This week, South African early-stage accelerator and investor Founders Factory Africa (FFA) raised $114 million. The firm plans to use the impact capital from Mastercard Foundation and Johnson & Johnson Impact Ventures “to scale its model to better serve founders across the African tech ecosystem.”

FFA combines venture studio and VC models, providing investment and hands-on support for early-stage founders building local solutions to local challenges. Founded in 2018 by Roo Rogers and Alina Truhina, the firm runs its model via programs in partnership with corporates and impact investors.

In 2019, FFA partnered with South African healthcare company Netcare to select 35 African health-tech startups for an acceleration and incubation program. The following year, the firm inked a deal with Standard Bank, accepting five startups across fintech and healthtech sectors into its venture program. And in 2021, FFA announced a partnership with Small Foundation, selecting 18 agritech startups for an acceleration and incubation programThe selected startups across the three programs received between $40,000 and $250,000 in cash in exchange for varying equity stakes. In addition to capital, FFA provided these startups with technical and operational expertise, including tailored support services across product development, UX/UI, data science, engineering, business development and growth marketing. Through the partnerships, the startups also had access to distribution channels, customer acquisition, pilots, data, IP and expertise provided by the corporate investors.

Since its inception in 2018, FFA has backed and helped scale 55 startups across 11 African countries. It provides up to $250,000 equity capital to startups at the idea, pre-seed and seed stages, and $150,000 catalytic capital in non-dilutive funds into portfolio companies.Still, FFA’s newly announced mammoth raise isn’t solely for investing equity and catalytic in new and existing startups. “The allocation details are still being structured and finalized with various investors on how that would play out. We are very clear on the fact that our model from day one has been quite operationally heavy to unlock support growth for our startups,” CEO Bongani Sithole told TechCrunch in an interview. “So that means hiring great talent to unlock that growth, bolstering our support structure and building out IP to help our founders scale their businesses.”