Africa wants to emulate India’s startup success. But Africa’s top VC doesn’t want to emulate Indian VCs

On a typical weekday morning, Zachariah George slips out of his two-storey villa—50 steps from South African capital Cape Town’s Atlantic Ocean beaches—and slides into his grey BMW Z4 convertible.

A half-hour later, he rolls into trendy Kloof StreetCNNThe ‘world’s coolest’ streets for 2022 revealed by Time Out, a narrow lane packed with bars, pizzerias, and shops selling chunky jewellery and bronze artefacts. Climbing to the first floor in a co-working space called Innovation City, he passes a four-foot-tall statue of a unicorn—the dream of just about everyone in the building, possibly except George himself—then settles into his glass-enclosed office.

Every few minutes, company founders, startup executives, and other venture capitalists knock on the glass, hoping for a few words with George.

Everyone connected to African startups seems to know him. Harvard Business School recently featuredHarvard Business SchoolLaunch Africa Ventures him in a case study, noting his firm “had made a name for itself by targeting early-stage investment opportunities across Africa.” In Nairobi, an investor points to him as the most aggressive player in the space. A Chicago finance professor says if writing about the African VC ecosystem, one must speak to George.

Born in Kerala and raised in Oman, George (43) studied at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and Stanford University, then got hired by financial-services firm Lehman Brothers back when it seemed indestructible. But he soon got disillusioned, went on a trip to Africa, and before long, relocated there permanently.

His ambition is akin to India’s early VCs, Helion’s Ashish Gupta or Nexus’s Suvir Sujan, to build an ecosystem that doesn’t exist. But the surrounding circumstances vary.

India’s startup booms and busts draw awe and hand-wringing in equal parts, but its ability to draw investors is roughly on par with its economic success over the past decade. Simultaneously, the country’s VCs had US pension funds and endowments with the appetite to back them for decades without solid returns, not to mention a market that eventually sprang wealthy consumers.

India accounted for nearly 4% of both global GDP and global startup funding in 2024, according to data from the International Monetary Fund and CB Insights

Africa’s fragmentedSaiiaBreak Down Africa’s Barriers trade policies, unstable or corruptInternational Monetary FundMore Sand Than Oil regimes, and an ever-deferred infrastructure boomBCGBridging Africa’s Infrastructure Execution Gap, on the other hand, have trapped it in a cycle of business promise and disappointment.