Future Africa has said allegations that it infringed on the intellectual property of a founder who filed a funding application on their website is false, baseless, and unfounded.
In an online report titled ‘Intellectual Property Theft: A Nigerian Corporate Masterclass’, Future Africa was said to have received a pitch email on May 10, 2021, from a company known as Sidebrief which bills itself as a one-stop solution to start, scale and operate businesses across Africa, and not Norebase (as contained in Future Africa’s statement).
Sidebrief proposed to provide businesses with a single platform to help them with registration, regulatory compliance, and tax compliance in the most diversely-regulated continental market in the world.
“If that sounds like a great idea, that is probably because it is. It was so great in fact, that Future Africa decided to take it. Only, instead of responding to the pitch with an invitation to meet and negotiate to invest in it, the company decided to take it. As in just take it. Sidebrief never heard back from Future Africa.,” the report stated.
On May 31, 2021 – 3 weeks after Future Africa received the pitch from Sidebrief – the company’s General Counsel and co-founder, Tola Onayemi, registered a business called Norebase in the UK.
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With Norebase placed side by side with Sidebrief, all the documents quoted in the report show a lot of similarities between both companies’ pitch decks.
Other reports online accused Future Africa of not mentioning Sidebrief whose pitch deck was blatantly plagiarised in their statement released. “Tola did Sidebrief dirty. Nigerian Tech bros are in the same WhatsApp group cheering him up. In school then, when you copy someone’s work, the lecturer knows and knows who copied from who. Tola, you copied Sidebrief. Stop digging,” a tweet online read.
Future Africa has now denied the allegations. According to the company in a statement shared with BusinessDay, Future Africa’s mission is to build the future in Africa by investing early in mission-driven founders solving hard problems in large markets.
“We work with Africa’s largest community of investors to provide capital, coaching, and community for founders who are turning Africa’s biggest challenges into global businesses. Our vision is to build a society where prosperity and purpose is within everyone’s reach. Given our mission and values, we cannot be involved in the theft of intellectual property,” Founder and General Partner, Future Africa, Iyinoluwa Aboyeji said.
The founder of Norebase is the former General Counsel of Future Africa. Following his resignation, Future Africa invested in his company according to their standard investment process.
“However, it is important to note that we are far from a major shareholder or stakeholder in Norebase. In fact, we own less than one percent of the company. That said, whether we own zero percent or 100 percent of the company, we would never breach the trust the founder places in us,” Aboyeji said.
On the 10th of May, 2021, Future Africa received an application from Norebase to pitch for funding via the standard form on their website without attaching any deck or investment materials to their application.
As per the standard process, the automated email messaging system sent a response to the email address as they have done for the over 1,000 applications that are made to them every year. Every application is reviewed exclusively by the investment team in a secure information management system the legal team has no access to.
According to Aboyeji, the investment team, in this case, concluded the startup was not compelling enough to advance beyond that point in their process emphasising that their legal team does not review applications to pitch for funding and typically only gets involved after they have expressed an interest in funding a startup.
Since announcing the Future Africa Fund in January 2020, the team has received over 2000 applications from startup founders. In 2021, over 1200 applications were received.
“Out of this large number, we have only invested in 31 startups this year. Unfortunately, we cannot invest in all startups who apply to pitch us for funding especially since many companies simply do not meet our criteria for investing. We believe this was one such case. We wish the founder well but would like to remind the public that we are not obligated to fund every pitch we receive,” Aboyeji said.
To fully demonstrate the transparency of their investment process, Future Africa said it will engage a global professional services firm to independently investigate these allegations and then on the basis of the published findings proceed to take appropriate legal action.
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