MaC VC Fund III elevates the firm’s total assets under management to $600 million since its inception in 2019. 

Founded by industry veterans Marlon Nichols, Adrian Fenty, and Mike Palank, MaC has made a huge impact in the venture capital space, especially notable for its focus on cultural shifts and behavioural trends.

The increase in capital allows MaC VC to enhance its investment strategy, raising its initial check size to between $2 million and $3 million, up from the previous average of $1.5 million in 2023. 

This change reiterates the firm’s focus on supporting innovative startups with funding at early stages. Noteworthy investments include companies such as Chef Robotics, Stoke Space, and Pipe, which shows a broad interest in diverse technological advancements.

The firm has affirmed its ability to yield impressive returns through successful exits. A prime example is the acquisition of Wonder Dynamics, an AI-driven visual effects company, by Autodesk in 2023, which generated a remarkable 5.4 times return on investment for MaC. 

MaC’s founders bring a wealth of experience from various sectors, including politics, entertainment, and technology. Fenty, the former mayor of Washington D.C., highlighted the firm’s strategic approach, stating, “Our growth has been about backing the right founders and making impactful investments.” 

This multifaceted perspective enables MaC to provide financial support and also strategic guidance tailored to the unique needs of each startup.

In addition to its domestic focus, MaC is expanding its investment reach internationally, with recent moves into the African market, including investments in Nigeria-based Shekel Mobility. 

Nichols noted the importance of seeking talent beyond traditional boundaries, noting, “You have to be deliberate about finding talent outside of your hometown or state.”

MaC VC will continue its mission of identifying and supporting innovative startups across the globe. 

With a vision of creating a sustainable, multi-generational venture firm, the team is focused on delivering exceptional value to its portfolio companies and driving technological advancements. 

The Silicon Valley startup has raised $2.3 million to upskill sales representatives with AI role-play using Practice Prospects.

The pre-seed funding round was led by BoxGroup, MaC Venture Capital, and NOMO Ventures. Additional investment came through the scout funds of Greylock and Sequoia. This early-stage funding will be used to expand the team, enhance the product, and accelerate the company’s go-to-market strategy.

Designed for sales representatives and their managers, FullyRamped’s platform provides AI-powered “Practice Prospects” – custom personas that sales reps can engage with to refine their skills in an environment that mimics the progression of a real sales call. 

Notably, the platform uses real-time voice AI to offer natural conversations with minimal latency, providing companies with a safe, controlled manner to adopt AI in their sales training processes. 

This allows representatives to practice their pitch and objection handling with a variety of personas without burning real leads. Essentially, it offers infinite opportunities without the constraints of manager or teammate availability. This dramatically streamlines the upskilling process, ensuring sales reps are battle-ready when they join real calls with real stakes. 

FullyRamped was founded by Aaron Marks, a Stanford engineer specializing in Natural Language Processing. He was previously employee #2 at Skiff (acquired by Notion earlier in 2024) and left his role as a Growth Manager at Verkada to start FullyRamped.

The concept began as a prototype that he built, enabling sales reps to call live phone numbers and practice their phone skills on-demand in a simulated cold call environment. This early test laid the foundation for what would become FullyRamped’s comprehensive AI-powered training platform. 

Aaron Marks, CEO and founder of FullyRamped recalls “the best part was using it myself; I learned how to sell FullyRamped over the phone, by using my own product.”

Today, sales training is largely done through internal sales academies, which come with high costs and extended time commitments. FullyRamped introduces AI to this traditional process, shortening the ramp time for new representatives, reducing the number of potential leads lost during training, and increasing conversation-to-meeting-booked ratios. 

The company’s platform is designed to complement, not replace, traditional role-play exercises, to offer a comprehensive training solution. Ultimately, by providing an entirely new medium for training, FullyRamped allows companies to sidestep the typical drawbacks of developing the sales skills of junior cohorts.

“Our goal is to help companies develop their human capital,” commented Aaron Marks. “We believe that AI is a tool that will be used by humans, not replace them. People still prefer talking to people, especially in high-stakes B2B sales conversations.”

Despite only launching over the summer, FullyRamped already has paying customers. Technology companies with sales-led motions are using FullyRamped to onboard and train their Sales Development Representatives (SDRs). 

