How Maya Horgan Famodu Broke the Glass Ceiling in Venture Capital for Africa

Maya Horgan-Famodu started from humble beginnings, born to a Nigerian father and an American mother. She spent most of her youth in Minnesota, United States.

“My older sister and I grew up in rural Minnesota with my mother, and my younger siblings grew up in Lagos with my father. We were so poor when I was a kid. We lived in a trailer park and truly struggled to put food on the table until I was in my teens. It couldn’t have been farther away, but many poverty dynamics of rural America are actually quite similar to those in Lagos”, Horgan-Famodu recounts.

She went on to gain a Bachelor of Arts degree in environmental sciences at Pomona College and completed a Prelaw Program at Cornell University. After her graduation from school, Horgan-Famodu worked at JPMorgan Chase, before launching Ingressive, a market entry firm in 2014 and Ingressive Capital in 2017. She was inspired to create Ingressive Capital when she observed the challenges her friends faced in getting financial support for their businesses here on the continent. 

Horgan-Famodu returned to Lagos, Nigeria to launch the fund and was faced with dismissive investors because she only had a year of experience. She broke the glass ceiling by launching Ingressive Advisory, which provided market entry services for investors. Since its inception,  Ingressive Advisory has been attracting top worldwide investors and IT businesses to invest in Nigeria, helping to grow the country’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

“We started leading global investors to Africa before tech was a thing here,” Maya explains, “back when questions were less ‘how many M&A deals have occurred in the African market this year?’ and more ‘do Africans even have internet and electricity?’ It was necessary to not only change the Africa narrative to focus on its incredible innovations and opportunities but also sell a future few imagined”, Horgan-Famodu told Forbes.

Read the full interview with Maya Horgan-Famodu HERE.

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