In the opening months of 2025, Joovlin, a Nigerian financial technology venture designed to streamline payments for micro-suppliers, ceased operations. Although it had achieved promising early momentum with over 2,000 active resellers and more than 6,000 products catalogued by suppliers, the firm explained on LinkedIn that its customer numbers had not expanded sufficiently to produce the income required for self-sufficiency without ongoing investment. Facing a dearth of fresh capital and diminishing financial reserves, Joovlin ultimately proved unable to continue.
This tale is far from unique amid Africa’s burgeoning yet precarious entrepreneurial landscape. Numerous ventures across the continent have secured substantial investments, swiftly accumulated users, and then abruptly collapsed. While shortages of capital are frequently cited as the primary culprit behind these closures, underlying challenges such as flawed implementation, hasty expansion, lax organisational frameworks, and ambiguous alignment with market demands play equally significant roles. Analysts suggest that approximately 70 per cent of African startups do not endure beyond their initial five years. As reported by Disrupt Africa, the period from January 2023 to June 2025 witnessed the demise of 33 such enterprises, driven by both funding shortfalls and inadequate operational rigour, with Nigeria accounting for nearly half of these instances.
Against this backdrop, Clarus has emerged as a vital resource for navigating the turmoil. Established by Victor Ekwealor, this consultancy provides interim expertise in go-to-market and expansion strategies—often termed fractional go-to-market services—to assist startups, incubators, and backers in developing scalable mechanisms that convert concepts into sustainable momentum.
Ekwealor characterises the preceding decade, which commenced around 2015 with the international spotlight on entities like Paystack, as a time of lenient investment and accelerated development. Securing funds often served as a shorthand for achievement, fostering rapid progress that prioritised velocity over foundational stability. This environment enabled entrepreneurs to experiment with bold visions absent rigorous oversight, where pitch presentations overshadowed comprehensive product planning. As investor enthusiasm persisted, scant attention was paid to customer loyalty or per-unit profitability. However, that phase has drawn to a close. According to Africa: The Big Deal, funding for African startups totalled $2.2 billion across 488 transactions in 2024, reflecting a 25 per cent reduction from the prior year and a sharp departure from the highs of 2021 and 2022. Ekwealor views this transition as the conclusion of an indulgent investment cycle.
He attributes the change to elevated global interest rates, which disproportionately burden emerging economies. While financiers remain engaged, their criteria have sharpened considerably; tangible performance now outweighs mere potential. In Ekwealor’s assessment, struggling companies repeatedly encounter five core deficiencies in their market entry approaches: vague positioning that attempts to appeal universally; haphazard channel selection, involving expenditures on popular platforms devoid of return evaluations; oversight of retention, rendering user acquisition straightforward yet retention elusive; fragmented teams, with product development, promotion, and sales functioning in isolation; and an absence of consistent operational tempo, where frantic activity masquerades as advancement.
He dismisses undirected channel investments as mere speculation rather than strategic deployment.
Returning to essential principles, Ekwealor frames the present juncture as a pivotal adjustment in mindset, compelling African startups to prioritise core elements over capital pursuits. The emphasis within the sector is evolving from superficial indicators—such as total users or weekly registrations—towards durability and optimisation. Sustainability duration now eclipses sheer expansion speed, with the market favouring refined operations over narrative flair or intuition.
This perspective resonates with investors. Olu Oyinsan, managing partner at Oui Capital, emphasised to TechCabal in January that guidance to founders remains consistent: concentrate on bedrock aspects like reliable income streams, healthy margins, and steady, viable progression. At Clarus, Ekwealor observes entrepreneurs increasingly inquiring about market positioning, conversion analytics, and long-term customer worth—timeless notions that have seldom anchored decision-making until now. Funders, too, probe deeper into retention patterns, user activation metrics, and income robustness, moving beyond surface-level figures.
For Ekwealor, the subdued atmosphere does not herald contraction but refinement. The sector is purging excesses, transitioning from impulsive exuberance to focused intent. The firm’s name, Clarus—evoking transparency—mirrors this evolution from instinctive outlays to purposeful planning. Drawing on Nassim Taleb’s notion of antifragility, Ekwealor posits that adversity forges the most resilient enterprises, infusing the outlook with optimism.
