Neither Here nor There - The Diaspora Founder Conundrum

I'm back fundraising after launching Borderless last July. The focus of my last fundraise was to build traction and show a shell of what a borderless investment platform can be for Africa and its diaspora, and I'm grateful for the progress we've made to date.

We onboarded our 20th investment collective this week. That was a target I wanted to reach by the end of 2025, so I'm glad we got there this month. We also have a product called Raise by Borderless, and over $2M is currently being raised by founders across Uganda, Côte d'Ivoire, Nigeria, and the UK.

Getting here came with challenges. Our bank accounts were repeatedly blocked because our volume grew significantly in Q1, and I found myself scrambling, calling former colleagues to help unblock them. One of my customers called and shouted at me for a dropped transfer, but there was nothing I could do. We had sent funds via SWIFT; the money passed through a custodian who blocked it, and by the time it reached its destination, the deal had closed. We then tried to recover the funds, which took another three weeks. It left my client and me extremely frustrated. I wrote about how we are solving this with stablecoins here.

These are the challenges nobody tells you about. You just have to be in it to find out for yourself. Despite all of it, I'm grateful to be building a company I believe needs to exist, and I've been lucky to be the one building it.

The momentum has been great. But as a founder and steward of this company, my key role is to make sure it stays around long enough to fulfil its mission: closing Africa's $402 billion funding gap. To close a gap that size, you need real capital behind you. We've been getting by, penny-pinching and actively driving revenue to extend the runway as much as possible. We built most of our tech layer with two engineers until October 2025, when one left. I know we could do far more with two or three more. One of my engineering advisors stepped in this month to help us move more quickly, but adding talent would drastically shorten my runway, and I can't run that risk indefinitely. So the answer is fundraising.

I've raised money before, and anyone who's done it will tell you it isn't fun. Mine has been more complicated because I'm based in the UK, trying to build a big business for Africa and its diaspora. Somehow, I'm never quite enough. I'm not African enough for African investors because I'm not based on the continent, and I'm not British [0] enough for British investors because I'm building for Africa.

What prompted me to write this was an investor who recently told me I don't look like a founder who needs help, because I'm male and based in the UK. It wasn’t nice to hear, but I bit my tongue, because I'm the one doing the fundraising. So I explained the "not enough" part.

We saw this problem six years ago and started HoaQ Club to invest in Africa and its diaspora. Diaspora founders struggle more than you'd think. Many of us are building global products and businesses, but it takes a certain kind of investor to understand the real opportunity in front of them. The market we serve is nearly invisible to the people we're trying to raise from. British and American investors don't really see the diaspora opportunity because each is focused on their own domestic market. But diaspora products sell just as well as Western ones. The market is huge, in numbers and in spending power.

Consider the scale. Africa's three largest economies, Nigeria, Egypt, and South Africa, have a combined population of over 400 million and a combined GDP of roughly $1.18 trillion. The global African diaspora (with real income) is estimated at around 41 million people. If you treated that diaspora as a single economy, its collective annual GDP would be north of $1 trillion, putting it on par with those three giants combined and ranking it among the fifteen largest economies on earth. That's not a fringe market. That's a country-scale one, just spread across borders.

And that economy already funds the continent. The diaspora sends home over $100 billion every year, more than Africa receives in foreign direct investment, and roughly double what it receives in official development aid. That is why African governments are forever running roadshows to court the diaspora. We are the single biggest funder of the continent.

Remittances are only the part you can see. For several African economies, money sent home from abroad a structural pillar. There are seven African countries in which remittances account for more than 10% of GDP. In the Gambia, that figure is close to 30%.

It makes sense, then, that VCs continue to fund remittance companies. What they miss is everything else the diaspora spends money on. Remittances are only a small slice of the diaspora wallet. The rest, the savings, the investments, the everyday consumption, is where the real, unfunded opportunity sits. The UN estimates the diaspora is sitting on $30 to $40 billion in idle savings, parked in bank accounts and losing value to inflation every year. There are a lot of great founders building for this cohort, but VCs are struggling to see the gap in the market. And yes, there is a market in the gap.

Why this should change how you invest

First, the diaspora is not a charity case; it's an underpriced asset. The instinct to ask whether a diaspora founder "needs help" gets the opportunity backwards. This is a 41-million-person market that already moves over $100 billion a year across borders and holds tens of billions more in idle capital. Any other customer base with those numbers would have investors competing to fund the companies that serve it. The diaspora opportunity isn't small or speculative; it's simply unmapped, and unmapped markets are where the best returns hide. The founders who already understand this cohort, often because they're part of it, are the ones holding the map. Backing them isn't doing anyone a favour. It's getting in early.

Second, diaspora founders are a hedge, not a risk. The very thing investors hold against us, that we live between worlds, is what makes us valuable. We operate across regulatory systems, currencies, and cultures by necessity, and we build products that survive in more than one market because they have to. A founder who can move capital between London and Lagos, navigate a SWIFT block at 2 am, and still close the next deal is not a weaker bet than a single-market founder. They're a more resilient one. In a decade when capital flows, trade routes, and migration are only becoming more global, the founders who already think in borderless terms will shape the future of how companies are built.

The compounding case nobody is pricing in

Let’s talk about the compounding case. When you fund a diaspora founder, you're not just backing one company; you're seeding a flywheel.

Diaspora founders hire diaspora talent (no brainer). We know where it is, we trust it, and we've usually worked alongside it. Those employees, in turn, send money home, invest on the continent, and many eventually start their own companies. The capital doesn't stop at the founder. It circulates through a network already wired to move money to Africa. Every diaspora founder you back is a node that pulls more talent, more spending, and more investment into the same channel. In addition, many of us hire excellent talent in Africa. Most of my team is based in Lagos and Abuja, and I’m actively looking to fill roles in Nairobi. Funding diaspora founders is an indirect way to close the talent gap in Africa. Now, consider the knowledge transfer. I can keep going…

This is how the pie gets bigger for everyone, including the investors who were sceptical at the start. A single funded founder creates 10 diaspora and local jobs that support 100 families, which become the next wave of founders. Beyond remittances, the continent gains companies, employers, and tax bases. Funding diaspora founders goes beyond transferring capital from your portfolio to a cause. It's an investment in the one network proven to compound African economic participation, and you compound your returns right alongside it.

Thank you for reading, as always.

Joe

Hi - I’m Joe Kinvi, co-founder and CEO of Borderless. We are building the investment infrastructure for the African Diaspora. Right now, we enable investment collectives to structure to pool capital across multiple asset classes and founders to raise capital from their friends and family. Our goal is to enable the 41 million diaspora members to invest effortlessly across the continent.

I’m currently raising my seed round. If you want to learn more, please email me at [email protected], and I will share my pitch deck with you.

One last invitation - My team is hosting its first official, semi-professional event in London titled the Africa-UK Innovation Bridge, and if you are in London, you should join us. Link to register here.

_{[0] I live in the UK and it’s easier to say British for the sake of the article.}