How Silverbacks Holdings Backs Africa’s Global Tech, Sports, and Media Winners

Hey, I'd like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres and if you'd like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters.com and click on be our guest to apply. All right, so today I have Ibrahim Sanya on the line and he's executive chairman over at Silverback's holdings and this episode is part of our Middle East and Africa Summit coverage where we bring you the best of those that attended the Middle East and Africa Summit in Abu Dhabi hosted by the Milken Institute. Ibrahim, welcome to the show. Hey Adam, great to be here. All right, so excited to get into what you're doing over at Silverback's holdings specifically investing in Africa's tech, sports, entertainment, and media. Got a lot going on there and talk about what you're also going to be getting into in 2026 and to get us started here though, let's start with the Middle East and Africa Summit, the MEA Summit that would took place in Abu Dhabi. It talked to me, how was your experience? Outstanding, it was superb, fantastic to see you and obviously all the friends that Milken have done a phenomenal job with love this event. It's one of our favorite ones and it's our second or third time showing up and we are taking it religiously and I hope you two think it's the best event that happens in the region and on top of it, what you would observe is that it's happening just at the right time at the end of it and then you have the Abu Dhabi Finance week so you get to get your cake and it did too. Yeah, what keeps you coming back? A lot of different things that you could be doing obviously in the region, lots of conferences, lots of things going on, what makes the Milken event special? What makes it different to you? So for me, I've been attending the Milken event for a decade so I'm a lawyer list and the region we cover at work is African business. So having Abu Dhabi being in the place that hosts this event is perfect because increasingly the UAE has become the epicenter for an extra state of Africa and an extra state of India, an extra state for anybody in Asia. So it becomes a powerful role where you get a chance to do business. We are self-hackled up a lot of activity in the UAE, I'm a resident of Dubai, so for me it's almost a few minutes from home, I'm also based in Peru for the rest of the time. Having the event have so many friends come in from different parts of the world, people from the state, from Europe, from the African continent, and both from Asia. Milken does the right, right mix because not only brings different geographies but many sectors. You have a lot of leaders, actual service sector, a lot of leaders from the technology sector, a lot of leaders from the entertainment and various sectors. So for us it's the right time, it's the end of the year. You can just sit down, reconnect, and prepare for the year to come. That's wonderful. Let's get into Silverback's holdings. Talk to me about the company. Where do you want to begin? How do you want to see this up? So the company we started it six years ago, 2009, I would argue that if we had to, the simplest name for a company was COVID because COVID is really what created this company. It was created at the back of it because I was in Dubai when this idea came about. I almost died. It was in COVID hospitalized and a doctor had enough to help me to not go on the other side, but you know what they say. When you're about to pass, you realize a few things. So for me it's one statement from my Buddha and also used by him today, which goes as follow that every individual has two lives. And the second one starts when he realized that you only have one. When I almost passed and be associated by some local doctors, a lot of thought and a lot of review of my life, went through and decided that there's a few things that since I was giving the second chance, the second act, I and some close friends wanted to do things that were dear to us. So we established this company for some of our old names that specifically is organized around a simple idea that we take seriously, which is that with the advance of companies based in Africa and the Middle East are able to reach just about anybody in terms of service. And that's true when you start this technology, but it wouldn't start with technical financial services, but also commerce, but also sports and entertainment, because technology allows frontier to disappear and allows entrepreneurs from one geography to truly go global. And from our standpoint, we are for most of the members, most of the managers, most of the partners are old born in the African continent from Cairo to Mauritius, Senegal, Djibouti, Ghana. And we decided we're really going to bring our common experience. We all have worked together in the past in previous capacities, and wanted to provide ambition to build something global. And over the last six years, we've been quite lucky to find these rare gems, these silverbacks that we are from a wide group of gorillas, and these leaders really stand out on the back of five criteria that we follow judiciously. The first one is we are looking for founders that are a second act or serial founders. Secondly, we're looking for founders are able to build a business that is a commanding growth rate of over 60 percent, whether in terms of revenue level, maybe the level or a metric that is consistent over more than two to three years. So these are both market fit companies, and these businesses typically have crossed the 10 million dollar revenue threshold. The largest company we are back in today has already 600 million dollar revenue. Within the year, the truth criteria is a company that must have over 30 percent of the invoice revenues outside the African continent. So in that segment, we are looking for companies that are moved beyond one country in Africa to two to five, and now that are operating in Asia, in Europe, or in the US, and are collecting hard currency, whether dollar, British bound, or another currency, because there's a lot of volatility, whether you're in Africa or in Latin America and Asia, currency volatility can be an issue. So for us, in terms of risk management, finding these businesses that operate across geography are very important, one of the examples of such companies is one that we all know called