Driving Africa’s Tech Revolution: Inside P1 Ventures
Spotlight on P1 Ventures with Mikael Hajjar, Co-Founder and Managing Partner
P1 Ventures is the first partner of choice for the most visionary African technology founders, with US$50mn AUM of early-stage capital deployed in 34 companies across two funds.
‘‘We constantly challenge ourselves to punch above our weight and think outside the box. We have been seeking to attract the best entrepreneurial African talents. We are focused on a specific type of founder persona that combines at least strong unique relevant insight, curiosity and resilience’’
Tell us about P1 Ventures, highlighting key milestones and achievements in the industry.
We launched a proof-of-concept fund in early 2020, making our first investment in Algeria’s ride-hailing app, Yassir, which subsequently secured a US$150mn Series B round led by Mary Meeker’s BOND Capital. In 2023, we raised a second fund, expanded our team, and onboarded IFC as our first institutional investor. We also closed major investments in Nuitee (Morocco) and Raenest (Nigeria), which secured capital from top-tier VC firms.
What are your key priorities and objectives over the next 12 months?
We have been building a diverse, pan-African team and nurturing a contrarian culture. There are now five of us working full-time, with complementary backgrounds as former operators, investors, and founders. We are locals and have boots on the ground in Cairo, Lagos, Nairobi and Dakar. Many of us have studied, worked or lived abroad, enabling us to bring local and global perspectives to our work.
We constantly challenge ourselves to punch above our weight and think outside the box. We have been seeking to attract the best entrepreneurial African talents. We are focused on a specific type of founder persona that combines at least strong unique relevant insight, curiosity and resilience. Unique insights come from domain expertise and intimacy with a specific unmet market need. Resilience and curiosity may be the most important attributes for our founders — building businesses in Africa may be one the most challenging markets to operate in!
What unique strengths, expertise, or strategic approach does your organisation bring to our industry?
We may be the only GP that combines an entrepreneurial experience on the continent (built and scaled ventures in South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt and Kenya) with an international track record (invested in Uber and Airbnb as early as Series B). We’re also grateful to stand on the shoulders of giants: our senior advisors and investors built Index Ventures (one of the top VCs funds globally that is behind Skype, Adyen and Datadog among others) and scaled Uber globally.
We’ve been building our in-house data science tool to scale up talent and deal sourcing. Our dashboard compiles a repository of over 10,000 companies and talent from both public and proprietary sources. We continue to develop our tool and use certain criteria — for example, repeat founders and top tier education or work — that allow us to flag promising founders to invest in and senior hires to scout for our portfolio companies early on.
What are P1 Ventures’ core values and how do they contribute to your success in the industry?
We’re all about conviction, not diversification. We review over 500 investment opportunities yearly and only move forward with a handful of them. This results in a fairly concentrated portfolio (fewer than 25 companies) which is quite atypical for an early-stage technology venture capital firm. We love actively supporting our founders to build and scale their businesses. We spend a lot of time working very closely with them to exceed the challenging growth milestones we set.
We cultivate a strong bias for action coupled with an independent perspective. We promote first-principle thinking and ground contrarian thesis development in facts and data. Even when exposed to an uncertain environment (e.g. COVID pandemic), that allowed us to expedite a decision-making process and move forward on contrarian opportunities. Yassir’s Seed investment was closed at a time when Uber and its peers were trading at an all time low.
We believe in having a high-performing, lean and agile culture. We choose very carefully who we work with and once decisions are made, we take responsibility for outcomes and trust the people we back to over-deliver on expectations. High integrity is one of our strongest values. We have a high bar for trust, ownership and accountability both in our team and across our portfolio.
What motivated P1 Ventures to join AVCA?
We invest with a purpose. Empowering mission-driven founders to maximise impact is what we care the most about. We implemented an ESG framework and Environmental and Social Management System (ESMS) a couple of years ago and started reporting on metrics in 2023 to quantify progress towards several UN SDGs. Through its regular events and collegial community, AVCA offers a great platform to connect with institutional investors and domain experts in order to collect insights and gather perspective on industry best practices and improvement opportunities for our firm.
AVCA has also brought together most of the African GPs and LPs that seek to build a stronger connectivity within the ecosystem. As we started institutionalising our investor base as a firm, it felt natural to join AVCA as we wanted to elevate our profile and grow our network of asset managers that have a more programmatic allocation to African entrepreneurship in technology.
