Fellowship Spotlight: Ajim Capital

VCI Fellow and Founder of Ajim Capital, Eunice Ajim, moved from her home country, Cameroon, to the U.S. at the end of 2011. When she arrived to the States, she had something that many people spend their whole lives chasing: clarity.

An Entrepreneurial Spirit

“I knew that the only way I was going to become as successful as I wanted to be was if I went the entrepreneurial route.” She credits her father for planting the seed that bloomed into her entrepreneurial spirit. “My dad has always been an entrepreneur; he’s started multiple brick-and-mortar businesses,” she shares. Following in his footsteps, Ajim launched her first business, a hair salon, on her Louisiana college campus and paid her way through school.

After graduating with a degree in mathematics and statistics in 2016, Ajim landed a job at Apple and relocated to Austin, Texas. But her new work situation in many ways paled in comparison to her hair salon experience. “I was making a lot of money as a student. I had my flexibility. I enjoyed it,” she reflects. She couldn’t make sense of giving so much time and energy to a company without maintaining the benefits she reaped from working for herself. “When I had a regular job that was not even paying me that well and was giving me headaches, I was like, ‘Okay, I can’t do this. I’m out.’”

Stepping Back Out on Her Own

In January of 2017, less than one year out of undergrad, Ajim started Data Gig, an online marketplace connecting data science professionals to data projects. In a moment when companies were trying to incorporate AI into their businesses but struggling with the practical elements of doing so, Ajim created Data Gig to step in and fill that gap. “I built a marketplace connecting data professionals to small- to medium-size businesses, and I thought I was gonna become a billionaire.”

“Unfortunately,” Ajim says, “the life path of an entrepreneur is not straight.” She shares a string of challenges that she encountered since launching Data Gig; she faced barriers that make the successes she’s achieved just five years later even more remarkable. “After some time, I just ran out of money. I couldn’t pay my car note; I couldn’t pay rent, so I eventually became homeless and my car got repossessed.” Despite these drastic circumstances, Ajim would not allow her morale to be compromised. “Even though I was struggling,” she says, “every day, I woke up, fixed my hair, put my makeup on, and I showed up to meetings.” 

The Second Launch

Her perseverance eventually landed her an investor who believed in what she was doing and was excited to support her work. She closed her first company and launched a second. “Within two years,” she says, “we raised over $3.7M in seed funding and grew the company to more than eight figures.” This was the type of experience she had in mind that motivated her to take the startup path in the first place. 

It was 2020, and the COVID-19 pandemic was tearing through the country, creating endless challenges and puzzles to solve. One major obstacle her second company faced was hiring, due to the fact that many people got comfortable working from home and didn’t want to return to the old way of doing business. Given the lack of U.S.-based tech talent, Ajim turned to Africa. “Being African and always wanting to figure out a way to help my African continent,” she says, “I was like, ‘Hey, let’s hire a team out of Africa.” 

Identifying Her Life’s Mission

Ajim cites what she learned through her initial engagement with the startup world as the motivation for starting her own VC fund that would invest in Africans. In their efforts to hire an African-based staff, her second tech company’s team faced significant challenges. They struggled to find software developers, encountered payroll issues, and had to navigate complications of cross-border payments from employers to employees. “The more we faced challenges,” Ajim reflects, “the more I was like, ‘There must be a solution out there to fix these problems.’ So I started looking for solutions and that was my experience that exposed me to the startup ecosystem.” 

In her early days of mentoring and investing, Ajim learned quickly that the biggest challenge for African tech entrepreneurs was access to capital and flexible resources that support the growth of successful companies. Of her learning during this time, Ajim shares, “I just enjoyed it so much that I started to make my mission and my life purpose to bridge the gap between access to finance between Africa and the rest of the world.”

The Birth of Ajim Capital

After spending a year successfully angel investing in 10 African tech companies with nearly half a billion in combined valuations, Ajim launched the fund that could help her carry out her newly identified life’s mission. Ajim Capital is a $10M early-stage fund capturing the massive undercapitalized possibilities across Sub-Saharan Africa. The company writes between $25K and $250K checks at pre-seed and seed stages, supporting founders with hands-on, strategic advice and access to a formidable network of investors and experts across the globe. 

Ajim Capital helps investors see the many compelling reasons to invest in Africa. By 2050, Africans will make up 35% of the world’s population and 10% of internet users, and hold 12% of the world’s GDP. “Africa is rising,” Ajim says passionately, “and the time to invest is now.”

The VC Include Fellowship

In addition to her admiration of the other GPs in the VC Include Fellowship, Ajim is grateful for the VCI team’s incredible communication and investment from beginning to end. “These people are not fake,” she says. “You see how genuine and empathic they are, and you don’t get a lot of that from LPs. It usually feels transactional.” This way of being modeled another way to do this work.

Ajim also gained helpful hands-on experience and exposure, both through pitching to the VCI community and getting to know VCI’s network of LPs, and shares that the fellowship gave her a solid understanding of what she’s signing up for. “I felt a lot of clarity coming out of it,” she says. 

As one of VCI’s  professional development mentors always says: “Clarity Begets Clarity.” We know that Ajim will leverage her vision, passion, and learning to continue accelerating her life’s mission of bridging the financial gap between Africa and the rest of the world, and we look forward to witnessing her success!