Launch Africa, the pan-African venture capital firm with more than 180 portfolio startups, has returned $2.5 million to investors in its first fund after completing 11 exits, joining the small group of African investors that have actually returned liquidity to limited partners (LPs).
African venture capital has had a returns problem. Funds were raised aggressively between 2018 and 2022, deployed across hundreds of startups, and then hit the same wall as the rest of the global venture market in 2022, when exits began drying up.
According to Carta, the cap-table software firm, only just over half of 2020-vintage funds had returned any capital to LPs by the end of 2025, and roughly 15% of the nearly 2,900 US venture funds made their first distribution only during 2025. In Africa, the picture has been worse.
Speaking at the Africa Prosperity Summit in November, Ventures Platform’s Kola Aina estimated that around $20 billion has been committed to African VC since 2020, against a benchmark expectation of $40 to $60 billion in returned capital by 2035. The gap is wide, and it is now the central conversation in African private capital.
However, that conversation is slowly starting to shift because a handful of firms have begun returning money. In January 2025, Oui Capital, an early-stage VC firm, told its LPs it had returned its $4 million debut fund in full, after partially exiting its $150,000 stake in Moniepoint for $8 million when the Nigerian fintech became a unicorn.