Prior to founding Clarus half a year ago, Ekwealor accumulated over 11 years of experience spanning Africa, the United Kingdom, and Europe in nascent firms, promotional efforts, and media outlets, including TechCabal. He reflects on intuitively applying go-to-market principles long before formalising the term, often extending unprompted counsel to emerging businesses on refined approaches. His pre-technology endeavours with family ventures—a aquaculture operation, a telecommunications service, and an apparel line—instilled early lessons in cost-revenue dynamics, underscoring the necessity of modest mark-ups for viability.
European stints honed his precision, while African contexts nurtured ingenuity. Yet Ekwealor candidly acknowledges his own missteps, including overreliance on inherent appeal for ideas, postponement of critical market decisions, and mistaking inertia for endorsement. These insights have moulded Clarus into an entity rooted in framework over sentiment. He has witnessed firsthand how ambiguity can doom promising initiatives, rendering his mission deeply personal.
Clarus markets itself as a provider of partial go-to-market and scaling support, enabling startups to leverage seasoned guidance and architecture at a fraction of permanent hires’ expense. Ekwealor clarifies that this extends beyond advisory roles into integrated delivery. The process initiates with a comprehensive market entry review, encompassing positioning, communication, buyer personas, conversion pathways, loyalty cycles, and distribution efficacy. From there, bespoke frameworks emerge, incorporating precise customer targeting, channel and pathway calculations, progression models, and standards for acquisition expenses alongside lifetime revenue projections, complemented by monitoring tools and routine review protocols.
Ekwealor underscores that their remit involves embedding basics such as market stance, profitability per unit, buyer insights, and implementation steadfastness—fundamentals that, despite their simplicity, are routinely overlooked in startup cores. He contends that go-to-market transcends promotional drives; it commences with the inception of development and forms the vital conduit linking offerings to audiences. Absent methodical approaches, expansion relies on serendipity, hinging on networks or fleeting popularity—outcomes he likens to chance.
Success, in his view, manifests through attitudinal evolution and process duplication: when leaders pivot from exploratory queries to data-driven commitments, the mechanisms prove effective. Clarus engages with ventures from nascent to maturing phases in sectors like financial technology, software services, learning platforms, and digital foundations, collaborating with incubators, capital pools, and innovation initiatives across Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, South Africa, the UK, Europe, and the Middle East.
Revenue streams from project fees paid by startups, supplemented by sponsorships from investors and accelerators for their charges. Extending its reach, Clarus is inaugurating the Clarus Growth Lab to instil market entry essentials throughout investor holdings. This programme allies with incubators, financiers, and network builders to integrate practitioner-guided systems into their offerings.
Ekwealor once pondered why venture capitalists engaged minimally with investees; he now recognises capacity constraints. The lab aims to furnish that foundational layer of market expertise across portfolios. Structured as intensive group sessions, it progresses from assessment to autonomous tools—ranging from analytics interfaces and review schedules to optimisation blueprints—affording backers enhanced oversight of genuine progress and enabling accelerators to infuse market discipline as a core feature.
Most incubators conclude at showcase events, he observes; Clarus picks up precisely there. The partial model facilitates broad accessibility: budding entrepreneurs secure expert aid sans full-team commitments, while investors acquire organised capabilities without internal expansions. Ekwealor envisions the lab as bedrock for the forthcoming decade, positing that future initiatives and funds will be crafted by practitioners imparting tangible momentum, not mere anecdotes.
Should prior African technology epochs have been marked by buoyancy and plentiful resources, the ensuing one promises to be defined by precision, endurance, and meticulous delivery, Ekwealor maintains. Entrepreneurs demonstrating market resonance via deeds rather than discourse will draw superior resources and personnel. His quinquennial ambition for Clarus is straightforward: to render organisation commonplace, embedding explicit market systems into the fabric of every incubator, fund, and entrepreneurial nexus. Expansion ought to be intentional, eschewing happenstance.
He concedes the paradigm shift demands patience. Maturing an ecosystem, akin to guiding a young professional through habit reformation, requires leniency—particularly for one of considerable maturity. Yet market pressures are imparting the education: those neglecting essentials falter, while the disciplined persist in advancement.
Clarus wagers that African enterprises will flourish through rigour and systematic scaling, not buzz or lax financing. By disseminating adaptable frameworks among creators, backers, and nurturers, the firm aspires to steer the landscape from a surge of fervent aspiration towards assured, reproducible prosperity.