Raise - Afrikan Heroes

Raise, the African Ecosystem’s End-to-End Fundraising Platform, Receives Investment from Carta

May 11, 2023

Raise, a Kenyan company that provides an end-to-end fundraising platform, has announced that it has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Carta, a San Francisco-based company that specializes in capitalization table management and valuation software. Founded in 2018 by Marvin Coleby and Eugene Mutai, Raise launched its alpha version in 2019 and went public in June 2020.

The platform offered by Raise is designed to simplify cap table management for startups and companies operating within the African ecosystem, providing a comprehensive solution for managing shareholding structure, both before and after fundraising, allowing businesses to focus on growth and building a successful future.

Carta, which is attempting to build a global stock exchange for private companies, is the world’s largest ownership platform, having raised $1.2 billion dollars and scaled to two million shareholders, $2.5 trillion dollars in assets, and onboarded 35,000 companies. Carta regularly makes acquisitions and investments into similar ownership products in strategic markets across the world.

Marvin Coleby, co-founder of Raise, expressed excitement about the partnership with Carta, stating, “Since the Carta strategy team joined our cap table, we’ve been working really closely with them to understand how to bring the best customer experiences to African tech. We’ve been learning everything we can, from podcasts and mentorship from growth, content, sales, finance, and engineering teams all the way from C-Suite to management-level teams at Carta. Carta is the best at what we do, and we figured we could learn how to apply those learnings to build Africa’s largest ownership platform.”

Raise plans to use the funding from Carta to offer liquidity products and experiments with African currency settlements; syncing with syndicate platforms across the ecosystem to invest directly into equity structures and cap tables; integrated market data from the tech ecosystem; and a relaunch of its electronic shares product.

In addition, Raise plans to leverage Carta’s API and the open cap table standard it is building to provide world-class ownership, equity, and security experiences for customers. Existing Carta customers and shareholders are able to sync their holdings directly to Raise and run health checks against African law and macroeconomic trends.

Coleby also mentioned that they are still trying to figure out what product-market fit will look like in African tech, but they have explored different angles with the Carta team, and they will probably share some polls on Twitter to get feedback from the public.

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Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard

Raise, the Kenyan Fundraising Platform Secures $25k Investment

February 27, 2021

Venture capital firm, and the Kenyan fundraising platform Raise, have jointly announced a partnership that saw Microtraction help mobilize $25,000 for Raise, an end-to-end fundraising platform, to help it build out its platform and scale. Raise was founded two years ago by Marvin Coleby and Eugene Mutai, while its alpha was launched in 2019 just before going public in June 2020.

Marvin Coleby and Eugene Mutai,cofounders of Raise — Marvin Coleby, cofounder of Raise

Raise describes itself as a simple fundraising and equity management platform for Africa, with aim to drive founders to a faster product-market fit by empowering them with affordable online tools to raise faster and distribute equity to hire talent. Startups can manage electronic cap tables, automate financing contracts like SAFEs and share private deal rooms.

“Raise’s mission is to simplify equity and democratise access to assets for Africans across the world, where people have the power to create financial independence for their communities, teams, and families,” Coleby, Raise’s chief executive officer (CEO), said.

Raise has now raised US$25,000 in return for seven per cent equity from VC firm Microtraction. Founded in 2017, Microtraction invests in startups at the very earliest stage of their development, and has so far backed a host of Nigerian startups, like Accounteer, Riby, Thank U Cash, CowryWise, Wallet.ng, Schoolable, 54gene, Termii and Festival Coins, as well as Ghana’s Bit Sika. Raise is its first Kenya-based investment, though it did invest in data marketplace CARMA but at the time the startup was relocating from Nairobi to Lagos.

Raise has so far scaled more than 200 companies, transacted over US$150 million in equity on the platform, and created over US$90 million worth of valuations. It has also partnered with Africa’s largest corporate law firms to continue onboarding users and scale across the continent, with Microtraction saying it was “laser-focused” on building Africa’s number one platform for equity and fundraising.

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry