Before
She grew up in a low-income household in rural Minnesota, with a Nigerian father and an American mother, studied at Pomona College, and worked at JPMorgan Chase. An early attempt to raise an Africa-focused fund failed because, in her telling, Africa was not on the map of venture capital and she had no record for anyone to trust.
The move
After the failed raise she built Ingressive Advisory, a market-entry consultancy helping global investors reach Sub-Saharan African technology markets. Profitable services bought her two things a first-time manager cannot otherwise get: capital of her own to angel invest with, and a client list of serious people who later became limited partners. In parallel she ran daily volume outreach, thousands of cold emails and messages, treating rejection explicitly as arithmetic.
The turn
Personal angel checks into African startups, reportedly including Paystack, built the record. Ingressive Capital began investing in 2017 and reached a ten million dollar final close in June 2020.
Timeline
- Around 2014 founds Ingressive Advisory
- Profitable consulting alongside personal angel checks
- 2017 Ingressive Capital begins investing
- June 2020 final close at 10 million dollars
- Now roughly 50 million dollars across 39 plus investments
What this route asks
Patience, and a skill someone will pay for adjacent to the market you want to invest in. Two accuracy notes: dates for the early failed raise vary across sources and one commonly cited year appears to be a transcription error, and past public reporting concerning her affiliated nonprofit was not resolved to a primary source in this research.