Tidjane Deme is a general partner at Partech, a global tech investment firm. He co-leads the firm’s Africa fund, which raised over $300 million in February.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
What did it take to raise a $300 million fund for Africa?
You need to partner with a host of institutions to make this happen.
Firstly, you need to work with development finance institutions, which are the biggest drivers of the African investment ecosystem. You need to prove to them that you have the infrastructure to manage the fund.
Then, you must work with corporate investors, and also convince sovereign investment funds like Mubadala and Bpifrance. We’ve also raised from our first U.S. pension fund and received investment from Africa Re, one of the continent’s biggest insurance companies.
What sets you apart as an investor?
We are a local investor, not a tourist investor that flies in to do a deal and flies out. When we launched our first fund in 2018, most of the series A and B investments in Africa were led by global funds, which meant the teams were not based locally, but in Europe or the U.S. If you try and explain to somebody in New York the problem of access to health care in Lagos or transferring money, they won’t get it. But we can understand the problem.
Given the current funding landscape, what is your elevator pitch to your investors?
We tell investors to invest in African tech — not because of impact, but because this is a fast-growing sector. We are growing a middle class, everybody is coming online on smartphones, and there are fundamental problems that can be solved using tech. We have a growing and improving pool of talented tech entrepreneurs.
