Madica, the pre-seed investment programme backed by global early-stage venture firm Flourish Ventures, has put $200,000 each into five African startups in its latest funding round, bringing its total deployed this year to $1.6 million across eight companies. Each startup also receives an 18-month programme of mentorship, coaching, and immersion trips designed to support founders through the earliest and riskiest stages of building a company.
The five are Talenteo, an HR software platform serving Francophone Africa's mid-market businesses out of Algeria; Paysika, a digital neobank in Cameroon; ChipMango, a Nigerian startup building chip design and edge-AI hardware; and two Egyptian ventures—Delta Oil, which runs a marketplace turning used cooking oil into renewable fuel, and Bekia, which pays consumers for recyclable waste.
A thesis about who gets funded and tested by who actually did
Madica has been explicit about its founding premise. "Our original thesis, which still holds, is that we would back founders across sectors, markets, and founder profiles that are typically underfunded on the continent," said Emmanuel Adegboye, Head of Madica.
That thesis is genuinely visible in two of this round's five bets: Talenteo, in Algeria, a market that barely registers in African venture capital data next to Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and Egypt, and Paysika, in Cameroon, a Central African market with even less venture activity than Algeria's. Backing a Francophone North African HR platform and a Central African neobank in the same round is a real, checkable departure from where African VC dollars usually go.
But three of the five startups in this same round, ChipMango in Nigeria and both Delta Oil and Bekia in Egypt, sit squarely inside the "big four" markets Madica's underfunded-founder thesis is implicitly defined against.
That's not a contradiction of the thesis so much as a reminder of its actual shape: Madica isn't avoiding Nigeria and Egypt; it's diversifying who and what gets backed within and beyond them sector and founder profile matter as much to the underfunded framing as geography does, and a Nigerian chip-design startup or an Egyptian circular-economy marketplace can be exactly the kind of overlooked bet Adegboye is describing, even sitting inside a well-covered country.
Sector bets as unusual as the geography
The sector spread is its own signal. ChipMango's hardware and edge-AI focus sit far from the fintech and e-commerce plays that dominate African startup funding rounds. Delta Oil and Bekia are both circular-economy businesses turning waste streams (used cooking oil, household recyclables) into revenue — a category that rarely draws pre-seed checks of this size on the continent. Pairing that with Talenteo's enterprise software and Paysika's neobanking model means this round has no single dominant sector story, which is itself the point of a programme built to back founders "across sectors."
What $200,000 actually buys at this stage
The check size matters as much as who receives it. At the pre-seed stage most African startups are working with far less, or with nothing formal at all, $200,000 alongside 18 months of structured mentorship and immersion trips is enough to get a small team through product-market fit testing without the immediate pressure of a seed raise. Whether that runway converts into the kind of trajectory that attracts the region's larger funds is the actual test of whether Madica's underfunded-market bets pay off, not the size of the check itself.
What to watch next
The real measure of this round won't be visible for a year or more: whether Talenteo and Paysika, the two startups furthest from Africa's venture mainstream, can convert Madica's backing into a follow-on raise from funds that don't yet look seriously at Algeria or Cameroon. If they can, Madica's underfunded geography thesis gets a genuine data point. If they can't, the more familiar market bets in this same round, ChipMango, Delta Oil, Bekia will likely be the ones defining Madica's 2026 vintage instead.
Sourcing notes
- Madica backs five African startups with up to $200K each, enters Algeria and Cameroon. Dealroom.co. Sep 16, 2026.