MAGIC Fund

This International Women’s Day, we’re celebrating the founders in our portfolio who are closing longstanding gaps in areas that have historically underserved women. Kara’s Teal Health just received the first-ever FDA approval for at-home cervical cancer screening, a breakthrough for the 1 in 4 women in the US who are behind on their screenings. Somer at Hera Biotech is replacing an 8-year diagnostic wait for endometriosis with a non-surgical tissue-based test. Sipra and Shama at LunaJoy Health have built a women’s mental health platform now serving 15+ payers across more than a dozen states, raising $7M+ to make care accessible across every stage of a woman’s life. We’re proud to support these founders and the many other women across our portfolio building impactful, enduring companies. Happy International Women’s Day.

Dimeji Sofowora is a lawyer-turned-founder-turned-investor whose career has been defined by one consistent instinct: spotting broken systems and building what comes next. Before becoming a full-time builder, Dimeji trained as a lawyer, earning an LLB from the University of Leeds and a Distinction-grade LLM in Banking and Finance Law from Queen Mary University of London. He sharpened his finance edge at Goldman Sachs in London and at top Nigerian law firm Aluko & Oyebode, where he worked across capital markets, M&A, and litigation. In 2016, he co-founded Helium Health, now Africa's number one healthtech provider, backed by over $12M from Tencent, Draper Associates, Y Combinator, and the World Bank. Under his leadership, the company has supported over 10,000 health workers, digitised 2 million patient records, and through its financing arm HeliumCredit, disbursed over $11M to clinics, hospitals, and pharmacies across the continent. As a General Partner at MAGIC Fund, Dimeji brings the rare credibility of someone who has actually built in emerging markets under real constraints. He backs founders tackling daunting challenges at the earliest stages, pre-seed and seed, with not just capital, but the hard-won insight of a founder who has been in their shoes. His portfolio boasts of over 80 startups backed globally and his journey embodies MAGIC's core ethos: founders backing founders before they're obvious.

Kelvin and the team are digitizing commerce at scale, laying the foundation for millions of African entrepreneurs to sell, scale, and thrive. We’re proud to have been early believers in what is fast becoming the Shopify for Africa.

MAGIC backs founders building the rails for tomorrow. In 2022, we invested in @getBumpa at pre-seed because we believed African retail needed its own operating system, not just another storefront builder. Since then, the numbers tell a powerful story. Power merchants on Bumpa can drive 145,000 website visits in under two hours during viral sales. The platform has processed over ₦160B in transactions. More than 100,000 Nigerian businesses now run on its infrastructure. This is what happens when founders build for durability, not hype.

Finding the right investors goes beyond money, it’s about finding the right match. In this snippet, our General Partner, Temi Marcella breaks down a few crucial steps on how you could find the right investor for your startup. Definitely worth the watch. 🎯

MAGIC portfolio companies like InstaKin and Balad are building beyond money movement, addressing the full spectrum of diaspora needs across underserved corridors, turning overlooked markets into high-margin opportunities.

The remittance industry is massive, but relatively flawed. High fees, limited infrastructure, and a myopic focus on cash transfers miss the real needs of diaspora communities. The next wave isn’t just moving money faster or cheaper. It’s building comprehensive service ecosystems for underserved corridors where migrants need medicine delivery, bill payments, and local support networks as much as they need money transfer rails.

This is why MAGIC invested in 2021. Founders JunYuan Tan and Phillip An didn't tweak the mortgage model. They replaced it. They're not just building a business, they're creating infrastructure where none exists and opening doors for generations locked out of homeownership. Swipe through to see how Homebase is redefining proptech in Southeast Asia.

Homebase (YC W21) saw a broken system and built something entirely new: a co-investment model that eliminates barriers, shares risk equally, and makes homeownership actually accessible. Since 2019, they've served 20,000+ clients across 20+ Vietnamese cities, becoming the first Vietnamese company ever accepted into Y Combinator and raising $30M from top proptech investors who built the US market.

Our portfolio company @kivohealth recently partnered with Priority Health, Michigan’s second largest health plan, to deliver AI-powered virtual care for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) to 1.3 million members across the state. Congratulations to the team on this win. More to come.

We’re excited to share that Mono our portfolio company, has been acquired by Flutterwave, Africa’s leading payments technology platform. Together, they’re building a more interoperable financial system for Africa, where businesses can seamlessly authenticate customers and scale across borders with confidence. As early believers in Mono’s vision to power Africa’s digital economy through open banking, we are proud of the transformation they’ve driven across the continent and excited to see them accelerate at a global scale.

