Base10 becomes first Black-led Venture Capital firm to cross $1 Billion assets under management with new fund

Late last year, venture capitalist Adeyemi Ajao traveled back to his native Spain to tend to his 92-year-old father. The elder Ajao asked his son about recent investments by his venture firm, Base10 Partners. “I said: ‘Oh, I’m actually doing fintech deals in Africa,’” Ajao recalls. “And he’s like: ‘So, I left Nigeria for Europe, you left Europe for the U.S. Now you’re going all the way round back to put money in Nigeria? You are crazy.’”

Ajao thinks otherwise and is betting on fintech in Africa as one of the 6 to 8 emerging “megatrends” into which he plans to invest the capital from Base10’s third early-stage fund. On Tuesday, the firm announced the closing of that fund, a US$460 million vehicle which takes its total assets under management to more than US$1 billion. It marks the first time a Black-led venture capital firm has crossed the ten-figure threshold. “It’s crazy that in a world where venture capital raises $150 billion a quarter, we are the first one. There should be multiple by now,” Ajao says.

Founded in 2018, Base10 Partners is helmed by managing partners Ajao and TJ Nahigian. The San Francisco-based firm uses a data-driven approach to invest in automation tech across sectors such as food and retail. “There are way too many companies out there,” Ajao says. “By our calculations, there are 110 new deals per day that our VCs have to look at, so we have to find a way to focus and filter that.” To do so, the firm built an automated software tool to track startups in real time with a set of predictive data points; the 64 investments Base10 has made represent 0.4 percent of the more than 15,000 companies that it follows.

Most of those investments go into sectors the firm has identified through its software to be an emerging megatrend, which Ajao defines as “trends that are growing fast in terms of hiring and raising money, but still have a majority of early stage opportunities versus later stage.”