ASINT / Finance & Institutions
The signing and its structural design
On June 30, 2026, the Bank of Industry signed a fund management agreement with Kuramo Capital Management, appointing it as Fund Manager of the DICE Fund of Funds under the Investment in Digital and Creative Enterprises programme. The DICE Fund of Funds is structured with a target capitalisation of $170 million, with the Federal Government contributing an anchor commitment of $85 million through the iDICE Programme and Kuramo Capital mandated to raise equivalent matching capital from private sector investors. The Fund of Funds is the largest funding window under the $617 million iDICE Programme. It is designed to channel investments through venture capital funds that will, in turn, provide financing to startups and high-growth businesses operating in Nigeria’s digital and creative sectors. The fund targets a net IRR of 20% and a net money multiple of 2.4x, structured with government capital as a 30% first-loss junior tranche to de-risk the structure and crowd in private co-investment. The contract signing is the second major iDICE venture capital milestone. In November 2025, the Programme achieved a landmark first milestone when it made Nigeria’s inaugural direct government investment into a private venture capital fund, a cornerstone commitment to Ventures Platform’s VP Pan-African Fund II, which closed at $64 million with co-investors including the International Finance Corporation, British International Investment, Standard Bank of South Africa, and Proparco. The iDICE investment architecture is now a two-layer system: a direct government co-investment in a single fund, and a fund-of-funds vehicle that deploys through multiple VC managers simultaneously. The combination is the standard approach that mature sovereign innovation finance programmes use to balance concentration risk against programme management capacity.
The first-loss tranche and what it signals about market structure
The 30% first-loss junior tranche is the most analytically significant element of the DICE Fund of Funds structure. It is not primarily a subsidy. It is a market architecture intervention. Nigeria’s pre-seed and seed venture capital market has a structural gap that has been documented consistently across African VC ecosystem analyses: institutional investors with return requirements calibrated to global private equity benchmarks cannot access Nigerian seed-stage investments without absorbing risk concentrations that their investment mandates prohibit. The first-loss tranche solves that problem by subordinating the government’s $85 million to private co-investment returns up to the 30% loss threshold. A private LP entering alongside the government capital knows that the first 30% of losses are absorbed by the public anchor before a single dollar of private capital is impaired. That risk architecture converts investments that were previously outside institutional mandates into investments that are within them. Wale Adeosun, Founder and CEO of Kuramo Capital, stated: “Nigeria’s technology and creative sectors are arguably among the most dynamic on the continent, yet they remain underserved by formal venture capital, particularly at pre-seed and seed stages where the funding gap is highly required. The iDICE Fund of Funds shall address this structural gap directly by institutionalising and accelerating that trajectory at scale.” The geographic mandate reinforces the market architecture argument. The Fund’s geographic mandate ensures capital reaches founders across all six geopolitical zones, not only in Lagos and Abuja but in Kano, Enugu, Port Harcourt, Maiduguri, Plateau, and beyond. A fund-of-funds structure is the correct instrument for geographic reach precisely because it can mandate sub-fund managers to allocate portions of their capital to specific regions, rather than requiring a central manager to source and diligence deals across 36 states simultaneously.
Kuramo Capital and the manager selection logic
Kuramo Capital, established in 2010 with offices in New York, Lagos and Nairobi, has helped catalyse more than $3.5 billion in investments into African businesses and fund managers, supporting over 350,000 jobs. The manager selection logic is specific. A fund-of-funds manager for a government-anchored programme with three multilateral co-financiers needs a profile that combines: credibility with international institutional LPs for the matching capital raise, existing relationships with African VC fund managers for sub-fund selection, and compliance infrastructure compatible with AfDB, AFD, and IsDB standards. Kuramo’s three-city presence, its track record mobilising institutional capital for African managers, and its experience as a fund-of-funds investor in the African context are each relevant to those requirements. The BOI Managing Director’s charge to Kuramo, that delays in deploying capital could affect entrepreneurs waiting to scale their businesses and that the integrity of the fund is tied directly to Nigeria’s credibility in the global investor community, frames the programme not as a development grant but as a capital market credibility exercise. If Kuramo deploys poorly, Nigerian institutional credibility with global LPs contracts. If it deploys well and achieves the 20% net IRR target, Nigeria becomes a proven destination for institutional-grade venture capital structured through sovereign anchor investment.
The iDICE programme and its wider architecture
As of June 2026, implementation is well advanced on all three programme pillars: skills and enterprise development, access to finance, and ecosystem enablement, with activities running in all six geopolitical zones. The iDICE Startup Bridge launched three months ago, with the first cohort of 185 founders advanced in week four of training. Applications for Cohort 2 opened on June 24, 2026. The programme has commenced the setup and revamp of digital and creative hubs in 66 institutions, 36 universities and 30 polytechnics, across the country in collaboration with NUC and NBTE. The BOI/iDICE Debt Fund and the IsDB Murabaha Debt Fund together provide $110 million in financing for startups in the technology and creative sectors. The $110 million debt facility alongside the $170 million fund-of-funds equity vehicle creates a blended finance stack: debt for revenue-generating startups that can service it, equity for early-stage ventures that cannot. That stack addresses the Nigerian startup financing gap at both ends of the capital structure simultaneously. The Seplat re-rating documented in this series showed that Nigerian energy sector capital can generate 36% returns on equity when operational delivery, strategic ownership, and index architecture converge. The iDICE programme is attempting to create the equivalent enabling infrastructure for Nigeria’s technology sector, converting development finance into a market architecture that attracts private institutional capital at scale. The FTSE Nigeria frontier market upgrade documented in this series adds a structural tailwind: as Nigeria gains eligibility in international institutional portfolios at the equity market level, the iDICE fund-of-funds is simultaneously building the early-stage venture capital market that generates the companies that eventually reach the public markets those portfolios track. The two are not unconnected. They are consecutive layers of the same capital market deepening strategy.