The future of AI will not be shaped solely by technical breakthroughs. It will also be shaped by trust. Foundational language models are getting more powerful every day, but power alone does not drive adoption. Trust does. That is why so much of today’s AI work centers on bias reduction, model evaluation, safety, and real-world performance. The more reliable the output, the more people trust it. And the more they trust it, the more they build with it. ChatGPT alone now has well over 100 million active users each week, yet many people and institutions still hesitate to rely on AI for high-stakes decisions. The trust gap is now one of the most significant limiting factors on how deeply AI is embedded into daily life. Technical wins on their own do not always translate into human confidence. And without confidence, progress slows. Our General Partner, Tom Chen, in one of our MAGICal Insights pieces, explored why credibility, not just capability, will ultimately determine how deeply AI reshapes our world. Read the full article here: magic-fund.medium.com/the-ai-trust-c…

Spotlighting Natasha Zone, founder & CEO of @onezoneapp. After a decade in hospitality and concierge, she saw a gap: people wanted trustworthy recommendations without the noise of outdated apps and generic social media. She built onezone to solve that — expert-curated places to eat, drink, and stay, all in one platform. Today, onezone has driven 12M+ discoveries, 933K+ reservation clicks, and now spans 8 cities across the UK and Europe. What's next for Natasha and Onezone: expansion across Europe, US launch, and new verticals powered by their curated dataset. We are delighted to back founders like Natasha who create products that reshape everyday experiences.

AI is opening a new chapter in healthcare where providers can deliver more accurate diagnoses, more personalized treatments, and more proactive care than ever before. What once felt out of reach is quickly becoming part of everyday clinical practice as AI moves deeper into decision-making and patient outcomes. The impact is already visible in drug discovery, early detection, and safer surgical procedures. These advances show how rapidly AI is reshaping modern care. At MAGIC, we are energized by the founders building these breakthroughs and expanding what is possible in healthcare.

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Digital fatigue is real, and it’s reshaping the way modern brands grow. Our new article breaks down why the next chapter of DTC isn’t just about bigger ad budgets or better targeting - it’s about showing up in real life. From pop-ups to community events to immersive brand spaces, IRL is becoming the new unlock for trust, loyalty, and sustainable growth. Link to the article in comments

Anti-dilution provisions like ratchets are one of the most consequential, yet often misunderstood terms in a term sheet. They can dramatically reshape your cap table during a down round, affecting not just your ownership stake, but your ability to raise future capital and maintain control of your company's direction. Many founders focus exclusively on valuation during negotiations, but the type of anti-dilution protection you agree to can matter far more than the headline number. A $20M valuation with a full ratchet can leave you worse off than a $15M valuation with standard weighted average protection. Swipe through to understand what ratchets are, how they work in practice, and most importantly, how to negotiate better terms that protect your ability to build a meaningful company over the long haul.

Adeel Yang, MD, is a serial entrepreneur and investor at the intersection of medicine, technology, and human experience. From founding Picmonic, which transformed how millions of students learn, to building Medumo (YC, acquired by Philips) and now leading Dryvebox, Adeel has spent his career reimagining how people learn, heal, and connect. As a General Partner at MAGIC, he brings deep clinical insight and founder empathy to early-stage investing, backing startups like mdhub, Pirouette Pharma, and Blueberry Pediatrics.

“1 in 4 humans will be African by 2050.” Our General Partner, @TemiMarcella, shares how Africa’s demographic dividend is shaping investment trends on the continent. With population growth set to rival China’s, technology has the potential to transform lives, and this insight guides our thesis. You can already see this in our portfolio: @KlashaBusiness (Nigeria) building infrastructure for seamless cross-border trade, @ouredenlife (Nigeria and Kenya) helping Africans reclaim their time by outsourcing everyday tasks, Credable Group (Kenya), and @withboost (South Africa) equipping informal retailers with tools to scale their businesses, amongst others.

We’re excited to share that our portfolio company Koda Health has raised a $7 million Series A round. Founded in 2020, Koda Health is a digital health company transforming advance care planning (ACP) — helping patients and families articulate their goals, values, and preferences for future medical care, particularly in serious illness and end-of-life scenarios. With this new funding, the team will expand their national footprint, strengthen core functions across engineering, clinical strategy, and customer success, and continue building out new “goals-of-care” product lines. At MAGIC, we are proud of the team's accomplishments and are excited for what the future holds for them.