Enza Capital Raises Dedicated AI Fund for African Startups

AI captured about 60% of global venture investment in 2025, but just over 5% in Africa — and Enza Capital is building a dedicated fund to work that gap. The firm, which has invested in African tech for seven years, announced the specialist vehicle on the argument that specialist funds find and support the best companies more effectively than generalists.

"AI is the most consequential technology shift in a generation, and it needs to be harnessed to create value for a broad set of people," Mike Mompi, Enza's managing partner, told TechCabal. "That is why investing in AI in Africa now is an incredible opportunity and even a responsibility."

The numbers behind the bet are concrete. Enza has raised $58 million across its first two funds and counts 75 investments across 47 companies in nine African countries. Its name comes from a Zulu word meaning 'to build', 'to make' and 'to create'.

Who runs the fund?

Mompi started Enza in 2019 with two co-founders. Sir John Lazar ran Metaswitch, a communications software company backed by Sequoia Capital and Francisco Partners and bought by Microsoft in 2020. He is president of the Royal Academy of Engineering and chairs the Raspberry Pi Foundation. David Cohen worked at Goldman Sachs in London before roughly two decades as a partner at hedge fund Farallon Capital.

Sir John runs an office of the CTO with two CTOs in residence — one former head of engineering at Algerian super app Yassir, the other a former engineering lead at Founders Factory Africa. Enza also brought the AI Tinkerers network to Africa, roughly 1,300 builders across Nairobi, Lagos, Cairo and Johannesburg, running sessions with OpenAI and Microsoft. Since 2025 the firm has published its AI thesis on Substack under the name African Vector.

What does the AI thesis actually rest on?

Enza does not expect African startups to compete with frontier models — the capital required is too large. Instead it backs three categories. The first is local context: voice tools that handle Pidgin and code-switching, and smaller models trained on African data. Enza names Aethex AI, Lelapa AI, Intron and ToumAI as players here.

The second is proprietary data. Hakimu AI, an Enza portfolio company, has access to hundreds of thousands of previously unpublished Supreme Court case files, used to train a small language model helping East African courts deliver faster justice. The third is infrastructure and compute — running models at the edge where connectivity is patchy. Guidewheel, backed five years ago, collects machine data from Kenyan factories; customers report 41% more output from existing equipment and energy costs down about 15% a month. It has since scaled across North America with backing from Greycroft and Decarbonisation Partners, a BlackRock-Temasek joint venture.

Enza calls this the constraint advantage: products built for Africa's limits can also work far beyond it. The claim is plausible in the Guidewheel case; the broader pattern remains to be proven at scale.

How many AI deals has Enza done?

"I believe we are the most active venture fund making AI-native investments in Africa, but I would be happy to learn that others have done more so we can co-invest," Mompi said. The firm has made 11 AI investments and is working on its 12th.

The roster includes Lua, the first African AI business to go through Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch, which builds AI agents for businesses on five continents. WideBot, started in Egypt, built the first Arabic language model handling multiple dialects and counts 14 governments and more than 400 businesses as customers. Satlyt, at the infrastructure layer, announced its seed round in October. Orca Fraud and Buguard are AI-first cybersecurity companies.

On exits, Enza points to Quro Medical, a South African health tech firm whose wearables let a patient spend two days in hospital and eight at home instead of ten days in a bed. Enza co-led an early round and sold its full stake in 2025 to South Africa's largest publicly listed hospital group. With co-investors, Enza also helped launch Clearflow Markets to trade shares in private companies. "We cannot wait for liquidity to appear. We need to build routes to it," Mompi said.

What margins does Enza demand?

The firm screens hard on cost. A business that assumes cheap inference can be wiped out if that cost doubles. Mompi notes that many companies got into trouble between 2020 and 2022 chasing total transaction value while ignoring margins; he weighs net profit margin and free cash flow above gross margin. Enza also flags the $10 million Enzi Prize for open, affordable African AI, and warns of "huge and probably unreasonable overinvestment" in global AI infrastructure.

Enza is also preparing an announcement with Cassava, the company bringing GPUs into Africa. That deal, plus the pending 12th investment, gives observers concrete checkpoints on whether the AI thesis converts into returns.