Early adopters in the tech-sales sector have reported strong results, with the platform seeing promising growth since launch.

While FullyRamped is currently focused on tech sales, the company’s vision extends to serving all external-facing roles. “When you build software, you would never test in production,” Aaron Marks explained. “So, why don’t we give everyone with a “people-job” a staging environment too?”

As FullyRamped continues to grow, FullyRamped is set to give customer-facing employees the sandbox they need to practice ahead of high-stakes conversations – without the threat of being replaced.

David Tisch, managing partner at BoxGroup commented: “FullyRamped has identified a clear market need and built a solution with the potential to redefine the way we do business. We’re excited by Aaron and his vision for the future.”

Adrian Fenty, founding managing partner at MaC Venture Capital added: “FullyRamped is poised to be one of the breakthrough voice-first agentic platforms. Aaron’s vision for AI role play has great potential for augmenting, not replacing, a large share of human work.”

Comprising $3.2 million in equity and an additional $4 million in debt, the funding round, gives Shekel Mobility a clear path to accelerate its growth trajectory as it gears up to introduce innovative solutions in the coming months.

The funds are set to catapult Shekel Mobility’s current Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) of slightly over $2 million to four times its size. While leveraging this financial injection, Shekel Mobility prepares for its upcoming priced round, building on the momentum gained from this significant funding round.

Founded by Benjamen Oladokun and Sanmi Olukanmi, Shekel Mobility’s success builds upon its earlier achievements, including a $1.95 million pre-seed investment in January led by Ventures Platform, with participation from Y Combinator, Voltron Capital, and Zedcrest.

In the latest seed round, Ventures Platform and MaC Venture Capital co-led the investment with participation from Y Combinator, Rebel Fund, Unpopular Ventures, Maiora Capital, PageOne Lab Inc., Phoenix Investment Club, Heirloom VC, Pioneer Ventures, and various angel investors. The debt fund was facilitated by entities such as Zedvance, VFD Microfinance Bank, Zenith Bank, and Fluna, with some leveraging Shekel Mobility’s platform to finance auto dealerships.

Positioning itself as a mobility fintech, Shekel Mobility’s mission is to empower car dealers in navigating the $30 billion African used car market. The startup aims to be the go-to platform for launching and expanding car dealerships, aspiring to build the largest auto dealership ecosystem with transactions reaching $10 billion annually by 2025.

At the core of Shekel Mobility’s journey is its flagship product, Shekel Credit, offering immediate financing access to auto dealers. With credit limits extending up to $200,000 for vehicle purchases, Shekel Mobility has facilitated transactions exceeding $56 million. The unique financing model ensures a 0% default rate by overseeing the end-to-end process of buying and selling cars through dealerships.

Looking ahead, Shekel Mobility plans to introduce new offerings, including Shekel Business, designed to digitise informal trading processes within the auto dealership vertical. These tools aim to streamline sales processes, structure operations, and contribute to reducing the overall cost of owning car dealerships.

Investors recognise the potential of Shekel Mobility. Kola Aina, the founding partner at Ventures Platform, applauds the startup for creating a market-shaping innovation essential to the growth of Nigeria and Africa’s automotive industry. Marlon Nichols, Founder and Managing Partner at MaC Venture Capital, highlights Shekel Mobility’s potential to boost the African automotive sector by empowering small businesses with financing and providing affordable automobiles to local communities.

Other notable investors were Serena Ventures, Omidyar Group’s Luminate Fund, Melo 7 Tech Partners and Cascador — Empowering Economic Growth Foundation.

Stears, which was among Google for Startups Black Founders Fund 2022 cohort, will leverage the fund to enhance its data collection and analytics capabilities, hire data scientists, data analysts and sector analysts, and expand to Kenya in East Africa, South Africa and Egypt in North Africa.

Michael Famoroti, Bode Ogunlana, Abdul Abdulrahim, and Preston Ideh, founded Stears in 2017 as a media publication company focused on financial news and insights in Nigeria. The goal was to address the insufficiency of information and data-driven insights in the country.

With the new investment, Stears is planning to modify its product and is working with international development and financial institutions to produce proprietary and exclusive datasets that are not yet in existence.

The startup will now go beyond reporting insights from sourced data, to collating data, engaging in deep data analytics and presenting it to business customers in several formats.

