Enza Capital Launches Dedicated AI Fund for African Startups

Enza Capital, a venture firm that has invested in African technology companies for seven years, has launched a dedicated fund for artificial intelligence (AI) and AI-enabled startups on the continent. The firm argues that African venture capital is maturing and that specialist funds are better at finding and supporting the strongest companies.

“AI is the most consequential technology shift in a generation, and it needs to be harnessed to create value for a broad set of people,” said Mike Mompi, Enza’s managing partner. He called investing in African AI now both an opportunity and a responsibility.

The gap and the thesis

Enza says it has raised $58 million across its first two funds and made 75 investments across 47 companies in nine African countries. By its own count, AI took about 60% of global venture investment in 2025 but just over 5% in Africa.

The firm does not expect African startups to compete with frontier models, because the capital required is too large. Instead it is backing companies that adapt AI to local conditions: voice tools that understand Pidgin and speakers who switch languages mid-sentence, smaller models trained on local data, and computing that works where connectivity is patchy. Enza calls this the “constraint advantage”, the idea that products built for Africa’s limits can also work far beyond it. Its portfolio includes Aethex AI, and it names Lelapa AI, Intron and ToumAI as other players in the space.

What Enza looks for

Because building a prototype is getting cheaper, Enza says founders need deep market knowledge and a moat that cannot erode: proprietary data, existing routes to customers, or a product embedded in users’ daily work.

The firm also screens hard on cost. AI startups pay for every query their product runs, so a business that assumes cheap inference could be wiped out if that cost doubles. Enza backs companies with high margins or a clear path to them, and expects open models and cheaper local computing to push costs down.

Enza was founded in 2019 by Mompi with two co-founders: Sir John Lazar, who ran Metaswitch, the communications software company Microsoft bought in 2020, and David Cohen, a former Farallon Capital partner. Its team includes an office of the CTO and two CTOs in residence, and it is an operating partner of AI Tinkerers, a network of about 1,300 builders in Nairobi, Lagos, Cairo and Johannesburg.