Fast Forward Venture Studio wants to scale businesses across Africa

A new platform called Fast Forward has been launched by serial entrepreneur Opeyemi Awoyemi in collaboration with Omolara Awoyemi and Jake Bright to support and build African businesses. Fast Forward is an early-stage fund and venture studio.

Fast Forward Venture Studio, according to the firm, supports up to 10 startups annually, giving preference to platform and infrastructure plays, in industries such as B2B, Fintech, eCommerce, Edtech, Healthcare, Logistics, Deep Tech, SaaS, Future of Work, and Blockchain.

The venture studio initiative starts with an approach that is "impact-focused" and on which Fast Forward can establish a formidable company. The venture studio firm is particularly looking for concepts that it thinks can have an impact on at least 10 million people and produce at least $10 million in recurring yearly revenue in three to five years.

After the concept has gained traction, the venture studio looks for a skilled operator who they consider to attain a product-market fit, expand the business, and assume leadership. After all these requirements have been met, Fast Forward offers the operator or founder $100,000 in return for up to 20% of the company, as well as value-add services like co-founder position, recruitment, initial product strategy, engineering support, and administration including accounting and legal.

“We back entrepreneurs from day one, so almost exclusively, we’re the first money in the company. Lara and I are entrepreneurs that have scaled businesses in Africa, so we don’t see ourselves as only investors but also as builders,” said managing partner Awoyemi. “We understand the market and believe that the best way to unlock some of these opportunities, even most people are not thinking about, is to put entrepreneurs at the center. The ideas can come from us, but they are a dime a dozen; the real work is execution.”

One of the co-founders of the bootstrapped hosting platform Whogohost and the online employment board Jobberman was Opeyemi Awoyemi. In order to foster innovation and innovators in schools, he collaborated with Olufunbi Falayi in 2016 to establish the N200m FastForward Student Innovation Fund. 

Awoyemi joined Indeed as a senior technical product manager after leaving Jobberman. Omolara, its operating partner, however, formerly served as Nigeria's country manager for Jumia's fintech division and as a senior program manager at Facebook.

According to TechCrunch the decision Awoyemi made to choose this path is particularly intriguing given the large number of African founders who either start venture capital firms or syndicates. Instead, he and his co-founder contribute crucial operational knowledge to develop a venture studio, an uncommon feat in this region. 

Additionally, Fast Forward has a second early-stage fund that makes pre-seed investments in scalable tech-enabled businesses. The syndicated fund makes judicious investments of $20,000–$50,000 in a few studio-related businesses. The studio is home to a number of businesses, including Bumpa, AltSchool, TalentQL, Dojah, and Sendchamp.