Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, managing partner at Accelerate Africa and founding partner at Future Africa, urged entrepreneurs to focus profitability over pursuing investors for venture funding.
He mentioned this during a fireside talk with Christophe Viarnaud, AfricArena's founder, at the AfricArena Lagos Summit 2025 on Wednesday.
Aboyeji encouraged startups to focus on developing long-term cash-flow-positive firms before seeking global investors.
He emphasized the importance of shifting from reliance on foreign funding to self-sufficiency and rapid growth.
His words underscore the importance of profitability over growth-at-all-costs strategies as Africa's technology industry faces high-profile start-up failures and a decline in mega-deals.
Aboyeji cited the recent decline in African start-up investments, which decreased 25% year on year to $2.2 billion in 2024, as a wake-up call.
He observed that "tourist investors," referring to investors who are more interested in short-term gains, have departed, thereby paving the way for founders who effectively solve real-world problems profitably.
He cited Flutterwave and Andela, two unicorns (startups valued at over $1 billion) he co-founded, to emphasise the significance of unit economics in scalability.
He elaborated: “Global investors have billions waiting, but only for those who have crossed the $1 million revenue rubicon.
“We have a Nigerian development finance institution that we are partnering with and some major announcements are going to be coming out in a couple of weeks from now..
“We are going to be building companies from Nigeria, and we are doing this in a way that we can interrelate with other jurisdiction and give investors the comfort they need. We are building this for Africa starting from Nigeria.”
Citing artificial intelligence (AI), Aboyeji argued that African start-ups should focus on long-term, revenue-generating models rather than relying entirely on investor funds.
“We must hold on to Artificial Intelligence with our dear lives, he said.
“It’s going to allow us to leapfrog in ways that we’ve never been able to before. The key is to build AI solutions that solve our unique problems whether in agriculture, healthcare, or logistics—and scale them profitably.”
The conversation also focused on the misuse of venture capital by start-ups that seek growth at any cost, as well as the future of capital allocation for African start-ups.
He continued: “What I don’t like about the idea of ‘VC is not working’ is that it is almost like a way to justify failure. People who say VC is not working are the ones who spend the money.”
Aboyeji said this while pushing founders to make effective use of the cash invested in their companies, since doing so will improve investor confidence and establish businesses that are resilient to external shocks.
"Africa's next unicorns will be those that master profitability at scale," he said, laying the groundwork for the continent's technological future.
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