Madica Bets $1 Million on Startups in Africa’s Most Overlooked Markets

Algeria and Cameroon. Two countries that almost never appear in Africa’s venture capital headlines — until this week. Madica, the Flourish Ventures-backed pre-seed investment programme, has built its entire thesis around backing markets everyone else overlooks, and it just put fresh money behind that bet: up to $200,000 each in five new African startups, marking its first-ever investments in both countries.

The five deals — spanning Algeria, Cameroon, Nigeria and Egypt — take Madica’s total deployed this year to roughly $1.6 million and expand its portfolio to 18 companies across ten markets since the programme launched in 2022.

In Algeria, Madica backed Talenteo, an HR management platform co-founded by Louai Djaffer that serves medium-sized and mid-market businesses across Francophone Africa, a segment often underserved by software built with Anglophone markets in mind. In Cameroon, the firm’s first bet went to Paysika, a digital neobank co-founded by Roger Nengwe and Stezen Bisselou offering virtual and physical payment cards to consumers and small businesses across Central Africa.

Nigeria’s contribution to the cohort is ChipMango, co-founded by Ola Fadiran and Jovan Andjelich, which is building capabilities in semiconductor design and verification while also running technical training to grow the country’s still-thin chip engineering talent pool.

Madica’s cheque came shortly after ChipMango closed a separate $1.9 million seed round led by Atlantica Ventures, illustrating how Madica increasingly co-invests alongside larger backers rather than acting as a startup’s sole source of institutional capital. Rounding out the cohort are Egypt’s Delta Oil and Bekia, extending Madica’s footprint in a market it has backed before.

Emmanuel Adegboye, who heads Madica, has been consistent in describing the programme’s founding thesis: that some of Africa’s best startups are being built by founders, in sectors and in markets that remain systematically underfunded relative to their potential.

That means Madica’s team spends real time building relationships in markets like Algeria before a single deal closes — Talenteo, for instance, came to Madica through a referral from someone embedded in the Algerian startup ecosystem, rather than through the usual pipeline of warm introductions from Lagos or Nairobi.

Each portfolio company also joins an 18-month structured programme combining capital with mentorship, executive coaching, fully funded founder immersion trips, and access to Madica’s broader investor network — support designed to compensate for the thinner local investor ecosystems that founders in markets like Algeria and Cameroon typically have to navigate alone.

Whether $200,000 cheques are enough to carry these companies to their next funding milestone remains an open question — Adegboye himself has acknowledged that Madica increasingly needs co-investors to bridge what he’s called a widening funding gap for African startups beyond the pre-seed stage. But for founders in markets long treated as afterthoughts by the continent’s venture capital industry, Madica’s expansion into Algeria and Cameroon is itself the headline.