Nigerian investors lose more value after the cheque clears than before it. Diligence identifies risk before capital is deployed, but the most consequential problems tend to emerge or become considerably more expensive as the portfolio company grows.
An early-stage business can reach an institutional funding round with a cap table nobody can reconstruct, intellectual property still sitting with a contractor who left two years ago, three years of unfiled statutory returns, inconsistent commercial contracts and governance structures designed for a company half its current size. None of this is exotic. It looks administrative right up until the next financing, a strategic transaction or an exit puts it under scrutiny, and then it is cheap to have fixed early and expensive to fix under deadline.
We work with investors and portfolio companies on that institutional gap. Our focus is deliberately different from traditional fund counsel: we do not advise on fund formation or fund structuring. We work at the company and portfolio level preparing businesses for investment, strengthening governance once capital is deployed, and building the structures a company needs to scale and eventually transact.
Before an investment, we help identify and remediate what diligence is going to surface: reconstructing corporate records and cap tables, confirming ownership of intellectual property, reviewing material commercial arrangements, assessing statutory and regulatory compliance, examining data-governance exposure and organising the documentation a data room requires. The objective is not to simulate diligence for its own sake. It is to let the company enter the transaction knowing where its weaknesses are, and which of them need resolving before an investor finds them.
Capital then changes what the business has to be able to do. New shareholders bring information rights, reserved matters, board participation, reporting obligations and expectations around internal controls, while rapid growth generates new regulatory, employment, data, technology and operational risk. We translate investment documentation into governance that actually functions: clear board structures, delegated authority, reliable reporting, statutory compliance, internal policies and decision-making frameworks that can mature with the company.
Across a portfolio, the same weaknesses recur. A single fund will typically find the same four or five problems in most of its companies: corporate housekeeping, data protection, IP ownership, contract management, board governance, internal controls; discover them one at a time over several years, and pay to fix each separately under transaction pressure. A portfolio-wide health check surfaces them together, ranked by materiality, at a fraction of the cost. We work at that level: developing common governance standards, running targeted health checks across a portfolio, and going deeper into individual companies where remediation is required.
The work matters most ahead of a follow-on round, an acquisition or an exit. Historical corporate gaps, unclear ownership of assets, missing approvals and unresolved compliance issues are far easier to address before a buyer or incoming investor has begun diligence. We prepare businesses for that scrutiny and support remediation through the transaction itself.
We are a specialist firm, which shapes how we work with investors. Senior advisers stay close to the work, mandates move at the speed a live transaction demands, and portfolio support can run continuously rather than being activated once a problem has already become urgent.