Fund: Chui Ventures
Thesis: Investing in African entrepreneurs solving mass-market problems with a gender equity lens
Fund size: $16 million
Companies funded to date: 16
How she’s making the world a better place: Believing in the best founders in her home continent and making sure female founders get 50% of the opportunities to build companies as the men.
Joyce-Ann Wainaina: “VCLab was quite intense, but what I learned from it was brilliant.”
Joyce-Ann Wainaina’s journey to becoming a VC looks intentional in the rearview mirror, but in actuality, it was anything but.
She was a highly successful investment banker in Nairobi, Kenya, with two adult daughters successfully launched into their careers. She could have gone on that way forever.
So what changed? She started angel investing.
At first, she admits it may have been out of a sense of obligation or guilt. She had been fortunate enough to go to college in the United States and find a path that included living in her native country and also having a Western-style, lucrative career. But Wainaina has never been one to succeed and pull up the ladder behind her.
She wanted to give something more to her country, and she knew entrepreneurs– not bankers– were the ones really building the future. She invested in them– making sure 50% of her deals went to women– for seven years.
Over that time, she fell out of love with banking and in love with helping startups. But it was her daughters who came to her and suggested she become a venture capitalist, with a real institutional fund.
“What you’re doing with all of this angel investing is really important,” they said to her. “Why don’t you consider putting a structure together, and we’ll help?”
Before that, it had never once occurred to Wainaina to become a VC. She didn’t know where to start, but got a fortuitous email forwarded to her mentioning a VC Lab event.
That’s when it all started to click, and something that seemed huge and unknown and unattainable at one moment became an oversubscribed fund with major limited partners like The MasterCard Foundation and The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, just two years later.
“You know what they say, ‘When a student is ready, a teacher appears,” she says. “I didn’t hear about VCLab from anyone. I didn’t know about it from anyone at the time. I just happened to get a link to it in an email. The cohort was starting at the exact same time, and I was like: ‘Something wants me to do this.’”
Her fund, Chui Ventures, is a pan-African seed-stage fund with a gender-equity focus, backing startups that build mass-market companies. These were the same kinds of businesses she had backed successfully for seven years as an angel investor, too. 50% of her investments go to female founders; 100% go to African founders.
We asked her how she would have wound up as a VC if she hadn’t gotten that email. Because clearly, Wainaina was destined to be a VC whether she always realized it or not.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I was done with banking. I may have gone into a fund of funds or private equity. I knew I had this calling, and I had to answer it. I’m very glad I started the fund, but I didn’t realize it would be this much hard work. If I’d known, maybe I would have joined a larger fund and been a partner. But now we will be that bigger fund, and we’ll hire partners.”
Read more at https://govclab.com/2025/08/18/joyce-ann-wainaina/
