In April 2022, Five35 Ventures, a gender-focused venture capital firm, wrote one of its first cheques to Complete Farmer, a Ghanaian agritech company that connects smallholder farmers to buyers, inputs and financing.
In March 2026, it sold its entire stake. Five35 says the sale returned 3.5 times its money, an internal rate of return of 38% over four years, and that Complete Farmer’s valuation rose from $6 million to $49 million over the same period.
Five35 is a pan-African fund that writes pre-seed and seed cheques into tech-enabled companies, focusing on markets beyond the big four of Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt and South Africa.
“We invest in exceptional businesses first, and the gender lens helps us find overlooked ones,” said Hema Vallabh, Five35’s founding partner. “Turning that value into realised returns for our investors is the real test of our success. Over the next six to 18 months, we will write bigger cheques now that we have an anchor, invest more in secondary markets, and then move into our harvest period, where we will look harder at exits.”
Exits are rare in African venture capital and rarer in agritech, according to Briter, which calls exit routes the sector’s tightest constraint, as fragmented supply chains and heavy working capital needs make it hard for companies to scale.
Vallabh, an engineer who founded the women’s entrepreneurship platform WomHub, runs the fund with general partner Fatou Touré. Five35 was raising $30 million in 2022. When the capital winter hit, Vallabh cut the target and raised her first $1 million through cheques starting at $35,000, mostly from first-time investors. The Mastercard Foundation Africa Growth Fund came in as an anchor in late 2025, and she expects to close in the next three to six months.
The sale was partly a commercial call and partly a strategic one: a first-time manager still raising money needed to show investors it could return cash.
Vallabh explains below what Five35 means by a gender lens, why it sold its best performer early, how it raised money as a first-time manager, and what female founders face when they pitch that most investors never see.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How do you invest on the continent?
We invest at pre-seed and seed in companies that are significantly tech-enabled, and we are sector agnostic. We are pan-African, with a bigger focus on sub-Saharan Africa and a small allocation for North Africa. We invest in the big four of South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt and Kenya, and we are also excited about secondary markets such as Ghana, Senegal and the DRC.
We invest with a gender lens, and for us that goes beyond female founders. Our definition is about intentionality. A company can be co-owned or co-led by women, with a woman in a real leadership role such as CEO or CTO.
It can have an intentionally female workforce, with women spread across the business and not only at the lower levels. Or it can have an intentionally female customer base. The test is how we get more women participating in economic activity, living better lives and making more money.
For the customer base, the example I use is a male founder who builds a maternal health app. He is deliberately serving women, and those women become healthier and more economically active. We are a fully gender-lens fund, and for every investment, it has to be clear why we consider it one.
Complete Farmer has a male founder. How does it fit your gender lens?
It is a good example of our thesis. Desmond is a male founder, but Complete Farmer is a B2B and B2C platform, and when we invested, about 55% to 60% of its customers were women. Women also made up about 80% of its post-harvest workforce.
Because of the platform, more female farmers were taking their produce to market more efficiently and more profitably. The model gave farmers a market before they planted, which made their income more predictable and reduced waste. The gender impact was built into what made it a commercially compelling business.
Why did you build Five35 around a gender lens?
I have worked in this space for 20 years. I am an engineer turned entrepreneur turned investor. My first organisation was a non-profit that helped get more women into engineering. I later turned it into a commercial business, WomHub, which today works across talent, incubation and acceleration, co-working spaces and capital.
Someone who starts a fintech fund usually comes from banking. Gender is my specialisation. It is the right thing to do, and it is also an overlooked market that repeatedly shows better returns. Our pipeline comes from the WomHub network and two decades of work, and our partners help us support founders in ways other funds cannot.
At pre-seed and seed, you are backing the founder more than the numbers, because the numbers are not there yet. Research shows female founders are disadvantaged at this stage because they do not fit the mould.
Pitch competitions, to put it a little facetiously, are designed for the very articulate white male American founder. A more introverted founder may not pitch as well and still be very good at building her business. That is why we need more fund managers and investment committee members who look like the founders we want to back.
You argue that gender-lens investing is commercial. On what basis?
Our name comes from data. Research shows that adding more female entrepreneurs to the African economy could lift GDP by up to 5%, and that diverse teams can deliver a 35% higher return than all-male teams when the playing field is level. Our job is to help level it.
Our investors expect competitive financial returns, as they would from any other venture fund. We compete for capital with gender-agnostic funds. We care about impact, including job creation, and we want it alongside strong financial returns.
