VCs explain what startups must do to get funded in 2026 at the Africa Capital Allocators Mixer

The maiden Africa Capital Allocators Mixer pulled together lawyers, venture capitalists and founders last Friday in Lagos for a conversation that has been simmering quietly across Nigeria’s startup scene for years: is pre-seed capital actually available, or is the entire category being redefined out from under the people who need it most?

The event, powered by MarlVC and Bullion, was hosted and moderated by Amarachi Nwachukwu, a Venture Partner at MarlVC, brokering the much-needed critical handshake between Nigerian tech founders and the venture capitalists holding the purse. 

Two panels anchored the evening: one on legal readiness, featuring Chukwuebuka Okoli-Akirika, Senior Associate at Duale, Ovia & Alex-Adedipe (DOA), and one on investment realities, with Samuel Frank of Sahara Ventures, Mercy Ndubueze of WEAV Capital and Ryan K. Uche-Tasie of Lava VC.

By the end of the night, one thing was clear. Nobody in that room disagreed that money exists. What they disagreed on, sometimes sharply, was what it now costs to get it.

Nwachukwu opened by explaining what MarlVC actually does: a 12-week virtual accelerator, initial cheques of $50,000, with follow-on funding between $100,000 and $250,000. But she used her introduction to air a grievance she said she hears constantly from founders.

“VCs announce new funds, Fund 1 and Fund 2, and founders ask where this money is actually going,” she said, describing the confusion founders feel when fundraising announcements don’t seem to translate into cheques reaching them. She said she’d sat on both sides of the table, first as a founder and now as an investor, and wanted the evening to bridge that gap directly.

What “investment-ready” actually means, legally

Okoli-Akirika laid out a pattern he sees repeatedly, advising both founders and investors at DOA: startups get so absorbed in building products that governance becomes an afterthought. He broke legal readiness down into three pillars.

Governance structure. Too many startups, he said, exist only on paper, with co-founders operating on vague understandings rather than a formal charter or clearly defined board powers.

Intellectual property. This was the sharpest warning of the night for anyone outsourcing development. Copyright protection in Nigeria attaches automatically the moment something is created, he explained, which sounds reassuring until you consider who holds that copyright. If a startup hires a contractor or engineer to write code without a signed IP assignment agreement, the code legally belongs to the person who wrote it, not the company that paid for it. 

“If that developer leaves on bad terms, your startup is left running code it does not legally own or license,” he said, a line that landed hard given how often Nigerian startups lean on freelance or contract developers in their earliest days.

Regulatory compliance. He flagged the pace of change around CBN guidelines, SEC approvals, FCCPC rules and NDPR data protection requirements as a recurring red flag in due diligence, particularly for fintechs.

On term sheets, Okoli-Akirika pushed founders to look past the valuation line entirely. He singled out board representation and “reserved matters”, the veto rights investors often attach to board seats, warning that if those reserved matters extend to routine operational spending, an investor can effectively freeze day-to-day decision-making. 

His practical checklist for founders preparing to raise funds: lock down co-founder agreements with proper vesting; get signed IP assignment agreements with every contractor and employee and, if building an advisory board, use a formal instrument like the FAST agreement rather than informal handshake equity.

Africa Capital Allocators Mixer: The investor lens

This was where the evening’s central tension got named outright. Nwachukwu put it to the investor panel straight: funds keep announcing capital raised, yet founders keep saying pre-seed money is dry. Which is it?

Samuel Frank of Sahara Ventures: “I will be as blunt and honest as possible,” he told the room. “Yes, pre-seed capital exists, but the definition of pre-seed in Africa shifted completely after 2022,” he said.

Before that, pre-seed meant funding a pitch deck and two founders with conviction. Today, he argued, what used to qualify as seed-stage traction is now the pre-seed bar: a working MVP, real user adoption, and roughly $2,500 to $3,500 in monthly recurring revenue growing at 20 per cent month-on-month. 

His explanation wasn’t cynical, just structural. VCs answer to limited partners; the market has matured, and capital allocators are now expected to de-risk far more aggressively than they were three or four years ago.

Mercy Ndubueze of WEAV Capital took the question of what actually earns an internal champion at the investment committee stage, and her answer centred on something harder to fake than a pitch deck: obsession.

“I want to smell obsession from the moment a founder speaks,” she said, distinguishing founders chasing a trendy narrative from those solving a problem they’re personally driven by.

In a macroeconomic environment as unforgiving as Nigeria’s, she argued, that obsession is often what separates founders who push through hard periods from those who fold.

Frank built on that point by tying it back to venture maths. VCs work on a power-law model, he said: out of ten investments, nine might underperform or fail outright, and the fund’s return depends on the one that doesn’t. A founder who clearly understands their own path to profitability, acquisition or a secondary sale gives an investor real conviction that the capital deployed will come back multiplied.

Ryan K. Uche-Tasie of Lava VC tackled a distinction that trips up a lot of founders chasing VC money for the wrong reasons: the gap between a good business and a venture-scalable one. A business generating a steady $1 million to $3 million a year and paying healthy dividends is a genuinely good business, he said, but if its addressable market is capped, it can’t absorb institutional capital to scale tenfold or a hundredfold. 

What VCs look for instead is high operating leverage: revenue that can grow exponentially without operating costs climbing in lockstep. Asset-heavy, thin-margin businesses in small markets, however solid, simply aren’t VC-fit, regardless of how well they’re run.

On where domestic capital fits into all this, Frank pointed to Ghana as a model worth studying, where a fund-of-funds structure built around local pension money reportedly unlocked more than $35 million equivalent in local venture funds. He contrasted that with Nigeria, where pension funds manage over ₦20 trillion in assets under management, yet regulatory caution means an estimated 70 per cent or more sits in government debt instruments rather than reaching venture funds. The fix, in his view, is for local allocators to prove out exit pathways and secondary sales convincingly enough to get pension capital moving. 

In wrapping up the event, Nwachukwu framed the evening’s purpose plainly: closing the gap between what founders think investors want and what investors are actually screening for. “Founders hear about VC fund announcements yet feel starved of pre-seed cheque sizes. Investors, on the other hand, struggle to find investment-ready startups with clean legal structures and verified traction,” she said, describing the mixer as an attempt to get both sides talking candidly in the same room.

She confirmed this was the first of a planned quarterly series, with MarlVC and Bullion intending to take the format beyond Lagos to other parts of Africa and eventually toward direct engagement with Silicon Valley capital.

Also read: Nigeria leads Africa’s equity funding in H1 2026 with $214m, as early-stage investment grows