Samurai Incubate Inc. has officially closed its second Africa fund “Samurai Africa 2nd General Partnership” after successfully having raised 2.026 billion yen ($18.6 million).
Since January 2020, the firm kept fundraising despite the COVID crisis, and a total of 54 corporate and individual investors participated. The raised amount surpassed the targeted amount of 2 billion yen ($18.4 million).
Kentaro Sakakibara founded Samurai Incubate, and in 2018, the firm began investing in Africa by establishing a subsidiary called Leapfrog Ventures. From August 2018, Samurai Incubate invested $2.5 million in 20 African startups via the newly established firm. Then in June 2019, renamed itself Samurai Incubate Africa.
Samurai Incubate will accelerate investments in startups in Africa with the support of its Limited Partners (LPs).
Notably, Toyota Tsusho Corporation, which has a diverse network across the continent and founded by Mobility 54, a Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) for Africa joined as one of the LPs.
In addition, most investors are professionals with expertise in overseas investment or have experience in funding startups, expanding organisations, and growing businesses in a variety of sectors, and made the company go public or successfully made it acquired.
Selected startups and portfolio companies would be offered opportunities of matching them with a certain LP if there are needs by leveraging the LP’s network, knowledge and know-hows in order to support these companies.
Recently, in addition to three countries of Kenya, South Africa, and Nigeria, Samurai Incubate added Egypt as one of the focused countries. We also decided to increase the minimum amount of investment to 80 million yen ($800,000) per deal in order to meet the needs of a wide range of companies.
Samurai Ventures started investments into African startups in July 2018 and its portfolio reached 26 as of today, As of today, companies invested from our second fund are Eden Life, Evolve Credit, Shyft Power Solutions, FMG, Oneport, and Pricepally.