You see this in our portfolio. We first made 16 small investments, which I call our track record builders, and Complete Farmer was one of them. After our anchor investment, we made two new investments and three follow-ons. We now have 18 investments and a zero per cent failure rate. A few are struggling, and none has folded, and we are in year four, going into year five. These are unrealised gains, and the fund overall sits at about 2x.
Agritech exits are rare. What did Complete Farmer do differently?
Part of it was deliberate, and part of it was timing. Agritech is hard to scale because supply chains are fragmented, working capital needs are different, and operations are complex.
Complete Farmer did more than build an app for farmers. It built a full commercial supply chain platform that solved real problems on both sides of the market. Connecting production to predictable demand was unusual.
It also had strong leadership and strong execution, and it showed commercial viability fairly early. I am yet to see a solution in the market as complete as theirs. They have competitors in individual verticals, and building the full platform is what sets them apart.
Why did you invest?
They met our core criteria: pan-African, tech-enabled, early-stage, and gender lens. They were solving a problem on both sides of the market, and they had a strong founder.
Desmond was not positioning itself as a gender-lens company. When we looked closely, the strong female customer base was almost incidental. We saw a way to add value by helping them make that intentional and by helping with teams and governance. We were a small investor working alongside others, so I do not claim his success is because of us. But we knew where we could help a company that was already growing strongly.
Why did you sell in March?
It was the right time, and it made commercial sense. When Complete Farmer was raising its next round, we considered doubling down, but the valuation was beyond our range. Anything we could add would have been too small to matter.
We did discuss staying in for a bigger exit later. We will never know how that would have turned out. There was also a strategic reason. Our target as a fund is at least three times the money on invested capital, and this exit exceeded it. As a first-time fund that is still fundraising and heading into its harvest period, we needed to show that we can deliver exits. Going through a real exit process was also a learning experience.
We did not sell because we lacked faith in the company. They were one of our strongest performers and still have potential. It was a commercial decision, a fundraising decision and a disciplined capital allocation decision.
Who bought your stake?
We cannot disclose the buyer because of confidentiality agreements. It was a secondary transaction, and we sold our entire position.
Which other portfolio companies are close to an exit?
We are still in our investment period, and our focus is on deploying capital and doubling down on our strongest performers. We will invest quite aggressively over the next 18 months. We keep assessing liquidity, and sometimes the market approaches us to ask whether we will sell a position, but we are not actively chasing exits. Give us two or three years, and then we will be thinking seriously about them.
What support do you give founders beyond capital?
We are entrepreneurs investing in entrepreneurs, and we have a structured value creation method. We run portfolio community sessions for peer learning. One of our companies has made two acquisitions and walked the others through how it did them. We also work with each company on what it needs at this stage, such as building teams, governance structures and systems.
Our anchor, the Mastercard Foundation Africa Growth Fund, adds a second layer of technical assistance for our portfolio, both cash and in-kind. Through us, companies such as Complete Farmer can reach support they would not otherwise get.
We also lead by example on the gender lens. One female founder told me she does not think twice about sending me a WhatsApp message at 10 pm, whereas she would worry about it being misread if she sent it to a male fund manager. The level of sexual harassment female founders face when pitching is a systemic problem that we have to talk about, and many do not feel safe in rooms where nobody looks like them.
I had a baby in the last two and a half years, and I was fundraising while pregnant. Many of our founders told me they did not know that was possible. A female founder raising while pregnant gets asked how committed she really is or whether her life will change after the baby. A male founder rarely faces those questions. We build support for these realities into how we work, before and after we invest.
What was fundraising like as a first-time manager?
Tough. Fund managers have to raise from LPs before we can invest, just as founders raise to grow. Fatou and I are both first-time fund managers.
When I conceived Five35 around 2021, the market was in its heyday, with a lot of liquidity on the continent. Then the capital winter hit. We started with ambitious targets, and we had to adapt and aim for a smaller fund.
I went to my own network first. I looked for strong women, often executives, who had made money and invested in property or stocks, or as angels, but had never considered venture capital as an asset class or invested as an LP.
Through what I call the 35 Club, we took cheques from $35,000 upwards, mostly from women, and raised our first $1 million. Small cheques from individuals would never get us to a fund of $15 million or $20 million, and they let us make our first investments and build a track record. When we approached institutions, we could answer the question every first-time manager gets: what is your track record?
That led to our anchor investment from the Mastercard Foundation Africa Growth Fund, and other investors came in around it. We are now in what we call the final circle, with a small allocation is left, and we hope to close in the next three to six months. Would I have liked to raise more? Yes. The market has not allowed it yet.
How do you structure your investments?
We are a pure equity fund and do not do debt. Our preferred early-stage instrument is a SAFE, and that is how we first invested in Complete Farmer and most of our other companies.
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