Nigeria’s GetEquity, a platform for unlocking and aggregating the world of alternative private investment opportunities, spanning a wide array of alternative assets, has been busy pivoting in order to survive the global capital shortage, which has affected Africa.
Founded in January 2021 but only launched to the public that July, GetEquity began life focused on the VC ecosystem, and helping to connect founders with it.
“When we first started, we noticed a huge gap in the VC ecosystem as a closed and often poorly understood, mysterious and high barrier asset class and we began the mission to open this up to a new class of investors who also were interested in supporting businesses – accredited retail investors,” co-founder Jude Dike told Disrupt Africa.
Being a VC-focused venture in Africa in 2024, however, is not a great model. After bucking global trends in a record-breaking 2022, African tech saw a reset of sorts in 2023, as the global capital shortage began to bite. The number of funded ventures, and the total funding raised, declined for the first time since 2016, though not as dramatically as many had feared.
Though GetEquity had by this point, according to Dike, become “the most successful equity crowdfunding platform in Africa to date”, the downturn was always going to pose a challenge, and in any case, he said the startup had noticed a much wider gap in private investments in general.
“This led to the evolution of what is now GetEquity, providing private investments to both individuals and institutions through our platform and API infrastructure,” Dike said.
“In the past two years focusing on venture capital, GetEquity has been the largest private placement and organised capital pool platform in Africa, with over 14,000 users and US$3 million in deals done so far, with six exits and ROI to investors at 6x capital deployed. We saw quite a bit of traction in both the venture upturn and downturn and this spurred us to expand further outside of just VC.”
Uptake since the pivot, he said, has been “great”, growing considerably month-on-month, with five new deals listed and three closed so far. GetEquity itself has so far raised over US$500,000 in funding from the likes of GreenHouse Capital, Syndicate Protocol, Techstars, and Microtraction, and is plotting further growth.
“We are currently in the West and East African markets, with a focus on Nigeria and Kenya,” Dike said. “We plan a much larger focus on the diasporan market, and the Middle East market is already in the works.”
The startup makes money on the transactions on each deal on the platform, as well as infrastructure subscriptions and product and services customised to our partners and clients.”
He said the biggest problem operating as a company such as GetEquity in Africa is regulation.
“Africa has 54 distinct countries, with only about two of them having had any documentation on digitising assets and trade properly. Even amongst these two, execution on allowing new innovation is non-existent, it takes constant communication and proper self-regulation to show you are here for the long term,” said Dike.
In doing so, and pivoting to adapt to the “new normal” of the global “funding winter”, GetEquity may well have just ensured it will do just that.
