The numbers are blunt and they haven’t moved much. In 2025, female-founded African startups raised $254 million across 90 deals — a 60% improvement over 2024 in absolute terms, but still just 10% of total equity funding and 19% of deal count. Male founders raised on average 8.5 times the amount of VC funding as their female counterparts — down from 13.2 times the year before, but hardly cause for celebration. The structural gap between ambition and access in African venture capital remains one of the ecosystem’s defining features.
Into that gap steps First Circle Capital, an all-female-led, first-time fund manager focused on pre-seed and seed-stage fintech across Africa. And as of this week, it has secured a critical vote of confidence: a $3 million seed investment from the Dutch Good Growth Fund (DGGF), the Netherlands’ public investment vehicle for frontier and emerging markets.
The DGGF partnership, announced Monday, February 17, is part of a broader $30 million fundraise for First Circle’s Africa Fund I — a vehicle specifically designed to provide the “first-check” capital that African fintech founders need to prove product-market fit, build initial traction, and reach the stage where institutional investors might actually take them seriously.
First Circle Capital is betting that by combining deep sector expertise, boots-on-the-ground local intelligence, and a gender-inclusive lens, it can surface the fintech companies that would otherwise be overlooked in the earliest, most vulnerable stages of company-building. The Dutch government, through DGGF, is betting that First Circle is right.
What DGGF Brings to the Table
The Dutch Good Growth Fund is not a traditional venture investor. Managed by a consortium of Triple Jump and PwC on behalf of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, DGGF focuses on enabling entrepreneurship in frontier markets through systemic and inclusive growth, using a fund-of-funds model to invest in local funds and financial institutions that can reach SMEs in up to 73 selected countries.
DGGF’s mandate is explicitly developmental. It targets what’s known in development finance circles as the “missing middle” — businesses that are too large for microfinance but too small or risky for traditional commercial lenders. The financing gap for SMEs in emerging markets is estimated at nearly $5 trillion globally, and DGGF’s thesis is that backing local fund managers who understand the terrain is the most effective way to close that gap.
For DGGF, the First Circle partnership aligns with three strategic priorities: supporting first-time fund managers who would struggle to raise institutional capital on their own; promoting gender-lens investing; and backing the fintech sector, which remains the primary enabler of digital economic activity across Africa.
DGGF is also explicitly designed to support first-time managers. The fund provides not just capital but also capacity building, helping emerging fund managers develop the governance, portfolio management, and fundraising capabilities they need to compete for institutional LPs. DGGF is tailored to first-time managers and finance providers who want to implement a gender-lens strategy through seed and investment capital, and in supporting financial intermediaries with an explicit gender lens strategy, more female entrepreneurs actually get the financing they need.
That mandate is a near-perfect match for First Circle Capital, which brings together an all-female executive team with deep operational credentials and a focus on the most underserved segment of the African fintech market.
First Circle’s Operating Model: Hands-On, Early-Stage, Africa-Native
First Circle Capital is not a passive investor. The fund employs a structured value-creation strategy based on four key pillars: facilitating follow-on capital for startups, strengthening data-driven management practices, providing access to global fintech expertise, and leveraging a network of local venture partners who assist with sourcing, due diligence, and hands-on portfolio support.
That local network is critical. African markets are profoundly heterogeneous. What works in Nigeria doesn’t automatically scale to Kenya; what scales in Kenya may face regulatory headwinds in South Africa. First Circle’s model is built around local venture partners embedded in key markets across the continent, who can navigate fragmented regulatory environments, diverse consumer behaviors, and the operational complexity that comes with building startups in frontier economies.
The fund is managed by co-founders Selma Ribica, a former M-Pesa executive and early-stage fintech investor, and Agnes Aistleitner Kisuule, an entrepreneur experienced in building companies in frontier markets. Both bring operational expertise and a pan-African network to the firm’s investment approach.
Ribica’s M-Pesa background is particularly relevant. M-Pesa, Kenya’s mobile money platform, is arguably the most successful fintech innovation ever to come out of Africa — and its success was built on deep local understanding of user behavior, regulatory dynamics, and infrastructure constraints. That’s the kind of domain knowledge First Circle is betting will give it an edge in sourcing and supporting early-stage fintechs before they hit the radar of larger, international VCs.
The Fintech Thesis: Still the Dominant Force, Despite Diversification
Fintech remains the structural pillar of African venture capital, even as other sectors grow. According to Partech’s 2025 report on African tech funding, fintech remains the continent’s leading venture capital sector, with African fintech companies raising $769 million in 2025, accounting for 25% of total equity funding. That’s down from fintech’s peak years, when it commanded north of 40% of all VC dollars, but the sector still leads by a wide margin.
The reason fintech continues to dominate is structural. Financial infrastructure is the rails on which all other digital commerce runs. You can’t scale e-commerce, logistics, healthtech, or edtech without functional payments, digital identity, credit infrastructure, and banking integrations. Fintech isn’t just a vertical — it’s the enabling layer for the entire digital economy.
Reports by Boston Consulting Group and QED identify Africa as the fastest-growing fintech market globally, with revenues projected to grow 13-fold by 2030. That growth is being driven by mobile money penetration, declining cash-on-delivery usage, regulatory modernization in markets like Nigeria and Kenya, and the sheer volume of underbanked consumers — over 400 million adults across sub-Saharan Africa who lack access to formal financial services.
First Circle’s investment thesis is that the fintech companies best positioned to capture that growth are being started right now, in the pre-seed and seed stages, often by founders who won’t make it past their first capital raise without patient, operationally savvy investors who can help them navigate early-stage execution risk.
The Follow-On Capital Problem: Series A Remains the Valley of Death
One of the most significant structural challenges First Circle is designed to solve is what insiders call the “follow-on gap.” One of the most significant hurdles for African founders is securing Series A and B funding. First Circle actively facilitates access to downstream capital networks to ensure their ventures don’t stall after the initial seed phase.
The problem is well-documented. African startups can often raise pre-seed or seed capital from local angels, family offices, or early-stage funds. But when it comes time to raise Series A — typically $3 million to $10 million — the number of Africa-focused institutional investors drops off sharply. Many founders who successfully prove product-market fit at seed stage end up stuck, unable to access the growth capital they need to scale.
First Circle’s model is built to address this. The fund doesn’t just write a check and disappear. It actively works to connect portfolio companies with later-stage investors, ensures startups are building with the governance and data infrastructure that institutional LPs expect, and helps founders position their businesses for Series A readiness.
With a target fund size of $30 million, First Circle has already invested in 15 startups across eight African markets, with 30% of its portfolio led or co-founded by women and half operating across multiple countries. That’s a portfolio construction strategy designed to derisk concentration while ensuring meaningful exposure to cross-border fintech plays — companies that can operate in multiple regulatory environments and serve regional, not just national, markets.
The Full Capital Stack: IFC, We-Fi, and Global Tech Entrepreneurs
The DGGF commitment is part of a much larger fundraise. In addition to the $3 million from DGGF, First Circle has secured $6 million from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), part of the World Bank Group, and $2 million from the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi), alongside backing from FSD Africa, MSMEDA, Axian Group, and global tech entrepreneurs including Jens Hilgers, Tim Schumacher, Peter Steinberger, and Steve Anavi.
That LP roster is significant. The IFC’s $6 million anchor investment, announced in November 2025, was one of the clearest institutional endorsements of First Circle’s model. IFC investments carry enormous signaling value in emerging markets — they de-risk the investment for other LPs, provide access to IFC’s global network, and often unlock follow-on capital from other development finance institutions.
The We-Fi commitment is equally strategic. We-Fi is a global partnership focused explicitly on unlocking financing for women-led and women-focused businesses in developing countries. We-Fi’s co-investment is intended to bolster the fund’s capital base and support gender inclusion within its investment strategy. The fund is expected to implement gender-smart investing practices, including specific targets for investing in women-founded or women-led fintech startups.
That commitment is not performative. First Circle’s 30% portfolio allocation to women-led or co-founded companies is already well above the African ecosystem average. Female-led startups raised just 2% of funding in 2024 — and less than 1% if grants are excluded — underlining persistent gender gaps.
The individual tech entrepreneur backing — Hilgers, Schumacher, Steinberger, Anavi — adds another layer of validation. These are not passive family office checks; they’re operators who have built and scaled tech companies globally and are putting personal capital behind First Circle’s thesis.
The Gender Paradox: Women Writing Checks, Men Receiving Them
One of the most striking dynamics in African VC right now is what might be called the gender paradox. According to a January 2026 report from the African Private Capital Association (AVCA), while the recipients of capital remain predominantly male, the people writing the cheques on the continent are increasingly female, and at rates that outperform the rest of the world.
In other words: African VC is producing more female fund managers than almost any other region globally — but those fund managers are still struggling to direct capital to female founders at scale.
Part of the challenge is pipeline. In sub-Saharan Africa, up to 30% of roles in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) sectors are held by women, putting the region marginally ahead of the global average. However, 47% of STEM graduates from African universities are women, but this number dwindles to 23% when these graduates move into the tech workforce, and dwindles more when these women move into tech leadership.
But pipeline alone doesn’t explain the gap. Women-led startups receive less than 5% of total investment capital, even though they often outperform male-led enterprises in terms of return on investment. The challenge is structural: unconscious bias, limited access to networks, higher collateral requirements for debt, and the compounding disadvantage of being excluded from early-stage capital, which makes it harder to reach the traction milestones needed to attract later-stage investors.
Funds like First Circle are part of the solution. By explicitly targeting women-led and women-focused businesses, and by building portfolio support infrastructure designed to help founders navigate the gender gap, First Circle is attempting to rewire the pipeline from the earliest stage.
What Happens Next
First Circle is not the only women-led, Africa-focused fund in the market. Other notable players include Janngo Capital, which closed its second fund at approximately $78 million in 2024 and invests 50% of its capital in women-led businesses; Alitheia IDF, which operates the largest gender-lens private equity fund in Africa at $100 million; and Five35 Ventures, which targets female-focused and tech-enabled startups at pre-seed and seed stages.
But the competitive set remains small, and demand vastly outstrips supply. The $5 trillion SME financing gap that DGGF references is not a metaphor — it’s a structural feature of African and global emerging markets. The fintech companies that can close that gap, that can build digital credit infrastructure, payments rails, savings products, and insurance distribution at scale, are being started by founders who often can’t access the initial capital they need to test their ideas.
First Circle’s bet is that by showing up early, staying hands-on, and building the connective tissue to help founders reach Series A, it can capture outsized returns while enabling outsized impact. The DGGF partnership gives the fund the capital, credibility, and capacity-building support to execute on that thesis.
Whether it works will depend on factors far beyond First Circle’s control — macroeconomic stability, regulatory predictability, the trajectory of mobile money adoption, the willingness of later-stage investors to continue backing African fintechs. But the initial signs are promising. Fifteen portfolio companies across eight markets. Thirty percent women-led. Institutional backing from IFC, DGGF, and We-Fi. Experienced operators at the helm.
The African fintech ecosystem doesn’t need more capital going to the same companies at Series B. It needs more first checks written to founders who would otherwise never get a second one.
That’s the gap First Circle Capital is built to fill. And as of this week, it has $3 million more in ammunition to do it.
