88mph

88mph was a seed-fund and startup accelerator founded in 2011 by Kresten Buch, running three-month accelerator cohorts for early-stage web and mobile startups out of Nairobi, Cape Town and, from 2014, Lagos. Between 2011 and 2014 it invested a reported $4 million to $4.5 million across 36 startups. In June 2015 it said it would stop backing new African startups to focus on its existing portfolio, a move described publicly at the time as a pause rather than a closure.

The firm was still being named in African fintech deals well after that pause, co-leading Kenyan payments startup pawaPay’s $9 million seed round in August 2021 alongside Mr Eazi’s Zagadat Capital, with founder Kresten Buch serving as pawaPay’s chairman. Yet in May 2022, Mr Eazi himself described 88mph, the source of an earlier convertible loan to his company emPawa Africa, as “now defunct”. No source reviewed reconciles an active 2021 co-lead investment with a 2022 first-person account of the firm as defunct.