Novitske, a former New York based and staff of Sandler O’Neill Asset Management, decided, in 2012, to pitch her tent in Nigeria, after her long sabbatical leave. She had gone backpacking through Africa and afterwards, realized that she was bored of her job. Novitske decided to focus on an emerging market and shifted her career to investing in Africa.
Lexi Novitske founded
Singularity Investment in 2014, a private investment company with an aim to invest in and support emerging entrepreneurs that are in the startup stages of their businesses. Prior to the launch of
Singularity, she had worked with
Verod Capital Management, a Nigeria-based private equity firm.
Singularity Investment provides investment opportunities for media, telecommunication, and technology companies.
Lexi, being the company’s Principal Investment Officer, oversees its operations and manages investments in the company’s portfolio. A list of firms on
Singularity’s portfolio is: PayJoy, Paystack (both fintech companies), Liquidity, IHS, LISNR, sliide airtime, AsokoInsight, Smile Identity, Maliyo Games, cielo
24, ShotTracker, Page Cloud, Digital Genius, mPharma, Blueprint Capital Advisors, and Vorex (which has now exited).
She is passionate about the Nigerian market, and more especially, the Nigeria women. She admits that although her company’s current portfolio includes companies led by male founders, she hopes for this to change in the nearest future, such that there would be as many women or even more on board, considering that Nigeria has the highest rate of female entrepreneurs in the world. According to Forbes, Lexi claims to learnt how to do business from the Nigerian women: how they combine being wives, mothers and business leaders together, not taking no for an answer, doing all of these and yet maintaining their femininity.
Furthermore, Lexi has opened herself to learn as much as she can about the Nigerian market. In her interview with
How We Made It in Africa, she exposed the challenges she faced when she was starting out and the numerous questions she was ‘bombarded’ with. These, she said, have helped her to continually grow into being able to tackle the challenges that come at her.
Unlike the ‘disrupt’ business ‘trick’ that works in Silicon Valley, whereby a new business models with novel tech platforms can steal huge market share from major companies already existing, Alexandra is of the opinion that, in Nigeria – and Africa, generally, it is easier for start-ups to collaborate with existing large companies (key industry players) than to try to challenge them.
Novitske urges Western investors to leave their western world beliefs behind. She finds the western investors’ attitude of looking at the African market as a place for foundation funding or impact investing detrimental. She suggests that US investors should consider the African market, Lagos, Nigeria especially, because of its booming and energetic nature.
