The 5 most popular stories on Africa Private Equity News this week
Here are summaries of the five most widely read stories this week on Africa Private Equity News.
1. Vantage Capital exits Vumatel
Vantage Capital, Africa’s largest mezzanine debt fund manager, announced that it has fully exited its investment in Vumatel, a fibre-to-the-home network provider in South Africa. The company was established in October 2014 by Niel Schoeman and Johan Pretorius, industry veterans who had previously started up the Birchman Group and Conduct Telecom before creating Vumatel.
Vumatel started its life rolling out South Africa’s first fibre optic network to homes in Parkhurst by partnering with internet service providers who provided connectivity to their residential customers whilst Vumatel remained the owner and operator of the infrastructure.
2. Nigeria's Helium Health secures $10m in series A financing round
Helium Health, a Lagos-based healthcare technology company, announced it has completed a $10 million series-A funding round. Global Ventures and Asia Africa Investment & Consulting (AAIC) co-led the investment round with participation from Tencent, Ohara Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd, HOF Capital, Y Combinator, VentureSouq, Chrysalis Capital, Kairos Angels and Flying Doctors Healthcare Investment Company.
With the new investment round, Helium Health will expand its market footprint. In addition to growing its current customer base in Nigeria, Ghana, and Liberia, the company will use the funding to support expansion into new markets in North Africa, East Africa, and Francophone West Africa this year.
3. Kenya: PE firm DOB Equity makes follow-on investment in education company
DOB Equity, a Dutch family-backed impact investor in East Africa, has made a further investment in Moringa School, a technology learning institute based in Kenya.
The investment is to help Moringa accelerate the company’s transition to providing remote online learning. Since the Covid-19 outbreak, there has been an increased demand for online learning.
4. African Infrastructure Investment Managers fund exits SA renewable energy projects
African Infrastructure Investment Managers (AIIM) announced the successful divestment of AIIF2’s 14% stake in Cookhouse, a 139MW wind farm, and 34% stake in REISA, a 75MW solar PV facility. The assets were sold to AIIM’s IDEAS Managed Fund, one of the largest equity investors in South African renewables with more than $500 million invested in the sector.
Based in South Africa’s Eastern and Northern Cape respectively, Cookhouse and REISA reached financial close in 2012 as part of the round one bidding window of South Africa’s Renewable Energy IPP Procurement (REIPPP) programme, which has gone on to raise in excess of $10.6 billion of private funding for South Africa’s renewable generation capacity. These were the largest wind and solar PV projects completed in the first bidding round and, until last year, Cookhouse was the largest operational wind farm in sub-Saharan Africa.
5. Goodwell invests in East Africa Fruits
East Africa Fruits Co., a Tanzanian company addressing food distribution challenges to improve efficiencies in the farm-to-market sector, has closed series A equity funding totalling $2.05 million. The fundraising round was led by Goodwell Investments with participation from FINCA Ventures and Elea.
This investor capital accelerates East Africa Fruits’ ability to build essential supply chain infrastructure and better transport fresh produce directly from farms to urban marketplaces and strengthen livelihoods for small-scale farmers and food vendors.
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