Amarachi Nwachukwu couldn’t raise to save her startup; now, with MarlVC, she decides who gets funding

In May 2023, Amarachi Nwachukwu shut down MendHQ, a proptech startup she’d built to fix a problem she’d watched up close in her uncle’s law chambers: landlords losing rent because nobody had the resources to chase it manually. Three years later, she sits on the other side of the table at MarlVC, deciding which young founders get the cheques she never received.

The story of how she got there says less about resilience than about a structural gap she now spends her career trying to close.

MendHQ launched in February 2022. Nwachukwu, fresh out of law school, had spotted the opportunity from within her family’s chambers, where she was compiling annual reports for landlords because the lawyers were too busy. She built a team, onboarded lawyers and property owners onto the platform, and brought on an angel investor.

That relationship soured almost immediately. “The angel investor also wanted to be a co-founder,” she says, a demand she wasn’t equipped to negotiate around as a first-time founder still learning deal structure.

A second attempt to raise funds fell apart just as fast.

A prospective co-founder based in the US had agreed to bring in financing, and the team had already started interviewing field marketers to help close estate deals. Then, walking back from a meeting, Nwachukwu got a text: her backer was withdrawing to focus on her Master’s degree.

Amarachi Nwachukwu

“I’m like, why is it that relying on people’s money to run this always breaks you down in the middle, maybe when you’ve already engaged people to work?” she recalls.

That was the moment she decided to step away and earn money elsewhere before returning to build. She told her CTO first, then her newly hired marketing team, helping some of them find their next roles before formally closing the company in May 2023, roughly fifteen months after launch.

The finance career she wasn’t allowed to choose

Nwachukwu’s path into venture wasn’t a discovery so much as a return. Long before MendHQ, before law school, she wanted to study banking and finance. Her uncle, the same one whose chambers gave her a front-row seat to property mismanagement, had other plans.

“I wanted to study banking and finance, but my uncle said, ‘Where is the money you want to bank and finance? You should do law and join us in the chambers,” she recalls. “I said okay, the closest thing to finance in tech is VC. But I just felt like I needed to make a lot of money, maybe have an exit in my late 30s or 40s, and then I’d come and do VC.”

MendHQ’s collapse accelerated a timeline she’d expected to take two more decades. What was supposed to be a distant second act became the thing she pivoted to almost immediately.

Ask Nwachukwu what fundraising advice turned out to be false, and she doesn’t hesitate: raise money only when you need it.

“I don’t recommend that for anybody,” she says. “Raise it before you need it. Maybe you still have six months of runway. It gives you room to negotiate better.” She’s equally sceptical of founders who tell investors they’ll reach out “when they’re ready”. By then, she argues, the relationship should already exist.

This is advice shaped directly by what she didn’t do. Both times MendHQ’s funding fell through, the company was negotiating from a position of dependency rather than leverage, exactly the trap she now tells founders to avoid.

Surviving an aborted dream

The weeks after the shutdown weren’t as bleak as the arc suggests.

Nwachukwu credits her family and friends for absorbing the emotional weight, and she landed a new job as a product manager within a month. What stayed with her longer was advice from a mentor: grow alongside your peers rather than measuring yourself against founders further ahead.

“He told me age is the leverage you have over these people; take your time. That stuck with me,” she says. “I think it’s good to have people at the top, but growing with your peers reduces the pressure. It helps you fall out and figure things out together and express yourself better.” 

Because MendHQ folded early and quietly, the shutdown barely registered in the wider ecosystem. “Founders understand this stuff is very hard,” she says. “I was just starting, so I didn’t get any backlash.” The anonymity of failing small, she suggests, is its own kind of protection.

Nwachukwu’s route into venture wasn’t linear either.

She met a MarlVC-backed founder through Lagos’s meetup circuit, and when she saw on LinkedIn that the firm’s investor was coming to Lagos, she cold-messaged him, offering to send her deal flow ahead of his visit.

That turned into a coffee meeting and eventually an application while she was still midway through the Newton Venture Programme, a global training course for early-career VCs, which she had not yet completed.

She was rejected. “They said they passed on me. I was heartbroken,” she says. “But I didn’t give up.”

She spent the following months studying the ecosystem, joining a US investor-relations WhatsApp group, and immersing herself in Silicon Valley’s market dynamics. Then she went back. 

“I told him, this is what I’ve learned in the last couple of months. Let’s do a trial.”

That trial and the Newton certification she was completing were what eventually got her hired early this year. “Funny thing is, I didn’t lead with my founder background when I was applying,” she admits. What convinced MarlVC, she believes, was her read on the African market and her willingness to support portfolio companies both before and after a cheque is written.

Investment: what she looks for in startups

MarlVC writes $50,000 initial cheques with $100,000 to $250,000 in follow-on capital. Nwachukwu’s diligence is built almost entirely around one question: can this money get a founder to the point where institutional investors take notice?

“I look at your MRR, then I ask, ‘If I give you $50k, can you double that to reach even the African pre-seed standard so that you don’t die?” she says. She weighs product roadmaps against sector dynamics and studies team composition closely.

Sector experience, she’s learnt, matters more than she once assumed: “If a founder is building cross-border payments and nobody on the team has worked in fintech or a bank before, that might not be the best bet, because you don’t understand compliance.”

She doesn’t hunt for red flags so much as test commitment. A founder running a startup as a side project while co-founding somewhere else is an automatic no. “Everything else,” she says, “is closer to 60 to 70 per cent about the team. You might wake up tomorrow, and it’s not working. But we pivot with you.”

Pressed on Africa’s biggest unsolved structural problem, Nwachukwu doesn’t point to seed funding at all. She points to what comes after it.

“There’s no bridge to follow-on capital. Trust me, if some of the startups that died had gotten follow-on funding, they wouldn’t have died,” she says.

Her prescriptions: more “idea labs” to sharpen what founders build before they build it, more corporate venture participation, and closer collaboration between foreign investors, who she says have largely operated in isolation, and local funds already holding relevant portfolios.

Her advice to a founder calling mid-collapse, the call she never got to make in 2023, depends entirely on the business model. “If I see there’s no scalability, I’ll tell you to pivot; don’t die,” she says. “But if the business model is okay and you just need more funds to scale, explore other forms of investment. Private credit, convertible notes. It depends on the type of business you’re running.”

MarlVC's own pattern reflects that philosophy in practice. The firm runs two cohorts a year, each spanning 12 weeks, and its most recent intake, which closed applications this August, backed six African founders out of twelve term-sheeted globally, with the next application window opening around January 2027. It is a Silicon Valley-style bet-on-young-founders model transplanted onto African terrain, built around the same conviction Nwachukwu keeps returning to: the idea that a founder's first cheque means little if there's no bridge to the second. She would know. She built a company that never got one.