Scaleup Service Practices
The supply side of scaling support has a labelling problem.
Many programmes use scaling terminology while delivering standardised incubation. The distinction matters because the interventions are different in kind: early-stage incubation addresses product-market fit, business model validation, and founder capability. Scale-up support addresses organisational design, management professionalisation, governance systems, growth capital architecture, and the operational challenges that arise when a venture with proven product-market fit attempts to replicate its model at speed. Conflating the two wastes founder time, misallocates scarce expert capacity, and produces the cycle of training fatigue - ventures that have cycled through multiple generic programmes without receiving the support that their actual stage requires.
“We're scarce on people who are supporting startups at that scaling stage with the right balance of customisation, support services, and that balance between strategy versus on hands on execution.” - interviewee
"They don't need someone to say, here's a recipe that you have no money to execute on. And here's a bunch of consultants that you can't afford to pay, who've never done this before in a real market. That's what's usually happening."* - interviewee
The demand side has shifted materially since 2022. Ventures that survived the correction period are more sophisticated consumers of support - more likely to have experienced the cost of generic provision and less willing to accept it again. The market for genuinely expert, contextually grounded, execution-oriented support is larger and better-informed than it was. The supply of that support has not kept pace.
What the data shows about African scale-up readiness
The Scale Diagnostics report - produced by Systemic Innovation, and ScaleupNation under the FCDO-funded RISA Fund project, and applying ScaleupNation's ScaleUp Scan diagnostic tool to 42 ventures across Kenya, Ethiopia, and Rwanda - provides the most granular primary data available on what African scaling ventures actually look like from the inside.
The findings are striking. Across the 42 ventures assessed, 76 percent of leadership teams have no prior entrepreneurial experience in growing businesses. Only four percent demonstrate what ScaleupNation classifies as Customer Delight - the capacity to deliver products that surprise and engage customers, generating genuine loyalty - against 45 percent in the global ScaleUpNation database. Only eight percent demonstrate Strategic Leaps - the ability to seize growth opportunities through geographic expansion, product innovation, or market trend exploitation - against 20 percent globally. The self-rated vision score (76%) and the AI-assisted vision assessment score (17%) diverge by 59 percentage points: the largest gap in the dataset. Most leadership teams believe they have a compelling vision. Most do not have one that withstands independent scrutiny.
On lean operations (70% versus 59% globally) and learning velocity (41% versus 38%), African ventures outperform the global database. These are the dimensions that constraint and necessity build. African ventures that have survived long enough to be assessed for scale-readiness have been forced to optimise resources and adapt rapidly. What they lack are not the survival skills that adversity teaches. They lack the scaling skills that experience and structured development build: customer-centricity, commercial excellence, strategic positioning, and ambidextrous leadership that can drive both innovation and execution simultaneously.
The bimodal revenue distribution in the dataset is a further signal. Of 42 ventures, 22 show revenue growth exceeding 20 percent annually - a high-growth profile by any standard. Sixteen show growth below five percent. There is almost nothing in between. This polarisation - performing or stalling, with few ventures in the moderate growth band - reflects the structural conditions described throughout this publication: the middle ground between startup survival and genuine scale is where most ventures stall, and where support is most absent.
"What we realised was that, for the scaling piece, it was necessary to ask more pertinent questions such as: what are the unit economics of the business? Will it actually be able to scale faster if you apply the right support mechanisms?" - interviewee
What the evidence says about effective delivery
The Argidius SCALE framework - synthesising nearly a decade of evidence from across BDS provision in developing markets - identifies five characteristics that consistently distinguish effective from ineffective support: selecting the right enterprise to support, charging to improve accountability, addressing real operational problems rather than delivering fixed curricula, learning by evaluating enterprise performance, and leading by example through provider organisational quality. These are not aspirational principles. They are empirically derived from what works, and they represent the most rigorous publicly available evidence base for scaling support design in developing markets.
The GALI ten-year synthesis - covering 23,364 enterprises across 369 programmes - is consistent: the ventures that benefit most from acceleration are those that enter programmes with stronger teams and more developed businesses. Programmes most likely to add value are those with intensive, tailored, on-demand support rather than fixed curricula. Programmes that do not screen rigorously end up providing expensive support to ventures that are not ready for it, with negligible performance effects. These findings have been available for years. Their adoption across the African support ecosystem has been slow.
Spring Impact's work synthesising lessons from scaling programmes identifies a persistent pattern of delivery gaps directly applicable to the commercial context: most support providers lack a systematic approach to scale and have limited understanding of the activities, skills, and resources required at each stage of the scaling journey; assessing scale-related needs is chronically under-resourced, resulting in poor provider selection; limited understanding of local context produces engagements that are technically competent but operationally irrelevant; and support typically ends at the point where sustained engagement is most needed - during implementation.
