Ajo Angels Weekly is your source for tips, deals, and insights shaping startup investing in the US and Africa. Created to help Black folks build wealth, diversify their portfolios, and impact thier communities.
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Dates: Feb 11 to Feb 12 2026
Location: Nairobi, Kenya
📘Knowledge Drop: Due Diligence Deep Dive
Last week we talked about quick look due diligence to determine if you deal with worth more of your time. If you decide it is, now it's time to take a deep dive. People tend to get confused about this phase, thinking it's about predicting the future, but it's really about spotting risks.
What you’re trying to figure out is:
How could this thing blow up?
What needs to happen for it to work?
Does the potential payoff make the risk worth it?
As a new angel investor, don't try to be the smartest person in the room. Just focus on not making rookie mistakes.
The 5 areas you need to dig into
1. Founder/Team diligence
At the early stages, the founder/team IS everything.
Here is what you’re trying to suss out:
Will they quit when things get hard?
Can these people get shit done?
Do they learn quickly from mistakes?
Will they keep going when things get hard?
What you're looking for:
Founder clarity: Can they explain their business in plain English?
Founder ownership: Will they admit when they don't know something?
Founder magic: What have they built with almost no resources?
Watch out for:
People with impressive resumes but no track record of building anything
Founders who blame everyone else when things go wrong
All talk, no substance
People who don't actually listen to other opinions
Questions to ask founders:
Why are you the right person to build this?
What's the closest you've come to the company dying?
What's the hardest problem you're avoiding right now?
If they dodge questions or get defensive; that tells you something could be of.
2. Problem + customer diligence
You need to validate that the problem is a real thing that people want to pay to have solved.
The key question: Is this a must-have or a nice-to-have?
Dig into:
Who pays for this vs. who uses it?
What would happen if this product vanished tomorrow?
What are people doing to solve this problem right now?
Good early signs:
Customers paying even though the product isn't perfect yet
People cobbling together janky workarounds to solve the problem on their own
Users stick around even if the product isn’t user friendly
Red flags:
Idea of the customer is too broad
Long-winded explanations about why it'll matter eventually
No actual customer feedback, just the founder's opinion on what customers want
3. Market diligence
This is not as hard as people make it out to be; big wins require big markets!
Ask yourself:
If this works, can it actually get huge (hundreds of millions per year)?
Is this a full company or just a feature someone else could build?
Can this grow naturally or does it hit a ceiling fast?
An easy market sanity check:
Who's the first customer?
Who's the 10th customer?
Who's the 10,000th customer?
If those answers don't connect logically, it could be a reason for concern.
4. Business model + economics
This is where new angels either freeze up or don't bother looking. Don't do either.
You don’t have to do complex financial stuff here. You're just making sure the basic math makes sense.
Understand:
How does money come in?
How does money go out?
Do they make money on the first sale, or does the customer need to buy multiple times before they are profitable?
What needs to scale for this to actually work?
Reality check:
Understand that most numbers in early-stage companies are educated guesses
You're stress-testing their assumptions, and trying to understand their thought processes; not expecting perfect forecasts
Red flags:
If they have no idea how their make revenue or profit
Profit margins that don't match what's normal for this type of business
Customer acquisition costs that magically decrease without a real explanation
5. Deal terms + structure
New angels tend to make big mistakes here. The deal terms are very critical to the long-term success of the deal. A bad deal in a great company can wreck your returns.
Know these basics cold:
Is the detail priced fairly
Valuation or valuation cap
SAFE vs. priced round
Your right to invest in future rounds (pro rata)
How much ownership you're getting
Common new angel mistake: Ignoring terms because "it's just a small check." Small checks add up over time just like big ones.
Quick sanity check:
Is this fair to founders without screwing investors and vice versa?
Is the valuation based on hype or real traction?
How much diligence is enough?
Here's the rule: Stop when doing more research won't really change your decision.
You can't eliminate all risk, what you’re doing is trying to understand the risk you're taking on.
Supporting founders who look like us is important and powerful. But doing it without discipline is how we lose everything.
Final checklist before you invest
Before you write that check, make sure you can clearly answer:
Why this team?
Why this problem?
Why this market?
Why this deal structure?
Why right now?
If any of these answers feel “iffy”, slow down and take a closer look.
Deals Open For Investment: UMI
UMI is tackling a massive women’s health gap: 2.7B women face hormonal disorders that mainstream healthcare doesn’t fix. They offer a 3 month, clinically proven, personalized AI powered program that delivers real results, not generic wellness.
They’ve already got 435 paying customers, 45.6k followers, 4,600 email leads, and $555k in revenue.
The founder has a 100k audience and a track record of helping women heal naturally.
Early results: 83 percent success rate, including cycle normalization and fibroid reduction from 4.8cm to 1.4cm.
🦄Deals On My Desk
The API Powering Global Take-Back Programs
2DaLoop is the backend data and intelligence platform that helps large companies manage product take-back, recycling, and compliance across complex global supply chains. It acts as the connective tissue between manufacturers, recyclers, regulators, and downstream partners, turning fragmented systems into one unified data layer. It’s like a Plaid for circular supply chains, built to reduce costs, meet regulations, and unlock hidden value.
The Backstory: As innovation increases, so does waste, regulation, and reporting complexity. Large enterprises face fragmented data silos, manual reporting, and systems that cannot talk to each other, leading to missed signals and lost value. Fortune 1000 companies often spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars each year just to piece together basic supply chain and compliance data. The founders built 2DaLoop after seeing firsthand how the lack of interoperability made take-back programs expensive, risky, and inefficient, even for the most advanced organizations.
Key Innovation: 2DaLoop is a brand-neutral API that integrates upstream manufacturers, internal systems, and downstream recycling and logistics partners into one intelligence layer. The platform delivers Unity Data Intelligence, which turns raw supply chain data into actionable insights across compliance reporting, product lifecycle management, sales signals, and environmental impact. By automating manual data collection and connecting over a thousand ecosystem providers.
Funding: Raising $1.2M to complete product development, expand enterprise pilots, make strategic hires, and scale business development. The company already has active pilots, patent pending technology, and a growing network of over 1,800 organizations across the circular economy ecosystem.
❓Did You Know
ShearShare, founded by Dr. Tye Caldwell and Courtney Caldwell, became the first Black woman led startup accepted into Google for Startups, and now operates in over 900 cities, helping salon and barbershop owners earn income without owning a location?
Cheers,
Abdul
About Our Chairman
Hey Hey… I’m Abdul I’m the chairman of Ajo Angels and Shujaa Capital and I’m on a mission to introduce angel investing to 25,000 black folks over the next five years. I’m doing this with the goal of narrowing the racial wealth gap as well as trying to close the billion dollar funding gap for black founders.