TLcom Capital, the Africa-focused venture capital firm, is growing its early-stage portfolio from its dedicated $5M pre-seed fund, TAPSI (TIDE Africa Pre Seed Investments).
With its most recent investment in TurnStay, the South African travel payment platform, which has just closed a $2M seed round, TAPSI has now deployed 50% of its capital.
TAPSI was launched in 2022 to extend TLcom’s investment reach to pre-seed stage companies, providing up to $200,000 in funding alongside access to the firm’s global network and expertise. The fund acts as an upstream feeder vehicle for TLcom’s core $154M TIDE Africa Fund II, enabling portfolio companies that perform well to progress to larger funding rounds.
In addition to Turnstay, the TAPSI portfolio currently includes Talstack (Nigeria), Bright Financial (Sudan and Ethiopia), Tradehub (Egypt), Agrails (Kenya) and three startups backed through its partnership with First Check Africa, which focuses on delivering early-stage capital to female founders. Through TAPSI, TLcom expects to close on up to ten additional pre-seed investments before the end of 2026.
Building on the investment approach of TLcom’s TIDE Fund I and TIDE Fund II, TAPSI is sector-agnostic and focuses on key sectors where TLcom sees strong early-stage potential for outsized impact. Talstack’s journey demonstrates this approach in practice, leveraging its TAPSI pre-seed funding to validate its model and achieve early traction, culminating in a subsequent seed round from TIDE Fund II in 2024.
Eloho Omame, Partner at TLcom Capital, says, “Pre-seed investments allow us to expand our portfolio and allocate capital across multiple stages of a company’s lifecycle. Our goal is to create massive value in underserved markets and collaborate with African founders to build from the start all the way to exit; be it an acquisition or in the form of an IPO. This is by no means easy for any start-up, in any sector; building in Africa is not for the faint-hearted. However, the likelihood of success significantly increases if we support and work with founders earlier on in their journeys and we grow alongside them”.
TLcom portfolio of early-stage supported startups include Pula, uLesson, Autochek, FairMoney, Educatly, HUB2, ILLA, Littlefish, Seamless HR, and Andela.
Eloho Omame concludes, “With TAPSI as a dedicated pre-seed arm of our investment platform, TLcom is uniquely positioned to back companies across their entire growth journey from ideation and product-market fit to scaling and maturity, reinforcing our role as a long-term partner to Africa’s most ambitious founders. As we progress with this fund, we look forward to speaking with and supporting more early-stage start-ups from across the continent”.