Investor Spotlight: Paula Mokwena, CEO of Fireball Capital
- FemImpact Africa
- Dec 4, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: Apr 10
Leading Fireball VC’s Push for Africa’s Startup Success
Paula Mokwena is a force to be reckoned with in Africa’s venture capital scene. As the CEO and founder of Fireball VC, she’s focused on finding and funding startups that solve real problems across sectors like healthtech, fintech, agritech, and femtech. What sets Fireball VC apart is its hands-on approach: they don’t just write checks—they build ecosystems.
A Career Rooted in Finance and Impact
Mokwena started out in investment banking, managing portfolios across Africa and the Middle East. She served as a senior executive at a leading African investment bank and co-founded a nonprofit supporting women entrepreneurs. These experiences shaped her commitment to supporting underrepresented founders, particularly women and minorities.
But she quickly saw a huge gap in funding for underrepresented founders, especially women. This realization led to her founding Fireball Capital in 2017. “It wasn’t enough to invest,” Mokwena says. “We wanted to build something that supports founders from the ground up.”
About Fireball Capital
Founded in 2017, Fireball Capital has quickly become known for its bold, proactive approach. Under Mokwena’s leadership, the firm emphasizes more than just capital. "We invest in founders with resilience and vision—those who can navigate complex markets and build scalable solutions that work not just for Africa, but for the world," she explains.
Her strategy revolves around impact-driven innovation, aligning financial returns with social progress. Fireball’s portfolio includes startups in fintech, femtech, agritech, and healthtech, sectors Mokwena believes are key to the continent’s future.
The firm targets early-stage African startups with big growth potential. They look for scalable solutions in areas like financial inclusion, healthcare access, and food security. Fireball doesn’t stop at providing capital. They offer mentorship, market insights, and strategic partnerships to help startups succeed.
"VC is very nascent in Africa, " says Mokewena. "We definitely need a lot more investment, more fund managers to be supported by investors locally and internationally too - the more women we can then allow to come into the space. Because there are a lot of women fund managers that have got the skills to start their own funds and do gender lens investing within the VC asset class, but there is that funding gap."
Health and Femtech
Healthtech is a core investment opportunity for Fireball. Healthcare accessibility in rural areas continues to be limited, with significant challenges in retaining doctors within the public system. The healthcare system is highly fragmented, with a significant disparity between the private and public sectors. Around 75% of the population, who cannot afford the high costs of private care, are left reliant on underfunded public healthcare facilities. As such, innovative solutions to these issues have the potential to have huge impact nationally and across the continent.
The firm has backed healthcare companies like:
Mokwena has previously voiced her commitment to closing the gender funding gap, which disproportionately favors male-led startups despite data showing women-founded companies deliver higher revenue per dollar invested.
Contextual Challenges
Mokwena is focused on addressing key challenges in Africa's venture capital landscape. In the past she has emphasized the need for greater alignment between investments and local contexts, particularly given Africa's youth-driven population and the opportunities presented by digital transformation. Mokwena also highlights the importance of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) considerations in investment decisions, aiming to balance commercial returns with sustainable societal impact.
In terms of challenges, Mokwena points to the limited investment support for tech solutions tackling critical issues like healthcare access and financial inclusion in underserved communities. She advocates for increased venture capital engagement in sectors that directly address these socio-economic disparities, suggesting that a more robust VC ecosystem can spur entrepreneurship, job creation, and economic growth.
Fireball Capital's focus on supporting innovative, high-growth companies that address global challenges is central to its mission of creating a sustainable impact in South African communities and beyond.
Expanding African Startups Globally
With Africa’s startup ecosystem booming, Mokwena envisions Fireball playing a central role in scaling African innovations globally. “We’re building bridges between continents,” she says, “bringing African solutions to global markets while ensuring local impact.”
“Investors might be surprised to learn there are emerging technologies being born out of the African continent," Makwena says.
"African founders are building globally relevant and scalable technologies that are exportable to other markets. What venture capital managers in Africa are very good at doing is helping these businesses to improve their product market fit in the continent. Once these businesses are ready to scale globally they need global networks to help them get access to markets so i think it will be very important for investors in markets outside Africa to help these founders so they will be able to successfully scale their businesses."
Fireball Capital's global connections help African startups access international funding and new markets. They've partnered with venture firms in Europe, the U.S., and Asia, giving their portfolio companies a head start in expanding internationally.
What’s Next?
Fireball VC is set to close its ZAR1 billion (US$57 million) round fund in late 2024 or early 2025.
For Mokwena, the potential is clear:
"There is a lot of talent in Africa. There is a lot of innovation that is happening in Africa. There is a lot of technology rhat is not just a replication of technology that exists elsewhere in the world, but that is being developed in Africa that is globally relevant for solving problems not just in Africa but in other parts of the world."