In July 2025, PocketLawyers, a Nigerian legal technology startup, announced that it had received funding from Nubia Capital to drive its growth across Africa. The two-year-old startup had started out connecting users to lawyers, aiming to provide affordable legal services.
But it has since pivoted and now provides connectivity tools for lawyers, enabling them to significantly reduce the time spent on tasks such as drafting legal agreements and managing client communication.
PocketLawyers is one of ten startups seeded at FirstFounders, a venture studio based in Nigeria and founded by David Lanre Messan.
“I believe strongly that the venture studio model is the solution to drive entrepreneurship in Africa because a lot of founders do not have the experience to manage capital and operations successfully,” Messan shares with Techpoint Africa.
Democratising entrepreneurship
Venture studios — organisations that create startups rather than simply invest in them — trace their origins to the 1990s with Bill Gross’s founding of Idealab.
True to its name, Idealab functioned as a laboratory for experimenting with business ideas, developing the most promising concepts into standalone companies. Over nearly three decades, it has launched more than 100 startups, with roughly a third eventually going public.
Today, the concept has spread, with many organisations putting a unique spin on the model and more than 700 studios globally.
The venture studio model is favoured over individual startup experiments for its ability to turn the often haphazard nature of building disruptive businesses into a replicable system. But that’s not the only reason. That replicable system means organisations can develop playbooks that work for building businesses.
While still nascent in Africa, it offers advantages beyond codifying entrepreneurship. Venture studios pool resources and expertise, which lowers the cost of building a business. Perhaps more importantly, it helps to de-risk startups, ultimately making them more attractive to venture capitalists.
The journey to venture building
Before launching FirstFounders, Messan had already tried his hand at building businesses, with his first attempt dating back to 2007. From the proceeds of that venture, he funded skill training for more than 500 people, many of whom went on to start their own businesses.
That experience, he says, planted the earliest seeds of what would later become his interest in venture studios.
“I realised something while I was working with a lot of these entrepreneurs. It goes beyond empowering them with skills that can’t particularly translate into sustainable businesses. I saw that at the core of their problem was the gap of proper ideation and understanding the market.”
In trying to help these new entrepreneurs run their businesses more effectively, he established an agency that offers business and marketing strategies.
But his first real exposure to venture building came in 2010, when he began working with a handful of founders to refine their ideas. Much of the work centred on ideation, but he soon found himself facing a familiar pattern: many of the startups folded within a few years.
So he made another attempt, this time by setting up a venture studio called Troggeurban. Even though he admits he didn’t fully understand the model then, the studio launched three businesses, including a last-mile logistics startup that shut down two years later.
The FirstFounders playbook
FirstFounders is slightly unique in its approach to building a venture studio. Recognising the constraints of the market it operates in, the studio is not particularly concerned about building unicorns.
Instead, its focus is on building sustainable businesses across four major sectors — fintech, consumer, artificial intelligence, and entertainment. But that doesn’t mean it turns away ideas from other sectors.
For its first cohort, the studio selected 10 ideas to develop through its Venture Boot Programme. Five were ultimately discarded before any product was built. Of the remaining five that did move forward, only two — PocketLawyers and PayAfta — have survived.
Its selection process involves three key stages. The first is a call for ideas, which typically come from within the team, although external submissions are occasionally considered.
In the second stage, it collaborates with founders to build minimum viable products, narrowing the pool to 10 concepts that proceed to the final venture-building stage. Startups that don’t make it to this stage may still continue independently, just without studio support.
Beginning in 2026, when it plans to launch its flagship venture studio programme, the studio intends to formalise the first stage by opening public calls for ideas. According to Messan, the primary criterion guiding selection is the potential for high-growth opportunities in emerging or underserved markets.
Startups selected for full venture-building support receive roughly $120,000 in funding, including a $20,000 founder stipend that is released only on a need basis. It also takes an equity stake of between 25% and 35% in the startups.
To date, the studio has been self-funded, with revenue from its venture-building work supplementing its operations. It now plans to raise $7.5 million, which it would use to build 20 startups while increasing funding per startup to $300,000.
The FirstFounders DNA
Although the studio commits to supporting startups over the long term, the venture-studio model can falter if the wrong founders are chosen to lead those companies. To mitigate this risk, FirstFounders has developed a process designed to help it assess a founder’s character before committing to a partnership.
The evaluation begins at the ideation stage, where prospective founders submit an application with questions designed to gauge their resilience, entrepreneurial or intrapreneurial tendencies, creativity, and innovation.
A central component of this application is a psychometric assessment that helps the studio understand how a founder behaves under pressure.
Even after acceptance, founders are observed throughout the ideation and MVP-development stages. According to Messan, the studio prioritises character over industry experience when selecting founders.
Challenges and looking to the future
Messan identifies three main challenges the studio has encountered since launch, with access to capital topping the list.
“We always have to wait for capital, and what that means is that we make money today, and we move fast. Tomorrow, we don’t make money because maybe there is a situation or policy, or clients are not responding, so we have to wait.”
Beyond funding, talent retention has been a persistent issue, particularly as Nigeria continues to experience an exodus of skilled workers in the technology sector. He adds that the studio has only recently begun to receive broader ecosystem support as the venture-studio model gains wider acceptance.
