In January 2025, Oui Capital, an Africa-focused venture capital firm, told its investors that it had returned its $4 million debut fund in full, putting it among the small group of African fund managers to have returned capital to investors during the current cycle.

Oui Capital achieved this feat largely through a $150,000 investment in Moniepoint in 2019. When the Nigerian fintech crossed a $1 billion valuation five years later, Oui Capital’s stake was worth roughly $8 million, generating a 53x return on a single investment and one of the most-cited outcomes in African venture capital. 

It is the kind of result that can define a firm. But according to Olu Oyinsan, Oui Capital’s general partner, it is not the reason the first fund worked.

Even without Moniepoint, Fund I would have returned twice the fund’s size, according to Oyinsan. With Moniepoint included, the fund returns stand at 4x. That distinction matters because a large exit can sometimes obscure an otherwise average portfolio. 

The first fund also had a second exit from AMOpportunities, a US healthcare company acquired by a private equity group. Oui Capital led pre-seed rounds in Duplo, Bento, MarketForce in Kenya, and Akiba Digital in South Africa. Those companies remain in the portfolio and are still performing well, Oyinsan told TechCabal.

Founded in 2018 by Oyinsan and Francesco Andreoli, Oui Capital backs pre-seed and seed-stage technology companies across Africa, primarily in digital commerce, enterprise software, fintech, and human capital. 

The founders studied the market before developing the firm’s investment thesis and looking for companies to fit it. With Moniepoint, they bet that offline payments were being held back by high transaction-failure rates and that the company’s founders had the operational experience to solve the problem. 

Fund II, which the firm began deploying in 2022, is a deliberate fix for what Fund I could not do. Cheques now go up to $750,000, averaging around $400,000 to $500,000, and can reach $1 million across two rounds. Ownership targets have moved from 2% to 3% up to 5% to 10%. 

The portfolio is getting smaller, too. Fund I held about 20 companies, while Fund II is expected to close with 10 or 11. That decision followed the firm’s own post-mortem, which found that five of the six companies it wrote off early were its smallest investments: deals made with lower conviction to keep an option open. 

In this conversation, Oyinsan explains why he believes no African seed fund should be larger than $50 million, the deal he still regrets passing on, how returning a fund changes the conversation with investors, and why he believes African venture capital is facing an existential crisis that the industry must address before investors stop coming back.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What type of companies are you turning down now that you would have funded when you started?

SaaS companies that AI prompts can build.

Why was Oui Capital able to identify companies like Moniepoint before most of the market?

I feel like we approached this very differently. Francesco and I are basically entrepreneurs. We are hustlers. We did not approach building a fund the way most people do, which is a financial institution. We approached it as getting money to back entrepreneurs. We actually studied the market before we built a thesis on what we thought the market needed.

For example, we had a hunch that the major problem for payments at the time was transaction failure rates. That was a huge hunch, and when we met the company, it aligned with the same hunch they had. What was added to it was that they also had the experience to take a decent stab at fixing it. 

I will not tell you that we knew exactly how it was going to turn out, but we knew that if it went well, it would turn out this way. The most important thing is understanding the market for yourself as an investor, as a player in the market, and then figuring out who you think might be able to solve those problems. If you solve those problems, you become a successful company. That is how we went about it. And it was not just Moniepoint; we went about it the same way in several industries and sectors, figuring out what we thought would be a successful business.

In Fund I you wrote $150,000 cheques. In Fund II you go up to $750,000 or higher. Can the same approach still work at that size?

The short answer is yes. By the way, in Fund I, $150,000 was our highest cheque — there was a range, and that was the top of it. In Fund II, we can go up to $750,000, but our average cheque is around $400,000 to $500,000. We can go up to $750,000, or even $1 million, over two funding rounds.

It is yes and no on the approach because it is not cookie-cutter. It is not an accelerator where you just decide the cheques you are writing. What we found is that in Fund I we were constrained by fund size. Even then, we would have loved to write $500,000 cheques; the fund size limited which companies we could go into and where we could play. 

Fund II was fixing what we wished we could do in Fund I. If I had a bigger fund in Fund I, I would not have written $150,000 into Moniepoint; it would have been bigger. That is why we wrote the maximum we could, which shows you how much conviction we had. We maxed it out. There were other companies we wrote $25,000 and $50,000 cheques to. Moniepoint and maybe three other companies were the ones we wrote the full $150,000 into.

