Kiendel Burritt has 20+ years of experience making investments across Africa in financial services and fintech companies, and more recently in healthtech, supply chain tech and oceantech companies. With experience on all sides of the table (investor, investee, technical advisor and entrepreneur), she brings a comprehensive understanding of the challenges and practical issues involved in finding and closing deals as well as supporting companies in early and growth stages to scale. She has deployed capital using a range of instruments included equity, quasi-equity and debt. Ms. Burritt has held three Board positions in the past and now sits on the Advisory Boards of 4 early stage companies. In addition to investing on behalf of Funds, Ms. Burritt has become an active angel investor in seed funding rounds having invested in companies in areas as diverse as machine learning and AI, digital identify, edutech, and logistics.
As the founder of Digital Africa Investment, Ms. Burritt built the investment portfolio of Financial Sector Deepening Africa Investments (FSDAi) making investments on their behalf in a pan-African cross-border payments platform, a construction finance housing company, a pension fund administrator for informal workers, an invoice discounting and forward receivables platform for SMEs and a wholesale digital credit platform joining institutional investors and digital lenders in Africa. She has also provided transaction advisory services to KfW portfolio companies in Ghana and Sénégal as well as companies raising new capital and expanding into new markets, working most recently with a B2C MSME digital lender and a B2B healthtech start-up offering remote, cloud-based health services. Her investment work is informed by the development of a Change Management Toolkit to help companies navigate the mindset shift and organizational change required to become customer-centric and drive multi-stakeholder value creation.
Prior to now, Ms. Burritt was a Partner in two PE funds focused on financial institutions serving the base of the pyramid and SMEs in Africa, investing in institutions and/or preparing deals for investments in Mozambique, Madagascar, Sénégal, Kenya, Malawi, Zambia and Egypt. As Senior Technical Advisor at UNCDF she identified, invested in and facilitated technical assistance for “breakthrough” microfinance institutions positioned to reach significant numbers of unbanked individuals and micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in Angola, Turkey, Macedonia, Philippines, Pakistan, Ghana, Mozambique, Malawi, Togo, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Angola, Kenya, Madagascar, and Zimbabwe.
Ms. Burritt holds an MPA from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Arts in History (Magna Cum Laude) from Wellesley College where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.