Two years ago, Stears raised $650 million in pre-seed funding. So far, its enterprise customers contribute over 75% of revenues, increasing from 45% in 2021. It also expects revenues to double from last year as half-year revenues for 2022 have already surpassed full-year revenues for 2021. This is compared to the 80% revenue growth between FY 2021 and FY 2020.

Identitypass plans to expand its existing infrastructure, roll out new verticals around compliance, security and data collection, spread its reach into new African countries and employ more innovative minds.

The round, which comes a few months after Identitypass raised $360,000 in pre-seed investment, bringing its total funding to $3.1 million, also includes investors such as Y Combinator, Soma Capital, True Capital Fund and Sherwani Capital.

Identitypass affirms to have processed over 1 million distinct verifications since launch, with government-approved IDs, such as national IDs, driver licenses, international passports, bank verification numbers (BVN), phone numbers, vehicle plate numbers, debit cards, security watchlists and tax history included in its offerings. 

Depending on the number of endpoints a business connects to, the identity and verification platform charges between 10 cents to 20 cents on every verification it executes. 

Its products enable clientele to verify, gain deeper insights about users and businesses, detect as well as prevent fraud. Users can easily integrate data searches to retrieve contact or user data and are allowed to personalize web pages with contact or visitor information when they implement Identitypass’ data search on their website/application.

Businesses from across the fintech, e-commerce, education, mobility and other sectors leverage the platform and are spread in countries such as Nigeria, the United Kingdom, Kenya, the United States and India.

Founded by Lanre Ogungbe, Niyi Adegboye and Ebuka Obi, the two-year-old launched a SaaS platform in addition to its APIs. The software was built to enhance Identitypass’ growth scale and excel among its competitors in the market. 

The round was led by Mac Venture Capital, a US-based seed-stage venture capital firm that invests in technology startups leveraging shifts in cultural trends and behaviours. Other participants included Next Chymia an Asian private firm that focuses on blockchain-based companies.

Afya Rekod is a health data platform that digitally collects and stores health records of individuals, allowing both patients and health facilities to capture, store and access the mobility of the patients’ health data.

Launched in 2020, the platform has set up multiple functionalities such as hospital management, patient management, knowledge management, and inventory management for providers. Asides aggregation of information on pharmacies and other key resources to allow easy accessibility, the startup also enables the adequate compilation of data for patients’ health and provides access to medical intervention.

John Kamara, founder, Afya Rekod, said, “For the past one and a half years, we’ve singularly focused on building a dynamic platform that streamlines health records with analytics and provides access to specialized clinics and experts. This delivers high-quality healthcare in a way that is critical for this moment. We are very excited about this investment as it will help us grow in key markets in our journey to become the leading patient mobility-focused health platform in the world. Our mission is to empower patients by giving them access to their health data and to connect with the health ecosystem including hospitals, pharmacies, insurance, and beyond.”

“This investment will help us scale in other markets in Africa and accelerate the launch of our patient portal. This will give patients resources and tools to store and manage their health data, a critical function for patients with chronic illnesses, and their doctors,” further stated Kamara.

“One of the things we liked most about Afya Rekod was its commitment to patient-centred health innovation and how it addresses the gaps of current healthcare issues. The pandemic has pressed the fast-forward button, bringing an urgency into health data accessibility and analytics. This is a global problem that can be addressed by innovative private companies like Afya Rekod. We’re thrilled to partner with the team to tackle this challenging problem in healthcare,” said Marlon Nichols, founding managing partner of MaC Venture Capital.

Afya Rekod has over 150,000 users in 5 countries with key partnerships including the Association of Sisterhoods of Kenya (AOSK) and over 500 hospitals across Kenya; Healthy Mind Foundation to train psychiatrists in Lagos Nigeria; and Alchemy in South Africa to onboard private and public hospitals in Southern Africa.

“We are very proud to see one of our flagship startups, Afya Rekod, growing its impact globally. We’re set out to build disruptive technology that will solve some of the most pertinent challenges in Africa and beyond, and health is one of the sectors that require a multitude of interventions to improve quality access. We strongly believe in Afya Rekod’s mission and as we continue to support the company, we are confident that the impact it will create will be phenomenal,” said Irene Kiwia, co-founder and CGO, Adanian Labs.