Emmanuel Adegboye started his career wanting to be a medical doctor, but now heads up Madica, a sector-agnostic investment programme. But helping people is helping people.
Adegboye was interviewed as part of episode 14 of Disrupt Africa’s “The month in VC” podcast series, released in partnership with Atlantica Ventures and Goodwell Investments,
Launched in 2022 and affiliated with fintech-focused VC firm Flourish Ventures, Madica is a sector-agnostic investment programme designed to address structural gaps in Africa’s startup ecosystem. It recently announced its first three investments, in Ghana’s Kola Market, Kenya’s GoBEBA, and South Africa’s NewForm Foods.
Madica’s 18-month programme tackles key challenges such as limited access to capital, a scarcity of investors, insufficient mentorship, and the lack of structured support necessary for startups to resolve critical issues and foster innovation, entrepreneurship, and wealth creation across the continent. It provides each startup with up to US$200,000 in funding.
Adegboye drives this, but he didn’t always want to be an investor.
“Like most people who studied sciences in Nigeria, I wanted to be a medical doctor. But for some reason I found myself studying engineering physics. I was a very practical person and wanted to touch and feel the things that I did, so quickly realised that the core of what I really wanted to do was to solve real problems,” he said.
After a Bachelors and a postgraduate, he went on to do a Masters in environmental management. After his studies, Adegboye tried to launch his own startup, essentially Citymapper for African cities, and it was his work with that that led him to where he is now, working with and supporting startups.
“It was a very good introduction into the startup ecosystem. I did have and I still do have really strong operational project management skills, but I wanted to leverage that in solving problems. Being a first time founder I realised how incredibly hard it was to solve the problem that I was trying to solve, and it was then I realised there are probably people like me who have great ideas but may not have the kind of access that I had,” he said. “And that sort of informed my starting to build entrepreneurship communities.”
Having worked for Startup Grind Lagos, he also worked for VC firm Venture Garden Group (VGG), while also creating a community called Ventures Dialogue, Adegboye became exposed to that space.
“Rather than work within an organisation or try to solve one specific problem, maybe the biggest problem that I can actually solve is help create platforms for other opinions to solve like multiple other problems right. That’s when I started pivoting my career more specifically towards startup support,” he said.
At VGG, Adegboye helped design an accelerator programme that eventually became Greenhouse Labs, before moving on to Andela, then Utopia, and eventually Madica.
“When the opportunity came to join Madica, that felt like the perfect fit, and it felt like my career had been leading up to this moment where I’ve done everything from building communities, to designing programmes, to actually lobbying for policies, because I was also very heavily involved in pushing for the Nigeria Startup Act,” he said.
Madica spun out of global fintech-focused fund Flourish Ventures, itself funded by the Omidyar Network.
“Over the course of the investments within the region. It became clear that there are structural challenges within the ecosystem, and given the nature of the funding that Flourish has access to, and the global nature of their work, they believe – and I strongly believe – that they are best positioned to address this challenge,” Adegboye said.
“So prior to my joining they had been thinking about this for around two years, about what a programme could look like. That addresses some of the structural challenges within the african ecosystem and to be more specific about those challenges. It’s access to funding at the earlier stages; access to mentors; and then providing structured support to founders who may not have usually had access to those kinds of resources.”
That is what Madica aims to achieve, and it does this by identifying startups that fit its thesis, investing up to US$200,000 in cash, and then working with the founders for an 18-month period.
“The way the programme is structured is that we spend a lot of time doing a due diligence process, to understand first of all what the founders are trying to achieve – their vision for the business, and what their specific mousestones are,” said Adegboye.