What really changed is that we wanted to fix what we could not do the first time. We wanted to lead pre-seed rounds and participate meaningfully in seed rounds. We wanted to shrink the size of our portfolio, because when you write bigger cheques, you generally have fewer companies. We wanted to be able to set the terms of rounds. Most importantly, we wanted higher ownership stakes.

In Fund I we usually took between 1% and 5%, averaging around 2% to 3%. In Fund II we wanted to go up to 5% to 10% so that after rounds of dilution we still had meaningful ownership. It is a lot of maths. We modelled it out, and that is where we landed on cheque sizes. You cannot look at cheque size in isolation, because if you write a $750,000 cheque into a company valued at $15 million, you end up with less ownership than a $100,000 cheque into a company valued at $4 million. Fund II was a refined version of what we were meant to achieve in Fund I.

If you take Moniepoint out of Fund I, did you still return the fund? 

First of all, Moniepoint is not the only exit we have had in Fund I. There is also AMOpportunities, a US healthcare company that was acquired, which gave us distributions. It is less prominent in African media because it is a totally US play. We did have a small portion of the portfolio used for global plays, even though most of it was Africa. We had one exit from the US market and one from the African market.

That Fund I portfolio is a 4x portfolio as I speak to you. Without Moniepoint, it would probably be a 2x portfolio, which is still pretty good. Remember, in that fund we also had the US exit already realised. We led the pre-seed in Duplo, Bento, MarketForce, and Akiba Digital, the leading credit scoring platform in South Africa. They are all in that fund. Moniepoint’s story is great, but if you took Moniepoint out, we would still have a returned fund.

On Fund II, how many companies have you invested in, and how has the pace been?

In Fund I we did about 20 companies, and when we built the strategy for Fund II we decided to go lower and be more selective. We realised there were companies we should not have invested in. It stretched us in terms of managing the portfolio, and we learned from that.

Here is an interesting finding: when we did a post-mortem on our first fund, about five of the six companies we had to write off early were our smallest cheques—the $25,000 and $40,000 cheques. We decided as a team that we were not going to do those low-conviction deals anymore. That automatically meant we expected the portfolio to shrink to about 10 to 15 companies. We are not a spray-and-pray fund. We are not a big-portfolio fund. We are very selective, and we lean into the companies we have conviction about.

We now have about seven companies in that fund. I think we will wrap up around 10 or 11. It is coming to the tail end of the investment period.

You mentioned companies you should not have invested in. Can you expand on what type they were beyond the low-conviction cheque size?

Investing is a conviction-driven game. We realised that some of our worst-performing companies were ones we did not have strong conviction on in the investment committee, but we did anyway for optionality, and they ended up exactly as we thought they might.

What you also find out as a young fund manager is that money is not your scarcest resource. Time is. Struggling companies take more of your time than companies doing well. It is counterproductive to your fund returns because you spend most of your time on the companies that will give you the least return, just because you do not want them to die. It is almost like tending to a sick baby, and you abandon the healthy baby to care for the sick one.

Investing is a power-law activity, meaning you have to double down on winners. Going forward, we decided that those low-conviction deals with smaller cheques were something we would simply stop doing. That is why we moved naturally to a smaller portfolio and why you will not hear us announcing a deal every other day. We are very selective, and we go into deals we feel strong conviction for.

Which companies do you wish you had invested in?

I used to have a list of companies I thought I would regret missing. There were three on it.

The first was Gokada, when it was initially led by Fahim, bless his memory. That was around my time at Ingressive, maybe 2018 or 2019.

The second was Basepaws, a US company doing DNA testing for animals, especially cats. It was led by an amazing female founder who pitched us in Boston.

The third was Yellow Card, which my co-founder Francesco was interested in. I discouraged him from pursuing the deal. In hindsight, I think it would have been a great deal for us. I thought it was overpriced at the time, and this was when there were so many crypto companies popping up, so it was hard to decipher the moats. He still reminds me about it. In hindsight, Yellow Card is probably the only company left on that list, and I keep wishing them the best.

The rest of the companies I wish I had invested in, we never saw them. There was no missed opportunity, so it was not that we had the chance and did not take it.

Following the return of Fund I, has it changed the type of LPs you are meeting?

The short answer is yes, but the long answer is not really.

If you look at venture capital data, there is very low correlation between fund performance and AUM growth. It is not necessarily the funds performing well that are raising more capital. That is true globally, and there are probably two reasons for it.

