She learned finance on Wall Street. Now she is changing how Africa gets funded.

There is a particular kind of distance between Wall Street and Lebowakgomo, a township in South Africa’s Limpopo Province.

One is synonymous with global finance, enormous transactions and institutions moving billions of dollars across markets. The other is where Grace Legodi grew up in a family shaped by the horrors of apartheid, an enforced system of racial segregation, where her parents, a teacher and a social worker, placed an unusually high premium on education.

Legodi eventually crossed that distance.

She studied finance at the University of Cape Town, worked in mergers and acquisitions at Goldman Sachs, a global investment powerhouse, in New York and Johannesburg, and spent more than a decade across investment banking, venture capital and entrepreneurship development. 

Today, she is back in South Africa building Keyo Ventures, an investment manager financing early-stage businesses at the intersection of technology, infrastructure and the green economy across the Southern African Development Community (SADC). The Venture Capital (VC) firm backs companies working in areas such as electric mobility, water, waste management and sustainable agriculture, businesses that often look less like traditional software startups and more like the physical infrastructure behind the next generation of African technology.

But Legodi’s return home is not simply a story about a finance professional leaving Wall Street for African entrepreneurship.  

It is about what happens when someone who has spent years inside one of the world’s most sophisticated capital markets decides that its rules do not always work for the innovation and businesses being built at home. “Keyo is a data-driven investor that unlocks capital for early-stage tech-enabled startups in the green economy  and asset-backed businesses in Southern Africa,”  the company’s website screams in bold letters.

For Legodi, the problem is not simply that Southern African startups need more money. It is that the financial system is often designed for companies that already have the scale, track record, collateral or predictability that early-stage businesses do not yet possess.

That is the gap Keyo is trying to fill. “Capital is not a commodity here. It’s a trusted relationship with integrity,” Legodi told TechCabal.

In New York, she says, capital can move quickly because the infrastructure around it is mature: there is liquidity, established legal infrastructure and a deep pool of comparable transactions. In Africa, investors may spend months understanding the founder, the business and the formal and informal systems around it.

“Scale fast, worry later” may work as a shorthand for some technology businesses in established markets. Legodi does not believe it translates neatly to Southern Africa.

In many of the businesses she encounters, the founder is not simply building a product. They are also building the supply chain, finding customers, navigating regulation and, in some cases, creating the infrastructure the business needs to exist in the first place.

“That’s why resilience and perseverance is good,” she said, contrasting it with investment banking’s emphasis on size and speed. It is an idea that has shaped Keyo’s investment approach.

The capital gap

Founded in 2023 by Legodi, Keyo focuses on businesses working in green mobility, water, waste management, sustainable agriculture and other parts of the green economy. Its model combines alternative financing with technology that tracks operational and financial performance.

The companies Keyo targets often have customers, revenue and valuable assets, but are still too early-stage to secure conventional financing. Traditional venture capital tends to favour asset-light businesses that can scale without significant infrastructure, while banks generally require greater maturity and a longer operating track record.

“Too capital-intensive for equity VC, too early for a bank. That gap is exactly where we operate,” she stated.

Legodi is careful not to present debt as a universal solution.

“We do not believe that debt is always the right instrument for an early-stage African business. We want to help entrepreneurs understand that there are different funding instruments that extend beyond equity or debt which become relevant depending on the life cycle of the business,” she told TechCabal.

At the earliest stage, a founder might be better served by grants, competitions or simply customers paying for the product. Equity becomes more useful once there is evidence of market traction. Debt, she notes, makes more sense when a business has a proven model and assets generating enough cash flow to support repayment.

That distinction matters because debt comes with an obligation that equity does not.

Keyo prefers financing revenue-generating assets rather than businesses with uncertain cash flows. Its initial cheques typically range from R2 million ($125,000) to R3 million ($187,500), increasing as a business demonstrates performance and sustainability.

The approach is visible in the firm’s work with Zimi Charge, an electric-vehicle charging infrastructure company. Keyo provided capital for infrastructure rollout while a development finance institution supplied quasi-equity to support staffing and working capital.

The idea is not to replace equity but to give founders another option. “We come into the market as a complementary debt provider, not a replacement for equity,” said Legodi.

What institutional capital misses

Legodi’s frustration with conventional finance is less about the existence of capital than the conditions attached to accessing it.

She identifies four recurring barriers: revenue thresholds, minimum cheque sizes, currency mismatches and lengthy due diligence.

