Can venture studios crack Africa’s startup puzzle? FirstFounders thinks so

FirstFounders is betting on the venture-studio model to build sustainable startups in Africa, backing founders early, supplying playbooks, and supporting companies as they scale across the continent.

In July 2025, PocketLawyers, a Nigerian legal technology startup, announced that it had received funding from Nubia Capital to drive its growth across Africa. The two-year-old startup had started out connecting users to lawyers, aiming to provide affordable legal services. 

But it has since pivoted and now provides connectivity tools for lawyers, enabling them to significantly reduce the time spent on tasks such as drafting legal agreements and managing client communication. 

PocketLawyers is one of ten startups seeded at FirstFounders, a venture studio based in Nigeria and founded by David Lanre Messan. 

“I believe strongly that the venture studio model is the solution to drive entrepreneurship in Africa because a lot of founders do not have the experience to manage capital and operations successfully,” Messan shares with Techpoint Africa.

Democratising entrepreneurship 

FirstFounders portfolio startup founders

Venture studios — organisations that create startups rather than simply invest in them — trace their origins to the 1990s with Bill Gross’s founding of Idealab. 

True to its name, Idealab functioned as a laboratory for experimenting with business ideas, developing the most promising concepts into standalone companies. Over nearly three decades, it has launched more than 100 startups, with roughly a third eventually going public.

Today, the concept has spread, with many organisations putting a unique spin on the model and more than 700 studios globally. 

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The venture studio model is favoured over individual startup experiments for its ability to turn the often haphazard nature of building disruptive businesses into a replicable system. But that’s not the only reason. That replicable system means organisations can develop playbooks that work for building businesses. 

While still nascent in Africa, it offers advantages beyond codifying entrepreneurship. Venture studios pool resour...