CRE Venture Capital

CRE Venture Capital is an Africa-focused technology investor. Its mandate statement is narrow and explicit: it invests in visionary founders building category-defining technology companies that are levered to Africa. That phrasing covers both companies headquartered on the continent and companies domiciled elsewhere whose customers, operations and growth sit in African markets. It is not an Irish fund and not a generalist enterprise-software fund; the geography is the thesis.

The firm has been investing since 2014 and is recorded with roughly $200M under management. It backs companies from pre-seed and seed through Series A and later rounds, taking early institutional positions rather than growth-stage ones. Pardon Makumbe is a co-founder and managing partner.

The portfolio maps to the sectors where African technology has scaled fastest: payments, financial infrastructure, identity, commerce and consumer internet. Holdings include Flutterwave, the pan-African payments company; Yoco, the South African merchant-payments provider built for small businesses; Stitch, the South African financial-API company; Smile ID, which supplies identity verification and KYC across African markets; Sabi, the Nigerian B2B commerce and distribution platform; Carry1st, the mobile games publisher and consumer payments platform; and Matta, a Nigerian marketplace for industrial chemicals and raw materials.