Ex-NBCUniversal VP Raises $5M Africa Media Tech Fund With Brutal Math

Aries Media Ventures has launched its first venture capital fund targeting $5 million to back early-stage media technology startups in Africa, and it has already deployed capital into three companies. Founding General Partner Alykhan Kaba disclosed the target to Communiqué, though he has not revealed how much the fund has raised so far.

The fund's first three investments landed in Africa: Aktivate, a creator marketing platform; HustleSasa, a Kenyan events commerce platform; and Book Mahali, a venue-booking and hospitality platform. Aries plans to invest in 40 to 50 startups over four years, writing initial cheques of up to $50,000 and follow-on investments of up to $150,000 in companies showing strong growth.

Who is Alykhan Kaba?

Kaba spent more than two decades inside the world's largest entertainment companies, including Live Nation, Activision Blizzard, Entertainment One and NBCUniversal. Until recently, he served as vice president of content strategy at NBCUniversal, where his team evaluated and planned unscripted programmes including Love Island, The Traitors and The Real Housewives franchise.

The ambition predates the fund by years. Kaba was 11 years old during the September 11 attacks, growing up in a Muslim household in the United States. Watching how news coverage portrayed Muslim beliefs and attitudes toward gender equality and religion, he saw how much power media held over how people understood other cultures. "I want to spend the rest of my career learning as much as I can about the entertainment industry from the best companies in the world," he recalled thinking, with the goal of helping "develop the media ecosystem in parts of the world that are undercapitalised and underserved."

That interest took him to Afghanistan, where he interned at telecom company Roshan, which produced programmes such as Afghan Star and an Afghan adaptation of Sesame Street. After starting his career at McKinsey, he moved into corporate strategy roles across the entertainment giants.

What did he find in emerging markets?

At those companies, Kaba noticed international strategies focused on the United States and Western Europe. Everything else fell into a broad bucket executives called "the rest of the world," with little attention to individual markets. The role he had imagined — guiding major entertainment companies into emerging markets — didn't exist as he hoped.

Around 2021, Kaba started using his holidays to travel to India, Tanzania, Kenya, Tajikistan and Turkey, contacting entrepreneurs in creative industries who struggled to attract investment. Local venture firms prioritised fintech, agriculture and healthcare. International media investors lacked the local knowledge and relationships.

In 2023, he launched the Aries Media Project, a professional network connecting these founders with investors, executives and experts in Los Angeles, New York and London. It grew to more than 1,000 entrepreneurs across over 40 countries, roughly half based in Sub-Saharan Africa. That network became the pipeline for the fund. "If you are experienced enough in the industry and you are culturally aware enough to know what questions to ask and how to navigate the political and cultural landscape, you can actually make early bets with a relatively high level of conviction," Kaba told Communiqué.

How does Aries differ from other creative-economy investors?

Much institutional financing entering Africa's creative industries has gone into intellectual property or infrastructure. In Nigeria, MBO Capital has primarily financed film productions, while Volition Capital established its VEMA pool to back The Black Book, Netflix's most-watched Nollywood film. CANEX Creations Inc., Afreximbank's creative investment vehicle, focuses on commercialising African IP.

Aries takes a different route: it backs the technology supporting the industry — across film, music, television, gaming, sports and live entertainment — rather than financing content directly. Kaba believes those businesses fit venture capital outcomes better. Films and music catalogues can be profitable, but a VC fund needs some portfolio companies to return 50 or even 100 times the original investment, which suits private equity-style assets poorly.

Can the numbers work?

The arithmetic is demanding. A $50,000 cheque into a company valued around $2.5 million buys roughly 2%. After two or three more funding rounds, that stake could fall to about 1%. Follow-on investments of up to $150,000 might double the stake in the best performers. Even then, a $100 million acquisition would return about $2 million — less than half the $5 million target.

That puts the weight of the thesis on acquisitions. Kaba points to HustleSasa, arguing its ticketing and events technology resembles the kind of business Live Nation could acquire as it expands into new markets, at a price delivering outsized returns. "I'll never be the person to write you the biggest cheque," Kaba told Communiqué, "but I can be a strategic investor in a way that I think other investors may not be able to."

The fund's model depends on global entertainment companies eventually buying the businesses it backs. Kaba spent a decade waiting for those giants to enter markets like Lagos and Nairobi; they didn't. Aries now needs a handful of its companies to sell for hundreds of millions of dollars in an industry that has produced very few exits of that size — and whether anyone on the other side of those doors is ready to pay will decide the fund's fate.