TLcom Expands TAPSI Pre-Seed Investment Portfolio with Backing for South African Travel Payments Platform

TLcom Capital, the Africa-focused venture capital firm, has expanded its early-stage portfolio through its dedicated $5M pre-seed fund, TAPSI (TIDE Africa Pre Seed Investments). Its latest investment in TurnStay, a South African travel payments platform that has recently closed a $2M seed round, brings TAPSI’s capital deployment to 50%.

Launched in 2022, TAPSI was created to extend TLcom’s investment reach into pre-seed stage companies, providing up to $200,000 in funding, alongside access to the firm’s global network, operational expertise, and more than two decades of experience in African venture investing. The fund also serves as an upstream feeder for TLcom’s $154M TIDE Africa Fund II, enabling high-performing portfolio companies to progress to larger funding rounds.

In addition to TurnStay, TAPSI’s portfolio includes Talstack (Nigeria), Bright Financial (Sudan and Ethiopia), Tradehub (Egypt), Agrails (Kenya), and three startups supported through its partnership with First Check Africa, which delivers early-stage capital to female founders. Through TAPSI, TLcom aims to close up to ten additional pre-seed investments before the end of 2026, continuing its commitment to diverse founding teams across Africa’s leading innovation hubs.

TAPSI’s investment approach builds on the strategy of TLcom’s TIDE Fund I and TIDE Fund II. The fund is sector-agnostic, targeting key sectors with strong early-stage potential for significant impact. Talstack’s trajectory illustrates this, having used TAPSI’s pre-seed funding to validate its business model, achieve early traction, and secure a seed round from TIDE Fund II in 2024. This model reinforces TLcom’s position as a multi-stage investor with deep insight into the African startup funding lifecycle, recognising the vital role early-stage capital plays in enabling African tech companies to scale and deliver impact.

Eloho Omame, Partner at TLcom Capital, said, “Pre-seed investments allow us to expand our portfolio and allocate capital across multiple stages of a company’s lifecycle. Our goal is to create massive value in underserved markets and collaborate with African founders to build from the start all the way to exit, be it an acquisition or in the form of an IPO. This is by no means easy for any start-up, in any sector; building in Africa is not for the faint-hearted. However, the likelihood of success significantly increases if we support and work with founders earlier on in their journeys and we grow alongside them.”

TLcom has one of African tech’s strongest early-stage portfolios, featuring companies such as Pula, uLesson, Autochek, FairMoney, Educatly, HUB2, ILLA, Littlefish, Seamless HR, and Andela, one of the continent’s unicorns. With approximately $250 million under management, including the $154M TIDE Africa II, TLcom is committed to empowering ambitious entrepreneurs tackling major challenges in large, underserved markets.

Eloho Omame concluded, “With TAPSI as a dedicated pre-seed arm of our investment platform, TLcom is uniquely positioned to back companies across their entire growth journey from ideation and product-market fit to scaling and maturity, reinforcing our role as a long-term partner to Africa’s most ambitious founders. As we progress with this fund, we look forward to speaking with and supporting more early-stage start-ups from across the continent.”