Maximilian Fleitmann is a business angel and knows his way around the African continent. Here are his tips Maximilian Fleitmann
A guest article by Maximilian Fleitmann, founder and business angel. He is co-founder of the edtech startup Studyhelp. He has managed the internet holding company Wizard Ventures since 2022.
It’s been almost exactly a year since Diego, one of Plug & Play’s investors, invited me to Egypt to mentor fundraising and pitch decks. I myself started investing small tickets in startups in 2018. In the beginning there was no real strategy and only in the startups of my friends. Over time, however, I have continued to professionalize my investments. Today I have a portfolio of almost 20 investments, mainly in Europe and the USA.
I was curious if Africa could offer me good investment opportunities. The entire ecosystem there cannot yet be compared with Europe or the USA, because there are simply far fewer startups, far less funding, far less startup education and far fewer accelerator programs. Nevertheless, I was more than positively surprised at the degree of professionalism of the local founders.
Most of the startups I dealt with on site were in the fintech, logistics, Saar, ed-tech or marketplaces sectors. Among them were a surprising number of companies that are local versions of the big tech companies. I got to know the Arabic Blinkist copy “A5dr”, the PayPal for North Africa “Mynk”, the Charles for Morocco “Digishare” and the Eventbrite for Africa “Tidar”. A few things really surprised me: