The POEM framework: How Tomi Davies filters pitch potential in Africa tech funding

The difference between ideation and institutional capital is judgement. By the time a venture reaches the venture capital stage, the asymmetry that matters most (the intellectual kind) has already been captured by someone who showed up earlier.

For Tomi Davies, founder of the African Business Angel Network and one of the continent’s most prominent early-stage investors, that someone has been him for the past two decades.

His entry point is deliberate: pre-seed and ideation, the stage where the work is not scaling capital but shaping how founders think.

But showing up early is not enough when early-stage investing in Africa is littered with false positives: strong storytelling without revenue, technical teams without commercial discipline, large markets without credible access paths, and founders who confuse activity with progress. The challenge is not finding deals but filtering signal from noise in environments where signals are still forming.

This is where POEM comes in.

The framework that forces clarity – by Tomi Davies

POEM, Tomi Davies’ trademarked investment framework, is a 4-part filter designed to strip away ambiguity and expose structural weaknesses before capital is committed.

Proposition. Organisation. Economics. Milestones. 

Each component asks questions that founders often prefer to avoid.

• Proposition starts simply. Who is paying, for what, and why now? Not who might pay. Not what the total addressable market looks like. But who is actually ready to exchange money for this solution today, and why is the timing defensible?
• Organisation tests delivery capacity. Can this team execute repeatedly, or was the first milestone a lucky accident? Does the structure support what the business actually needs to do, or is it optimised for what sounds impressive on paper?
• Economics is where storytelling dies. Cash. Cost. Sustainability. Davies is clear about what matters in African markets. “In Africa, distribution beats innovation, and revenue beats narrative. That tends to surprise people.”
• Milestones separate real progress from rehearsed progress. Are the markers meaningful, or are they designed to sound good in updates? When a venture is run through POEM, noise becomes visible. “Many things that look impressive do not survive basic scrutiny,” Tomi Davies says. “That is the point.”

Why African markets demand different filters

Most investors fail in Africa not because they lack intelligence, but because they import frameworks built for mature markets without adjusting for context. They look for clean signals in environments where those signals are still forming.

What appears as disorder is often just early-stage market formation. Informality is sometimes how markets function before systems catch up, not always a flaw.

The real risk, Tomi Davies argues, is not volatility. It is misreading what matters. This explains the consistent false positives he sees. Premature scaling funded by capital that arrived before the business was ready.

Ventures that look structurally sound but lack the one thing that determines survival in difficult environments: disciplined execution.

“POEM helps correct that by forcing founders to align what they say with what they do,” he says.

The infrastructure argument

Tomi Davies does not frame Africa’s opportunity as a demographic dividend but as a capital formation challenge. The continent does not lack young, ambitious people but organised early-stage capital that is patient, informed, and locally grounded.

Without that layer, the pipeline breaks before it reaches venture scale.

This is why he founded the African Business Angel Network in 2015. The infrastructure gaps are structural and measurable: trusted data remains limited, governance stays inconsistent, syndication operates in fragments, and exit pathways continue to develop slowly. These are not abstract problems but concrete barriers that directly affect how capital flows and how risk is priced.

“Until these systems mature, investors will continue to hesitate, and founders will continue to operate below potential,” Tomi Davies explains.

Angel infrastructure is the missing link that prevents what looks like a demographic dividend from becoming realised economic output.

Nigeria serves as his case study, a young population without the systems required to translate energy into enterprise value. The challenge is not identifying talent but building the mechanisms that allow talent to scale.

What the market still misprices

After years of filtering deals through POEM and building angel infrastructure across Africa, Tomi Davies has a clear view of what remains structurally underpriced. Disciplined execution tops the list, with founders who can generate early revenue in difficult environments still not fully valued by the market.

Local knowledge and diaspora networks that bridge capital and context face the same undervaluation problem.

“These are assets, but they are not yet priced as such,” he says.

The market has not corrected this because feedback loops remain weak, capital stays fragmented, and signals lack standardisation. It takes time for patterns to become visible and for confidence to build, which means those who understand the structure currently have an advantage.

Davies’ focus remains unchanged: find the right founders early, fund them with discipline, follow them with intent. Not as theatre but as structure.

“That is how you build an innovation economy that lasts,” he says.

For founders navigating African tech, the message is that the investors who arrive first are not there for the narrative but to shape judgement. And if you cannot survive POEM, you will not survive the market.