• Algeria-based accelerator Algeria Venture (A-Venture) and the Algeria Investment Fund (AIF) have partnered to launch a VC fund targeting $10 million to support startups.
• The partnership aims to provide financing for Algerian startups at all stages from creation, Seed, and up to acceleration that could lead to an IPO.

Source: Afrikan Heroes

An agreement has been inked in Algiers between Algeria’s public startup accelerator Algeria Venture (A-Venture) and the Algeria Investment Fund (AIF) to provide funding to startups at various stages of development.

“The goal of this agreement is to provide financing for all stages of a startup’s life, from creation, seed, and up to acceleration that could lead to its IPO,” said Yacine El-Mahdi Oualid, Minister Delegate to the Prime Minister in charge of the Knowledge Economy and Startups, during the signing ceremony.

According to Algeria’s Minister of Finance, Abderrahmane Raouya, who was present at the signing ceremony, the AIF, through this agreement, will assist in the diversification of the sources of financing for SMEs and startups by serving as “an important incentive tool for these enterprises.”

The AIF, which was established in 2021 as a collaboration between the National Bank of Algeria (BNA) and the External Bank of Algeria (BEA), has a capital of 11 billion dinars.

Raouya claims that he will be able to “raise the funds that he will put into the financing of the national economy, particularly through startups and SMEs” year after year.

For his part, Sid Ali Zerrouki, general manager of A-Venture, stated that the signing of this deal constituted “a new qualitative step” in the assistance of startups, by providing them with funding tools “in accordance with their progress.”

“A startup requires more funding to develop and export and does not want to be satisfied with the 20 million dinars that Algeria Startups Fund (ASF) may offer it,” he claimed. “This is what justifies the signing of the deal with the AIF, which can give funding of up to 1.5 billion dinars, a first in Africa for a public fund,” he adds.

According to the manager, this arrangement would also “lay the ground” for foreign investment funds with which A-Venture has signed collaboration agreements and which are ready to spend “hundreds of millions of euros” in Algeria.

Algerian startups will thus be helped by this agreement to attain a level of maturity that will allow them to absorb these foreign investments, he stated.

El Hocine Djemmal, the general manager of AIF, believes that the launch of the fund he leads comes “at the perfect time” to “increase” and diversify the means of financing SMEs/SMIs and startups.