Nigeria’s federal government has made one of its boldest plays yet in the battle to keep startup talent — and capital — on home soil.
The Bank of Industry (BOI) has formally appointed Kuramo Capital Management as the fund manager for the $170.6 million Investment in Digital and Creative Enterprises (iDICE) Fund of Funds, in what the bank is calling one of the largest government-backed investment vehicles dedicated to the technology and creative sectors on the African continent.
The deal was sealed at a contract signing ceremony in Abuja, where BOI Managing Director and CEO Dr. Olasupo Olusi and Kuramo Capital CEO Wale Adeosun formalised the partnership.
How the Money Works
The fund’s structure is built around a classic blended finance playbook. The federal government is putting in $85.3 million as an anchor investment through the iDICE Programme — a 30 per cent first-loss tranche designed specifically to de-risk the vehicle and pull in institutional money that would otherwise sit on the sidelines.
Kuramo Capital’s job is now to match that figure from private investors, bringing the total minimum capitalisation to $170.6 million.
The iDICE Fund of Funds won’t write cheques directly to startups. Instead, it will invest through a curated network of venture capital and micro-VC funds, which will in turn back technology and creative enterprises. The financial targets are ambitious: a net internal rate of return of 20 per cent and a net money multiple of 2.4x.
Going Beyond Lagos
Perhaps the most significant — and hardest to execute — part of the mandate is geographic reach. The selected VC funds will be required to back founders across all 36 states of Nigeria and the Federal Capital Territory.
For a startup ecosystem that has historically been concentrated in Lagos, with secondary nodes in Abuja and Port Harcourt, that is a genuine structural ambition. BOI says the design is deliberate: the Fund of Funds model is meant to “democratise access to venture financing” and pull early-stage capital into cities and regions that traditional investors have largely skipped.
Cutting the Cord on Foreign Capital
The subtext of the iDICE Programme is one that Nigeria’s policymakers have been increasingly vocal about: the need to reduce the country’s dependence on foreign investors for early-stage funding.
Nigerian startups have historically leaned heavily on overseas VCs and development finance institutions to close seed and Series A rounds — a dynamic that creates fragility when global risk appetite shifts, as it did dramatically in 2022–2023.
Dr. Olusi put it plainly at the signing ceremony: the initiative underscores the government’s commitment to strengthening Nigeria’s innovation landscape from within.
The iDICE Programme layers additional infrastructure onto the funding push. BOI is simultaneously establishing and upgrading digital and creative hubs at 66 universities and polytechnics nationwide, in partnership with the National Universities Commission (NUC) and the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE). On the debt side, the bank has also introduced the BOI/iDICE Debt Fund and the IsDB Murabaha Debt Fund, which together earmark $110 million for tech and creative startups that need non-dilutive financing.
Why Kuramo Capital?
Kuramo Capital Management is a New York- and Lagos-based investment firm with deep roots in African private markets. The appointment of a firm with that dual identity reflects BOI’s intent to bridge international institutional credibility with on-the-ground African market knowledge — exactly the combination needed to make the private capital raise credible to foreign limited partners.
The Bigger Picture
The iDICE Fund arrives at a moment when African venture capital is in a complex state. Deal volumes and valuations that soared in 2021 have normalised significantly, but the underlying demographic and digital growth story in Nigeria — Africa’s most populous country and largest economy — remains intact.
Government-backed fund of funds structures have worked in other markets: Israel’s Yozma programme in the 1990s is the most cited example of how sovereign anchor capital can catalyse a self-sustaining VC ecosystem. Nigeria is explicitly trying to replicate some of that logic.
Whether it works depends on execution: the quality of the VC funds selected, the willingness of those funds to genuinely deploy outside Lagos, and Kuramo’s success in closing the private capital raise. But the architecture is sound, and the commitment of anchor capital at this scale sends a signal the market has been waiting for.
For Nigerian founders who have spent years pitching to investors based in San Francisco or London, the promise is simple: the money should be coming to you.
