Samata Capital

Lisa G. Thomas, the Founder and Managing Director, controls the investment function. The firm's published team lists no separate CIO, and the advisory board — composed of Wambui Chege, Heather Malloy, Micheline Ntiru, and Robert W. van Zwieten — provides external counsel rather than carrying fiduciary investment authority (per firm website).

The firm solicits direct submissions from founders via a public email address, requesting investment decks that cover team, product, market, historical and projected metrics, and financing-round details (per firm website). No proprietary data rooms or closed GP networks are disclosed, suggesting origination leans on open-market screening plus the team's internal relationships in African venture and growth circles.

Samata Capital is an asset manager organized as a private equity firm, not a family office. It was founded by Lisa Thomas and deploys external capital with a gender-lens mandate across African emerging markets. Its stage coverage spans buyout, early-stage, and growth equity, but the absence of a disclosed LP base makes its precise fund structure — permanent-capital vehicle, discretionary mandate, or blind-pool fund — unclear from public materials.

The firm’s published materials describe direct investing into scalable businesses — the founder-contact page is explicitly written for operating-company CEOs. There is no mention of making commitments to external private equity or venture capital funds, and no fund-of-funds activity is disclosed.

No separate philanthropic entity — foundation, donor-advised fund, or program-related investment vehicle — is publicly disclosed. The entire mandate appears housed within Samata Capital itself, suggesting the firm’s impact objectives are pursued through commercial return-seeking equity rather than through grant-making structures.

No explicit co-investment policy is published. The firm’s open call for founder decks and its small team suggest it likely leads or co-leads rounds directly, but there is no public evidence of a structured club-deal program or stated preference for co-underwriting alongside other Africa-focused managers.

The firm tags no negative screens and has published no exclusion list. Its materials emphasize a gender-lens threshold rather than sector constraints, making it theoretically active across any industry — provided the company advances opportunities for women and promotes gender diversity — in emerging-market economies.