African Women in Venture Capital
Eloho Omame
She is an early believer in the tremendous underleveraged potential of Africa's next generation of female innovators as a co-founder of FirstCheck Africa, which debuted in 2021. We are establishing Africa's first female-led venture capital fund, investing solely in technology startups driven by women and diverse founders. They are transforming narratives, pushing representation, and encouraging inclusiveness among startup founders, operators, and investors by focusing on Africa's thriving community of ambitious, under-estimated women in IT.
EndeavorNigeria, is an entrepreneurial network for high-impact founders driving high-growth technology firms at scale, was founded by her in 2018. In 2017, she conceptualized, created, and launched Lagos Innovates, a portfolio of startup assistance programs, in cooperation with the Lagos State Employment Trust Fund—a first-of-its-kind initiative by an African sub-national government.
She is a specialist in capital structuring and fundraising for companies at all stages, including startups, having spent over 15 years in financial roles spanning investment banking and growth private equity in the United Kingdom, Europe, and Africa.
She is an Endeavor Nigeria Mentor and a former Chair of the finance and capital sub-committee of the Lagos State Employment Trust Fund's MSME Recovery Fund, which was established to help small companies recover from the catastrophic combined impact of COVID and the End SARS demonstrations.
Eloho has a bachelor's degree in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science, as well as a master's degree in Business Administration from the London Business School.
Fara Ashiru Jituboh
Fara Ashiru Jituboh is the co-founder and CEO/CTO of Okra, Inc., a Nigerian fintech business that allows clients, applications, and banks to communicate in real-time financial information. She is an entrepreneur and software engineer who is fluent in over 20 computer languages.
Jituboh was inspired to create Okra by her natural desire to solve issues. Jituboh, who was born in Nigeria but raised in the United States, aspired to make a difference in her homeland. She began utilizing financial software to manage her finances while still in the United States. When she returned to Nigeria, she discovered that these applications were no longer functional since they were not linked to Nigerian banks. This is when the notion of Okra was born.
Jituboh co-founded Okra in 2019 with David Peterside. However, the firm did not begin operations until January 2020. Jituboh has created and scaled products for companies such as Canva, TechHustle, Sana Benefits, and Dorsata.
In 2014, she co-founded and served as CTO of Shixels Studios, which worked with financial firms such as AXA Mansard, Diamond Bank, and Renmoney, as well as telecom business Airtel, among others. Shixels Studios assists businesses in creating website designs and applications to increase their digital presence.
Jituboh has a B.S.C. in Computer Science from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University.
Maya Horgan Famodu
Maya Horgan Famodu is the Founder and Managing Director of Ingressive Capital, a $10 million VC Fund I and $50 million Fund II focused on early-stage African technology. Ingressive Capital has invested in some of Africa's most rapidly rising companies, including Paystack.
Maya and her colleagues are creating a pathway that will take students from the moment they decide, "I want to be in tech," to the day they launch. As a result, she co-founded Ingressive for Good, a nonprofit focused on cultivating technical talent and resources for African entrepreneurial ventures, and Ingressive Advisory, a market entry/market operations firm that has assisted 50+ global businesses in entering and operating in Africa, with a total of 50+ deals. She is a two-time Forbes 30under30 honoree and a UN MIPAD.
Famodu founded Ingressive as an investment advisory business to establish her name in the market before launching Ingressive Capital in 2017 at the age of 25. She is claimed to be the youngest person in Sub-Saharan Africa to start a tech fund, as well as the first woman to do it alone in Nigeria.
Horgan Famodu's drive to break into the African venture capital market stemmed from her background in a trailer park in rural Minnesota. Growing up "very impoverished" seemed like a "prison," she remarked, reflecting on the limitations it imposed on her ability to participate in extracurricular activities.
She described the emotion as "knowing you have the capacity, the drive, and the grit to accomplish something, but something outside of your control, access, is taken away..." I despise that sensation so much that I don't want anyone else to have it. "
It was one of the motivating aspects of her business development. Horgan Famodu stated that as an undergraduate student, she spent time in Madagascar researching the effects of western non-profit activities on local communities. She discovered that programmes with little local entrepreneurship resulted in less long-term change.