Today we are making a visual change at Raise. It’s still us, just better. This represents our internal growth from just a cap table product to a full-stack equity platform that can design a Pan-African company’s journey, from launch to liquidity. Our vision is stronger than ever: to raise Africa, one startup at a time.
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We're introducing a new product line and brand called raise.africa. Our goal is to create more equity owners in the African startup ecosystem. We've helped thousands of entrepreneurs, lawyers and investors in the African technology ecosystem fix the problem of equity ownership, and we've learned about the complexity of servicing corporate structures across Africa. Our dream is to rebuild Africa’s capital markets engine and enable founders, employees and investors to finance Africa’s economic renaissance.
Our core thesis is that the next generation of entrepreneurs, startups, and private companies will build a better Africa. We believe that we're all on the same team, and that shared equity ownership across the ecosystem could get us to our goal even faster.
We're launching early access at raise.africa, where you will get early access to Raise Core, a set of products dedicated to making equity management simple for African founders, from launch to liquidity. We’ll also be launching Raise Labs, a collection of our research over the years to build Africa’s equity on-chain. We’ve experimented all kinds of digital equities, from helping MakerDAO build its real-estate bridge for DAI, building on ERC standards for equity and ideating indexes for African equity on the Lightning Network. It’s time to share our learnings and mission.
Here’s our story.
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In 2019, we launched Raise when African startups had only raised $700 million dollars for the whole year of 2018. We started as a cap table product and our fundamental goal never changed: to create more equity owners in the next generation of the African startup ecosystem. Since then, we’ve seen an increase in the value of investments in Africa’s technology ecosystem. Next quarter, we’ll pass $20 billion dollars invested in this ecosystem. That’s 2 trillion Kenyan shillings, 3 trillion Nigerian Naira and 360 billion South African rands.
Every part of that total value represents the sale of equity ownership in African startups. That means a lot of corporations are being built every day across the ecosystem. Those corporations enable teams of people to group together and scale ownership. The African technology ecosystem’s ownership network is a dense network of SAFEs, shares, flips, debt and options that are owned by various fund & syndicate structures. If we drill even further, you’ll find pensions, real estate trusts, pension funds, public stock exchanges and ownership vehicles scattered across the continent of Africa.
As a founder, you know that equity ownership is everything you’re driving towards. It’s how you get investors onboard, it’s how you get employees to build incredible things and it guides your most important business decisions for all your stakeholders. As Raise, we see equity ownership as a tool to scale economic independence across Africa, which is mission-critical for accommodating Africa’s growth.
Africa’s ownership graph is large and hard to quantify because most of it is on paper or scattered throughout excel sheets and data rooms. But, we do know that if you mapped the ownership graph with predictive models of Africa’s population growth, we can build a platform that creates more owners by bridging private and public capital markets in a way that we can fund our own Pan-African economic agendas.
A successful bridge that can collect and clean $20 billion dollars worth of equity in African companies, could become one of Africa’s largest stock exchanges. Over the years we’ve drilled deeper and worked with the biggest funds, law firms & startups across the ecosystem. We’ve learned a lot and there’s a lot left to learn.
Who knew this market was so big?
