A new early-stage fund will skip films and music catalogues and back the software that runs creator deals, events and venues. Lagos-based Aktivate is one of its first three bets.
Every sponsored post, sold-out show and booked venue runs on something unglamorous: a DM thread, a spreadsheet, a payment that arrives late. Aries Media Ventures has just put money behind three startups trying to replace that mess with software.
The firm announced Aries Media Ventures Fund I on 21 October, an early-stage fund for media-technology startups serving Sub-Saharan Africa, according to Launchbase Africa. It has already invested in three companies: Aktivate, a creator marketing platform; HustleSasa, an events commerce platform; and Book Mahali, a venue-booking and hospitality marketplace. It invests at angel, pre-seed and seed stage.
Three bets, three corners of the creator economy
Aktivate is the Nigerian pick. It sells itself as an operating system for creators, handling brand collaborations, campaign management, digital product sales and cross-border payments, with tools for brands and agencies to run and measure campaigns. Founder Akinbola Asalu previously worked at Bitmama. Earlier reporting described Aktivate as bootstrapped, with about $5,000 in monthly recurring revenue, charging brands $250 a month and agencies $500, plus a 1% commission on milestone payments. Those figures predate this deal.
HustleSasa is a Nairobi startup founded in 2021 through the Antler accelerator. It gives event organisers ticketing, mobile-money and card payments, marketing, check-in and merchandise tools. German non-profit investor Impacc recently backed it as it moved into payments and financing for organisers, and Impacc says its data suggests one gig worker is employed for every ten tickets sold, including security, catering and technical crews.
Book Mahali, led by Kagwe Mungai, runs a Kenyan marketplace that connects hosts with people renting spaces and equipment for creative and hospitality use.
The pitch is to invest in the pipes, not the programme
Aries is run by founding general partner Alykhan Kaba, whose career spans Live Nation, Entertainment One, Activision Blizzard and NBCUniversal. The firm began in 2023 as Aries Media Project, a network linking founders in emerging markets to investors and executives in Los Angeles, New York and London. Communiqué reports it grew to more than 1,000 founders in over 40 countries, around half in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The fund deliberately avoids record labels, production companies, and film and TV content. That separates it from other money in the space. Communiqué notes that MBO Capital has mainly financed Nigerian film productions, and Volition Capital’s VEMA pool backed The Black Book, Netflix’s most-watched Nollywood film. Aries is going after software, which its backers argue can scale in a way a single film or catalogue cannot.
Kaba frames it as a question of where capital goes. “Capital bears the burden of going where the innovation is, not vice versa,” he said in the launch statement.
The gap it is aiming at
The numbers explain the opening. In 2022, African startups raised more than $6.5 billion, according to figures cited in launch coverage, and digital media ventures got less than 1% of it. Fintech took almost 40%.
What we don’t know
Aries has not published the size of the fund or the amounts invested in its first three companies. Communiqué reports a $5 million target, with first cheques of up to $50,000 and as much as $150,000 more for fast-growing portfolio companies, across 40 to 50 startups over four years. Treat those as reported figures, not confirmed ones.
The model also depends on exits. Kaba’s bet, per Communiqué, is that global entertainment companies will eventually buy the African businesses he backs. That is a long shot. Few African media-tech companies have sold at the scale this would need, and a small fund holding small stakes needs a big sale to return much.
Why it matters for young creators
This is analysis, not reporting: the people most exposed to this gap are young Nigerians who already earn from their audience. When brand deals live in DMs and payments cross borders slowly, the creator carries the risk. A funded, scaled version of Aktivate could mean standard contracts, faster payment and a record of earnings to show a client or a bank. Whether Aries delivers that depends on whether the portfolio survives long enough to try.
The next signals to watch: Aktivate’s next funding round, whether Aries publishes its fund size, and whether a second Nigerian company gets a cheque.