The provider landscape: what exists, what has closed, what has emerged
The provider landscape has changed materially since 2022. The two most significant changes are an institutional failure and a new entrant - both instructive for different reasons.
The most institutionally sophisticated scaling support offering on the continent prior to 2024 was Founders Factory Africa - milestone-governed, monthly progress-tracked, with portfolio engagement extending beyond programme completion. Its rebrand to 54 Collective and subsequent liquidation in 2025 was the institutional failure made visible at scale: a large-scale, donor-backed support institution collapsed under conditions its own design created. The governance failure that ended 54 Collective is precisely the governance failure scaling ventures are routinely advised to avoid.
As far as we are aware, no government in Africa provides dedicated scale-up support funded at the level and quality of international models such as the U.K Tech Nation or the Netherlands' Scale-up Holland. This is among the most consequential structural gaps in the ecosystem.
Against this, Endeavor remains the most evidence-backed network-anchored, high-intensity scaling support model in operation on the continent. Focused on companies with the potential to enter the top one percent within a defined timeframe, Endeavor provides access to a global network of experienced entrepreneurs who have navigated the scaling journey. The multiplier effect is empirically measurable. Endeavor's accessibility constraint - support primarily available within its selected portfolio, and its selection being deliberately selective - remains a limitation on ecosystem-wide impact.
Accelerate Africa - launched in 2024 by Iyinoluwa Aboyeji and Mia von Koschitzky-Kimani - is the most notable new entrant at the early-stage end of the support spectrum. Designed to fill the gap created by Y Combinator's withdrawal from Africa - which backed no African startups in its most recent summer batch and only three in each of the three preceding batches - it runs eight-week, in-person cohorts of ten startups across Lagos and Nairobi, with optional investment of $250,000–$500,000 from Future Africa available post-programme subject to diligence. Importantly, it is an early-stage acceleration programme, not a scale-up programme. Its value is in the contextual grounding and the founders who lead it. Its gap is the same gap that existed before it launched: there is no commercially structured, expert-delivered, sustained support offering for ventures at the scale-up stage in most African markets.
AI and the economics of delivery
The most significant development in scaling support provision since 2022 is not a new programme or institution. It is the emergence of AI tools that materially change what scaling support can be delivered, at what cost, and to how many ventures simultaneously. Support that previously required expensive human capital to deliver at reasonable quality can now be partially automated - enabling the scarce pool of genuinely expert practitioners to focus on the highest-value interventions while AI handles knowledge-diffusion, diagnostic, and curriculum functions at scale.
The shared service and affordable online learning models long predicted as the structural solution to the cost problem are now architecturally achievable in ways they were not in 2022. AI-powered diagnostic tools can assess a venture's operational state - across financial management, governance, people systems, customer data practices, and market positioning - at a fraction of the cost of human assessment. AI-powered learning platforms can deliver genuinely personalised curriculum adapted to each venture's specific gaps, sector, and market context. The institutional design question - who builds and maintains these platforms, how they are funded, and how quality is assured - remains to be answered. The 54 Collective collapse makes this question more urgent: the dominant funding model for scaling support - large donor grants to institutionalised intermediaries - has demonstrated its fragility in a way the ecosystem cannot ignore. Commercially structured support that ventures pay for does not disappear when a donor relationship ends.
Willingness to pay: changing, but not changed
The ecosystem precedent is that ventures receive support at no cost. The Argidius evidence and WDI East Africa research - establish the mechanism clearly: charging improves programme outcomes and selection; generic programming has a hard $150–200 ceiling; specific high-value support does not. The ventures most likely to pay for support are those that have experienced what poor or absent support costs them - precisely the cohort the correction period has expanded.
"Founders coming into the system need to understand that to succeed, they really need quality support. And this support costs money. There is a justifiable business case for it, but this narrative has not been adequately articulated." - interviewee
"At the end of the day, you get what you pay for. If something is free, you've got to expect a certain level of service." - interviewee
The causal story - expert support contributes to operational resilience which contributes to survival through capital contractions - is becoming more legible as the natural experiment of the correction period unfolds. Ventures that received the right support at the right stage, and paid for some of it, are disproportionately in the cohort that survived. The collapse of donor-funded support institutions adds the structural argument: commercial sustainability of support provision is not just good for providers. It is the only architecture that ensures the support is there when a venture needs it, rather than when a donor relationship permits it.
"There is a recognition of the need, but there isn't the conviction, and therefore willingness to pay. Even private equity companies which have value creation arms haven't been fully able to put together strong business cases." - interviewee
The gap between recognition and conviction is closing. It has not closed. Closing it - through better evidence, better articulation of the return on support investment, and better designed commercially structured provision - is among the most important near-term tasks for the support ecosystem.