Legodi believes institutional investors often define “early stage” at a revenue level that is already beyond the earliest phase of company building. Their large pools of capital also make smaller transactions less attractive. Meanwhile, investors with dollar-denominated mandates can create currency risk for businesses whose revenues are generated in local currencies.

Then there is the paperwork.

Legodi says institutional due diligence can take as long as 24 months before money reaches a business. For a young company, waiting two years for financing is not simply an administrative delay. It can determine whether the company survives.

“Some of the most promising early-stage businesses in the green economy are structurally too small, too young, or too resource-constrained to access institutional capital,” she explained.

This is the problem Legodi is trying to address: investors may want exposure to Africa’s green economy, while the businesses capable of driving that growth often do not fit conventional investment criteria.

“We leverage technology to collect day-to-day operational data, helping us track the scalability of the business and understand how we can support its growth,” said Legodi

The VC integrates with portfolio companies’ operational systems to track day-to-day performance, giving investors a clearer picture of productivity, revenue and risk.

But Legodi does not think technology alone fixes the financing problem. Capital must also come with operational support, reporting systems, talent and market access.

“You can’t just put money into businesses and hope for the best,” she said.

That belief also explains why one of Keyo’s most important milestones was not an investment in a startup. It was capital that helped Keyo itself become investable.

The $125 000 that changed the equation

For a first-time fund manager, convincing institutions to commit capital can be almost as difficult as convincing them to back an early-stage company.

Keyo received R2 million ($125,000) in catalytic funding through Anglo American’s Impact Finance Network. That investment helped the fund secure a R35 million ($2.19 million) commitment from its first institutional investor.

“That R2 million ($125 000) provided a positive market signal which gave our first institutional investor the comfort to come on board with a R35 million ($2.19 million) commitment, roughly 17 times the size of the original catalytic cheque,” said Legodi.

She stated that institutional financiers often want another backer to have taken the first step. Catalytic capital can therefore help bridge the gap between an untested manager and larger institutional commitments.

For Legodi, the experience illustrates a wider problem in African finance. Institutions may recognise the importance of early-stage companies but lack the capacity to reach them directly at scale.

Emerging managers can also act as intermediaries, but they face their own funding bottlenecks.

Legodi says Keyo has been fundraising for three years and remains in discussions with major development finance institutions, corporates and foundations. That experience has pushed the firm to explore family offices and philanthropic capital, which can sometimes move more quickly.

From Limpopo to the SADC region

There is a personal dimension to Legodi’s focus on jobs and small businesses.

She grew up in Lebowakgomo as her parents’ generation spent much of their lives under apartheid. They made sacrifices to ensure their children had access to strong education. Legodi became the first Black captain of school and valedictorian at Capricorn High School before receiving a scholarship to study at the University of Cape Town (UCT). 

She later completed a master’s degree in innovation and entrepreneurship at École des Hautes Études Commerciales de Paris..

Her career could have kept moving in the direction of global finance. Instead, she returned to a question much closer to home: what kinds of businesses will create jobs and build the infrastructure Southern Africa needs?

Her answer includes companies working on energy, transport, water, waste and food systems.

“The green economy needs to take off, and we want to see that happen across the region, not only for the environmental benefits, but for what it means practically: energy security, safe drinking water, and sustainable, secure food systems,” she said.

Keyo is targeting a R500 million ($31.3 million) investment in electric vehicles and eventually wants to operate across all 16 SADC countries. The firm says it already has six portfolio companies and a pipeline worth more than R300 million ($18.8 million).

But expanding beyond South Africa brings another layer of complexity. Regulation and currency risk become harder to manage when capital crosses borders. Legodi told TechCabal that Keyo is exploring fund structures that would allow it to invest in local currencies rather than push hard-currency risk onto entrepreneurs.

For now, Southern Africa remains the firm’s primary market. The larger ambition, however, is not simply to become another source of venture debt. Legodi wants founders to become more informed consumers of capital.

“When we reach R500 million ($31.3 million) and expand across the region, what we would really want to see change is founder awareness,” she said.

Legodi wants entrepreneurs to understand the difference between grants, equity, debt and other forms of financing that best suits the needs and realities of their businesses.

That may ultimately be the most compelling part of Legodi’s journey. She left a world where capital was abundant, structured and sophisticated, and returned to one where it can be scarce, patient and deeply personal.

Now, she is trying to build a bridge between those two worlds, not by importing Wall Street’s playbook wholesale, but by asking a more difficult question: what should capital look like when it is designed around the realities of Southern African businesses?

Her answer is still taking shape, one founder, one deal, and one financing structure at a time.

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