital is structured and how these companies actually grow,” said Christian Amouo, partner at Sabou Capital. “Our role is to bridge that disconnect so businesses can move forward on terms that reflect their realities.”

Launched in 2025, Sabou Capital invests in late pre-seed to Series A SMEs in agriculture and agroprocessing, renewable energy and climate, supply chain, logistics, and mobility sectors. Its portfolio businesses include Tomato Jos, a Nigerian agricultural production company that produces tomato paste from locally grown tomatoes, alongside other companies operating across food processing and fashion.

Sabou estimates that its fund could help create about 4,200 direct jobs and an additional 50,000 indirect value chain jobs with a strong focus on women and youth.