Last week in brief...Technology companies proved to be the main source of deal activity in Africa last week. We lead with a Series A investment by a US-based investor. Five Elms Capital, an investor based in Kansas City, backed Skynamo, a B2B field sales app and cloud management software company founded in Stellenbosch with $30 million. The company's customers include manufacturers, wholesalers, and distributors who deploy their sales teams in the field. The money's going to be used for sales and marketing initiatives to scale its business in the US, UK, and Southern Africa.
Flutterwave, a digital payments infrastructure firm, has landed a healthy amount of capital for its Series B round from many of the same investors who backed its oversubscribed Series A in October 2018. This time the round was co-led by Greycroft Partners and eVentures. The company will use the fresh capital to push its expansion into Francophone and North Africa.
Another private equity-backed payments company announced a deal of its own last week. Paga, based in Lagos, is buying Apposit, a software development company registered in the USA with primary operations in Addis Ababa. Apposit has been one of Paga's strategic partners since 2009, providing a dedicated engineering team to work on development under Paga's Chief Technology Officer, Eric Chijioke.
Dubai-based Emerging Markets Property Group is investing additional capital into a firm that it acquired in 2018. Mubawab, a real estate listings platform is benefiting from an additional $7 million which will be used to hire more people to accelerate the development of its service in Morocco and the broader Maghreb region.
In the first of two debt deals last week, TLG Capital confirmed it is expanding the size of the facility being provided to Atlas Mara by the investor's Credit Opportunities Fund. The deal provides the pan-African banking platform with an additional $20 million of financing which will be used to bolster the balance sheets of its banks on the continent. TLG first backed Atlas Mara in December 2018, investing $10 million from the Credit Opportunities Fund as a 2-year loan.
CDC is providing debt financing to Mettle Solar Investments. The deal boosts the amount of capital invested in the company following a $7.5 million equity investment last year made via CDC's new electricity development investment platform, Gridworks Development Partners. This time, the British DFI's Energy Access and Efficiency team are investing $10 million of debt in the company which will be used to accelerate the takeup of cleaner, cheaper energy sources by businesses on the continent.
Amethis Finance is reportedly close to taking a stake in a Kenyan supermarket chain. According to a report in Business Daily, the Paris-headquartered private equity firm is in the final stages of negotiating a deal which would give it a 30% stake in Navais, which has over 60 retail outlets across Kenya. In addition to agreeing on financial terms, the transaction must get the go-ahead from regulatory authorities before it can conclude.
As part of a slew of announcements coinciding with the first-ever UK-Africa Investment Conference in London last week, British DFI CDC Group confirmed several commitments to Africa-focused private equity funds. Among them is a €25 million investment in Mediterrania Capital's third fund which is aiming to raise €250 million (almost $300 million) by its final close. The fund is targeting growth capital investments in companies in North Africa as well as a select number of sub-Saharan countries.
Adiwalé Partners' maiden fund is another of the beneficiaries of CDC's fund commitments. The fund is now $20 million closer to its final target of $85 million, which, following a recent $55 million first close, is now well in sight. The fund will back small and medium-sized businesses in Francophone West Africa.
And finally this week, Ascent Capital and Fanisi Capital are planning to merge their funds' investments In a bid to maximize returns for their investors. The proposed combination is subject to regulatory approvals, which are expected to be granted by the end of the first quarter.
That's it for this week. As always, you can review these and other stories by clicking through to this week's preview edition of the newsletter.
Allan Cunningham is a senior media executive who has spent the last 15 years of his career working for some of the world’s most respected M&A and Private Equity media companies including Dow Jones’s publications Private Equity Analyst and VentureWire and most recently, The Deal. He has built a number of successful digital and event content businesses, both subscription and sponsor-supported, delivering information and content-marketing services to clients in the M&A and broader deal ecosystem. He recently struck out on his own and launched Rowayton Press, a multi-platform media company focused on the private capital opportunities in emerging and frontier markets. Mr. Cunningham holds a Bachelors degree from Liverpool John Moores University in the UK.
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