Helios Investment Partners

Co-Founders Tope Lawani and Babatunde Soyoye jointly lead the firm as Managing Partners. They chair the investment committee, which includes a senior partnership group drawn from institutions including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and McKinsey. The firm maintains a consensus-driven IC model rather than a single-operator structure.

Helios relies on an integrated team of over 70 professionals based in Nairobi, Lagos, Cairo, and London — a deeper in-market presence than most Africa-focused peers. The firm's long track record of building platform companies creates a repeat-founder referral network, while its energy and telecom infrastructure holdings generate sector-adjacent sourcing signals. This local network is supplemented by the formal relationships its senior partners maintain with African family conglomerates and regional corporates.

Helios primarily pursues control-oriented buyouts and significant minority growth investments. The firm focuses on established platform companies with proven business models but significant scope to professionalize operations and scale geographically. Earlier-stage venture is not part of the core strategy.

Helios invests across the African continent, with a geographic strategy spanning West, East, North, and Southern Africa. While the firm's mandate is exclusively Africa-focused, several of its portfolio companies, like Helios Towers, have expanded operations into the Middle East post-exit. The firm does not pursue standalone investments in Europe or other regions outside its core mandate.

Helios marked a major exit milestone with the London Stock Exchange listing of Helios Towers Africa in 2019, which returned significant capital to Fund II investors. Its early sale of a stake in Nigerian digital payments firm Interswitch to Visa reportedly valued the company at $1 billion (per Bloomberg, 2019), while other realizations include exits in the oil and gas and financial services sectors — providing a demonstrable path to liquidity in markets often criticized for exit bottlenecks.

Helios is a private equity firm, not a family office. It manages third-party capital from a blue-chip LP base that includes sovereign wealth funds, development finance institutions, and global pension funds across multiple fund vintages. In March 2023, the firm sold a minority stake in its management company to ADIA and other sovereign investors, shifting toward a permanent-capital-enhanced model while remaining an independent entity.

Helios has publicly communicated a continued emphasis on telecom and digital infrastructure, financial services, and energy, with growing attention to logistics and the consumer sectors as intra-African trade integration deepens. The firm has also signaled interest in climate-aligned infrastructure projects across the continent.