“The Missing Middle” is what we call the gap in finance the majority of entrepreneurs face in getting from a viable prototype or early customers to a full-scale proven business. This talk was presented at Sankalp Global 2022 by Luni Libes, co-founder and CEO of Africa Eats. In Part 1, Luni explains who he is, and how he came to fill in this otherwise missing middle. In Part 2...
Talk to 100 foundations and government offices about their solution to hunger and poverty in Africa, and you’ll find hundreds of programs that send people out to the villages to train the farmers. These programs are pushing on a rope. Africa Eats pulls on the rope. Specifically, we invest in supply chain companies that buy from smallholder farmers. When you buy from the farmers, they then...
SPACs are the big new old thing in American finance this year. What is a SPAC? It’s a pile of money in search of a business. Africa Eats is an anti-SPAC. It’s a pile of companies in search of money. SPACs exist because the system for funding high-growth private companies in the United States is far from efficient, and that includes the process for listing shares on a stock exchange...
One goal for Africa Eats is to be a public company, listed on a major world stock market. The sub-goal on the way there is to be a public company listed on one or more African stock markets. Why go public? A few reasons. First and foremost, because before investors invest they want to see a clear way to get their money back. For equity investors in private companies, that path is either an...
Most early-stage and growth-stage startup investors focus on valuation, and the question of whether the investee’s valuation can grow by an order of magnitude or more in the next decade. At Africa Eats, we do look at that, but we focus even more on how efficient our investees are with the money we provide them. How efficient is their use of capital? Specifically, we compute a simple ratio...
Africa Eats is tackling three big problems outlined by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Specifically: #2 Hunger, #1 Poverty, and an unstated #0 Finance. The first two should be obvious given the food & agriculture focus of Africa Eats, but to be explicit: #2 Hunger Not every African is able to eat three meals per day. Not every African receives all the nutrition...
Africa Eats is an investment holding company with numerous operational and financial innovations. Of the latter is our novel form of loans repayable with equity. Typical early-stage and growth-stage investors focus on building a portfolio of equity investments or they provide debt, not both. What is different about Africa Eats is that we intend to own our investees forever. We thus focuses on...
Africa Eats is not yet a year old, but the choice of holdco is already showing its benefits over a traditional venture capital fund. Did you know the first-ever modern venture capital “fund” was not a fund, but a public holding company? American Research and Development. Boston. 1946. The reason the limited partnership structure became the norm is that the founders of ARD...
KPMG and AGRA have published an outlook on Agribusiness in Africa based on data and conversations with 137 companies across Africa. This a great overview of the challenges that face the agriculture sector in Africa, both in general plus the added issues created by the pandemic. The report includes 10 priorities. Half of these are related to financing. Africa Eats address most of these directly...
The current status quo will see Africa’s economy grow but is unlikely to see the continent be self sustaining in terms of food as the population doubles by mid-Century. The food gap today exceeds $10 billion annually,even with 80% of Africans farming the land. And despite more and more funds, families, and foundations investing in Africa, the missing middle of capital (i.e. the gap in capital...