Madica, the Africa-focused pre-seed fund, has invested $200,000 across five startups in its latest cohort — deploying $40,000 per company — while breaking into two new markets: Algeria and Cameroon, according to TechCabal. The move marks the fund's geographic expansion beyond its established West African and East African footholds, signaling a deliberate push into Francophone Africa.
Madica's model is deliberately narrow in ticket size but wide in support infrastructure. The $40,000 cheque per startup sits at the extreme early end of formal venture capital, targeting founders who are typically pre-revenue or just crossing into early traction — a stage most institutional funds on the continent still skip. The fund pairs each investment with structured mentorship and operational guidance, positioning itself as a hands-on accelerator-fund hybrid.
The five new portfolio companies span multiple sectors and geographies, with the Algerian and Cameroonian entrants representing Madica's first formal commitments in those countries, as reported by CediRates. Algeria in particular is an underserved venture market — the country has a young, tech-literate population of over 45 million and a growing developer community, but attracts a fraction of the funding that flows into Egypt or Nigeria. Cameroon similarly sits in a Francophone tier that global and pan-African funds have largely bypassed.
The expansion is strategically logical. Francophone Africa collectively represents hundreds of millions of consumers, yet the region's startups routinely cite access to early-stage capital — not market size — as their binding constraint. A fund willing to write the continent's smallest formal cheques into Algeria and Cameroon is, in practical terms, operating where competition among investors is close to zero.
For context, Madica was established to address the structural gap between friends-and-family funding and the $500,000-and-above seed rounds that most African VC funds require before engaging. At $40,000 per company, the fund is not trying to lead a startup to Series A alone — it is trying to give founders enough runway and credibility to attract the next cheque, whether from a local angel network, a diaspora investor, or a larger seed fund, according to Condia.
The total $200,000 deployed in this cohort is modest by any pan-African fund standard, but the aggregate impact compounds across cohorts. If Madica runs three to four cohorts annually at this ticket size, it can back 15 to 20 startups per year — seeding a pipeline that, even at a conservative 10% breakout rate, produces two or three companies per year capable of raising institutional follow-on rounds. That is a volume game that suits the pre-seed stage, where failure rates are high and portfolio construction logic demands breadth.
The fund's entry into Algeria and Cameroon also carries a signaling function that extends beyond its own balance sheet. When a known, structured vehicle makes a public commitment to a new market, it raises the visibility of that ecosystem for larger funds doing deal sourcing. Madica's previous cohort investments in established hubs like Lagos and Nairobi have contributed to follow-on activity by other investors in those same companies.
Why it matters: At a moment when African startup funding has contracted sharply from its 2021–2022 peak, Madica's consistent deployment into overlooked Francophone markets — at the stage every other fund avoids — makes it one of the few vehicles actively expanding the continent's fundable founder base rather than concentrating capital in the same five cities.