The earliest cheque is the one African founders struggle most to raise, and the gap is widest in Francophone West Africa. Seed-stage financing accounts for just 1.5% of all the capital invested across Africa, three to four times below the 4% to 6% the United States records, by the count of the tracker Africa: The Big Deal. Senegal has moved to plug its own corner of that hole with a $50 million fund, the Catalyst DER/FJ fund, built to finance Senegalese startups at the pre-seed and seed stages.
Announced in Paris
The fund was unveiled by Aida Mbodji, General Delegate of Senegal’s Rapid Entrepreneurship Delegation for Women and Youth (DER/FJ), at VivaTech in Paris on June 20. Choosing Europe’s largest tech fair for the announcement was part of the point. Alongside the launch, five Senegalese startups, Andakia, Baamtu, SenITI, FAJMA and Absar, pitched to international investors and partners, a first look at the pipeline the fund is meant to feed and a way of showing private capital there is dealflow to back.
The catalytic design
The design is deliberate. Rather than simply hand out grants, DER/FJ intends to use public money to draw in private investors, create a leverage effect, and build the rung of the financing ladder that private markets have consistently skipped: the step between a founder’s idea and a first institutional cheque. It is a catalytic role, public capital going in first so that private capital follows, and it is one most African governments have struggled to play.
Why the gap is so wide
The structural backdrop explains the urgency. Institutional pre-seed money in the region is genuinely thin, and across Africa the financing mix has been drifting the wrong way, with grants rising to about 42% of pre-seed funding by value in 2025, up from 20% in 2021, by Africa: The Big Deal’s data, even as the number of active pre-seed investors has fallen. Capital also stays heavily concentrated in the “Big Four” of Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa and Egypt, which leaves Francophone markets like Senegal chronically underfunded at the earliest stage.
What it means for founders
For founders in Francophone West Africa, that is what makes this matter. A $50 million public vehicle aimed squarely at the earliest stage is a real attempt to build the missing rung, in a region where it has barely existed. The open question is execution: funds of this kind live or die on governance, and on whether the private money they are designed to attract actually turns up rather than leaving the state to carry the risk alone. But a government putting real capital exactly where the chain is weakest, and doing it on an international stage to court co-investors, is aiming at the right problem.
