Early-stage venture fund and seed accelerator 500 Global is ramping up operations in Africa after making more than 150 investments on the continent over the last 12 years, and Africa lead Mareme Dieng is at the forefront of it all.
Born in Senegal, Dieng has a fairly unusual background for a VC – in biology, which was what she studied and was her passion. After moving into biotech, life happened, as she says, and she wound up in VC.
“I met Tim Draper, who is a quite renowned venture capitalist based out of Silicon Valley, and he was quite excited about the idea of us working together, and he was quite convincing. Initially the goal was for me to join for three or six months, and see how it goes, and I ended up being there for five years,” Dieng told the latest episode of “The month in VC”, Disrupt Africa’s regular podcast on the African venture capital space.
“At the time he was also unning an accelerator, which I was very interested in because there were a lot of founders who were coming through and who were working on really emerging technology. A lot of deep tech was coming through that accelerator, so from a research standpoint it also made a lot of sense to be close to some of these founders working on these emerging technologies. But then I guess I just ended up getting sucked in, I never really made it out.”
She joined 500 Global about five years ago. Launched in 2010 in the United States (US) as 500 Startups, 500 Global ran its first accelerator in Silicon Valley in 2011 and has since expanded globally, running programmes and making early-stage investments all over the world.
“The reason why I joined was because at the time a lot of what we were still looking at at Draper was very Silicon Valley-focused. A lot of what was coming out was really just very kind of small incremental changes. So I was very interested in being in an environment where I could relook at technology that was bringing tremendous value, instead of just small, incremental value. And 500 was of very strong interest to me because they had such a strong presence in emerging markets,” said Dieng.
“I wanted to look at the ways in which technology can be applied to those markets in a much more high value manner. Technology is not as monopolised by Silicon Valley as it used to be, and that’s because you don’t have the same transformational capacity, because it’s already a highly exposed ecological environment.”
Having started out in 2010 in the US as 500 Startups, 500 Global began as a YC-style batch accelerator, and investor, but ended up growing on a very different trajectory.
“At first, we had all these entrepreneurs coming to us from all over the world, and we quickly realised that in order to provide them with truly additional value, we actually needed to meet them where they’re at, because it wasn’t just about having them through and actually there for a few weeks, but it was really about also giving them that additional support, that local support, being able to follow-on in those companies, and really be part of their life cycle,” said Dieng.
So 500, funded by globally distributed LPs from institutions to family offices, started regional funds in Latin America, Southeast Asia, Korea, and MENA, meaning it had a rapid global evolution.
“Some of those regions are now at their third or fourth vintage funds, because there was a very deliberate strategy from our end to ensure that we could continue being active, but also support those founders in a very differentiated way than we could do by helicoptering from the US,” she said.
500 made its first African investment in Egypt in 2012, and since then has made 156 investments. In Sub-Saharan Africa, it has done most of its investments through its global fund, but this approach is changing over time.
“Sub-Saharan Africa was still within what we would call our opportunistic markets, where a lot of our investments were done directly from our US fund. Now our history with Africa is also evolving, similar to other regions, as one of the things that is important for us is to build out local teams to really be able to think very differentially about how we provide support to our founders, especially because we invest so early and we take such risky bets,” Dieng said.
An Africa team is being built, and a dedicated fund may be on the horizon.
500 Global describes itself as sector-agnostic, but Dieng says that doesn’t mean that it does not have a very thoughtful approach to the sectors it invests in.
“Obviously if you are as active and as global as we are, you end up having a very heavy representation in your portfolio of different sectors across different markets as well. So for example, we are one of the most active fintech investors across the world,” she said.
However, 500 keeps the door of opportunity open for other verticals, because, as Dieng puts it, true innovation is often not spoken before it is.
“As VCs, a lot of our work is to make informed decisions. And our decisions are informed by the amount of data that we have access to, by the insights that we are able to access from other founders, as well as some of the research that we do,” she said.
“That does not mean that we don’t have many, many blind sides, because we do. And there are a lot of things that we don’t know. And often a lot of companies who are building something truly unique and something truly disruptive might have not been spoken before. And so for that reason, you know, the opportunity to remain sector-agnostic is very important because it really allows you to capture these outliers. Because our job is fully based on outliers.”
