Silver Tree Capital recently announced that it will invest $10m in African startups in 2016. You will probaly recognise PriceCheck, which is one of their investments. This post tells you what they do, and what you need to do. But, before that, let’s here from the the founders:
Manuel Koser, SIH Founder and MD says: “Our meteoric growth in 2015 has been driven by execution-focused delivery across all of our portfolio companies, as well as a number of company acquisitions that are already delivering positive returns. Our job now is to build on this momentum to maintain our aggressive growth trajectory and cement our dominance in the African ecommerce and price comparison markets”
Paul Cook, SIH Founder and MD says: “Through our operations across the continent, we are seeing first-hand that the African consumer market creates ‘leapfrog’ tech opportunities that our portfolio companies, with their expertise and deep understanding of their markets, are poised to capitalise on and grow. Silvertree-owned companies are without a doubt best placed to service and grow the millions of African consumers who are migrating to online platforms, looking to source the most competitive prices for goods and services.”
What Silvertree does
Silvertree Capital builds real businesses — and that means more than merely providing office space and some token equity. In addition to substantial equity investment, and depending on the needs of your business, we can help with some or all of:
- Access to large-scale investors for rapid growth
- Professional management or management support
- Business plan and model development, consulting and/or feedback
- Marketing, logistics, IT, talent management and other support functions.
We are interested in strong concepts with the foundations of a good team, meeting our investment criteria, and with the potential to rapidly reach scale.
What Silvertree does not do
- Investments into concept-level businesses. You should be post-revenue with good economics, or at least have a complete product and initial customers.
- Angel/small scale investments. We invest to change the future of companies.
- Support (eg. marketing, advice, software development) that does not also include an equity investment. We are an investor, not a consultancy.
- Secret ideas, non-disclosure agreements, or holding meetings before we receive company details by email. If secrecy is the only thing protecting your company, then the moment you release your product, you have no competitive advantage. We invest for execution ability, not secret ideas.
What you should do
If your company meets the above criteria, then contact us, and let’s talk further. We do not have fixed investment cycles.
Your submission should include at least:
- A clear “elevator pitch” of the concept that makes us excited about the business (NOT just the concept) in a few sentences
- Team details: who you are, and why you your team has the right people/setup to execute — what’s your “unfair advantage”?
- Historical financial and customer figures, and projections for next 2-3 years
- Initial proposal for amount of funding and support required, and what it would be used for
- Details on your product, the competitive market in your target geography, examples of similar offerings in other geographies (if any), etc.
This shouldn’t need more than e.g., a short email, 15 slides and a supporting spreadsheet.
Are you capable of leading a disruptive startup, but are without a team or great idea?
We are also continuously looking for people to lead existing companies or execute concepts that we incubate in-house. If you are young and hungry, talented, have multiple years of corporate/business experience (especially management consulting at top-tier consultancy, or similar), and want to build tech-enabled startups, please contact us.
Contact details: All the details you need, are just a click away. Click here