Anchor Africa’s venture engine.
The Founding Backer Circle opens after Cohort 1 delivers. A small, closed group with real economics and formal alignment. Members are not passive capital. $168,042 raised since 2022, from Artizen Season 7 and the Stacks Foundation SIP-031 grant.
The engine has already produced a company
In Artizen Season 6, SmartX Finance raised $31,697 on Artizen: prize money, people buying it directly, and matched funding drawn from several pools, the LAB Open Source Builder Fund among them. It was built by the LAB team.
Fourteen agent skills, five reviewed and registered upstream on the AIBTC registry, with write transactions proven on Bitcoin mainnet and paid endpoints charging per call today. V1 is in audit before public launch. That is the engine producing a company, and a community paying for it before it shipped.
Round 2 is open with 12 projects in it and a $38,000 pool, and those are other people’s projects. The Founding Backer Circle is the same idea again, at a larger scale, with formal economics attached.
See the Builder FundWho has already backed LAB
The Circle opens after Cohort 1. These are the institutions that backed the work before it did.
What the Circle is
The Founding Backer Circle is LAB’s inaugural cohort of institutional believers. It is designed for people who want deep alignment with a venture engine, not exposure to a single fund cycle.
Circle members are chosen for what they bring beyond capital: sector expertise, network access, operational judgment, and long-term commitment to African venture building.
The Circle is intentionally small. It is closed by design. And it opens only after Cohort 1 delivers documented outcomes.