One: fundraising as a skill is different from fund management or from being a great or profitable investor. Being a great fundraiser and having the energy to fundraise are separate skills, and a lot of firms do not have both equally.

Two: funds that are performing well have a lower need to raise a lot of money. In fact, there is an incentive to raise less if you are a great performer because you keep more of the gains. Think about a $5 million fund manager who does 4x — they create $16 million. A GP who has created $16 million in wealth is more likely to raise another $4 million and keep doing that because they have found a profitable sweet spot. But a GP who has raised $4 million and has no carry has a greater incentive to raise more because it is existential. They need management fees or the business dies.

I say yes because profitable fund managers have easier audiences with LPs. Forget what is happening in Africa, which I call ‘venture philanthropy’—it is turning into an NGO business at this point, because a lot of funds are not doing well. But in the real sense, investors are looking for returns, and you are more likely to take a meeting with a fund that is delivering them.

It has changed the conversation, but not because of the Moniepoint exit alone. An exit alone cannot make a fund profitable. It is how much is returned to LPs. You can have an exit that does not make your fund profitable. It is the raw fund performance data, like the internal rate of return (IRR) and distribution to paid-in capital  (DPI), that are the gold standards. 

If you have those, it changes the conversation with LPs and puts you in a better position to negotiate terms. All our exits, and all the companies we have not exited, are performing well. Fund performance is what changes it. Some LPs do not care which company the exit came from—they just want to know a manager can deploy successfully and generate above-market returns.

Would you say you have more leverage now that you have returned the fund?

Absolutely, because it has been proven that our product is good. It also puts less pressure on you to raise bigger funds. I have a dream that at some point maybe half or the majority of the money we invest at Oui Capital is just partners’ money. It gives you a lot more flexibility, and because fundraising is distracting, it lets you cut that out of your activities.

It is like anything else. An employee with a great track record who you are trying to poach has greater leverage to negotiate salary or to work from home. Investors want profits. Funds that have shown they can be consistently profitable have greater negotiating leverage.

Where does Fund III stand?

We are still investing Fund II. We started in 2022 and have a four to five-year investment period, so we are still actively deploying.

There will be a third fund. I cannot confirm the size or the strategy. It will still be majority Africa, but there might be a global play in it. Right now we are focused on creating the same results in Fund II that we did in Fund I. That is more important than going out to raise another fund. But for sure there will be a third fund, and several after that. This is going to be a multi-fund manager. They might not follow the nomenclature of Fund III or Fund IV, but we will manage money, put it to work, and create great returns for investors.

How have your assumptions about African tech changed since you started investing?

Africa is not a place for big funds. We are not there yet, especially for seed-stage funds. I personally do not think a seed-stage fund in Africa should be more than $50 million, maximum $100 million—if you want to make good returns. If you do not want good returns, or you want a big management fee, that is a different case.

I also do not think African deal flow is in a place for a large number of portfolio companies. Africa is tough to do business in, and as a value-adding VC, you need bandwidth to support companies. A smaller portfolio will create a more profitable fund.

Third, we cannot innovate our way out of underdevelopment. Infrastructural development creates more opportunities for startups to build on. As a VC or a founder, we need to root for and support the government, and hope the country develops infrastructurally, so we have more verticals to play in. You cannot innovate your way out of core underdevelopment.

Another myth is that markets are as big as we think. Nigeria is not a 200 million-person market. You have to cut out totally illiterate people, people with no access to financial inclusion or bank accounts, people with no internet access, and people with no purchasing power. By the time you cut those four groups out, the market is much smaller than you assumed.

Those are the four assumptions I came in with that have changed over the years.

What do you think about the current VC landscape and what the future holds?

I think we are in an existential crisis. We need to start making venture capital profitable, or the industry might not exist much longer. We need to double down, invest in the best entrepreneurs, and support them. We need to make it profitable for investors, or they are not going to keep coming back.

We report on companies using metrics that are non-financial—for example, how many people were helped. Venture is not philanthropy, even though impact investing exists. We do not want venture capital to look like philanthropy. We do not want VC firms to start looking like NGOs, because it dampens everything. I go around the world raising money, and we need to get it together as an ecosystem, support our entrepreneurs, and create great returns for investors so we can continue to be backed at both the company and fund level.

This will also deepen local participation. Africans are very return-oriented. If we can show returns, we will deepen local participation in investing in startups and in funds. We need to fix it.

True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks. Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.