TikTok that basically comes from a geography called China, but as 10 percent of his business in the US, but 90 percent of the business is in many other countries. So that business in China, but it's a truly global business, and that's what we believe. The future ahead looks like for many companies coming from different geographies, but we've observed for 40 years where you've got the US giving birth to companies like Facebook, companies like Uber, you're going to start seeing such companies emanating from other geographies and going global for a simple reason that technology allows frontiers to disappear. So as we go into 2026, we're in mid-January now, like what's on the target? Like what's on the plan? So first, the year has started in a great, great manner. In fact, there's an article about us on Bloomberg today. So I invite you to go check it out. We've announced that we are in conversation with the NBA. We basically have been investing in basketball for the past five, six years in some African team in which we invest that basically compete with the basketball Africa league that belongs to the NBA, NBA as its official tournament in Africa called basketball Africa league. We've had a Cape Town team, an inception that team is able to become a semi-finalist in 2024. We also can be did in five now in a tournament run by the senior, the China basketball league. But also we have a combat, combat sport team in the Nigeria for African World Fighting Championship. And that platform has partnered with DeZone, which is the Netflix of Swords, as well as Stake, which is the online betting platform that backs the UFC. So this is the UFC of Africa. We also invest in that business. So for us, 2026 is a year where we want to do more in basketball with the NBA. We're bidding for the franchise that they want to establish on the African continent. They're doing two parallel efforts, one with the African continent and one with Europe. So we're not pursuing the Africa opportunity with the NBA and our sports platform on combat. We basically have crossed, we're getting close to a billion views across media platform. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah, basically people that fight, this fight in the African continent, specifically Nigeria. And it's propagated in the YouTube or DeZone. And our largest viewership out of Nigeria is in Brazil and the US of Asia. So imagine that, having a tournament on the continent, but the viewers are in a massive-- Wow. Yeah. And one of the things that we discover through that journey is that the largest, second largest viewership comes from Brazil. And a lot of people don't have Brazil to Africa, but Brazil has 100 million Black people. So it's actually in terms of population after Nigeria, Congo, Ethiopia, the next concentration of Black people is in Latin America and they love sports. Imagine how technology allows you to be a large market that you typically wouldn't be-- there wouldn't be a new perfume in other sectors because the continent people look at the 1.5 billion people on the ground. But fundamentally, there's a lot more of that market outside the continent, especially in terms of the diaspora, whether you look at Brazil and Latin America or the Caribbean. And just the diaspora that sits in your London and different parts. In fact, that market is really the core business. We are after all the businesses. We are typically backing, are really looking at this population, flows to 3,500 million people that making significantly higher disposable income than the average that you find across Africa. Because Africa as a whole is a big demographic, but people making over 10 dollars a day is just about 60 million people. So if you're looking at a strong purchasing power, it's the size of France or Italy. But if you want to look at it outside the continent, you're suddenly looking at the market larger than the US of it. So that's really what technology allows you to do is suddenly being backing businesses that are providing services to the diaspora in the US or providing sports or entertainment via the internet that is watched by the diaspora in Brazil. And also, for backing movies that are sold to Netflix, we're backing a business for forever seven that was started by an Indian lady, that second generation grew up in Nigeria and started producing movies and sold 42 movies, IPs, two Netflix. We made some good on the back of it, one of them famous one called Namaste Wahala and another one called Postcard. In each instance, the production, the movie has been in top 10 in over 50, 60 countries, including Dubai, including India, and you have a fundamental concept. It's a bit of a monopoly. She makes love stories between Indians and Nigerians, whether it's in TV series or in single movies, that's basically 300 million population falling in love with a segment of 1.3 billion. So that's a large group. So nobody's doing love stories between Black and brown people and she's covering that vertical. Oh man, what a story. Yeah, what a smart go ahead. Yeah, now she's getting ready to do a cartoon and we're also backing that idea and she did Namaste Wahala number one for five years Netflix sat out of it and now she's getting it back and we're getting ready to basically prepare to shoot and finance the sequel. So when you think about it, all these ideas have the common theme that you are backing an entrepreneur that resides on the African continent but fundamentally they've erected a product that is consumed by people across various parts of the blow up biggest and best company is a company called MOVE that is backed by Uber that has 10% of that business. When we backed that business five years ago, we had six to seven cars and today it has 40,000 cars in the system. So was there an American client? You can see real good items at the point and the client is having the beginning with only Uber but they've added since their bolts grab and most importantly, WAIMO which is Google, the biggest market cut company in the world after NVIDIA and Tesla. So that company has appointed them to roll out autonomous cars in Miami, Phoenix and London and probably other programs. So you can imagine this business has started in the Lagos Niger and then today is in 29 cities across five continents all on the back of technology. Hmm, I love it. You bring him, this is a great story. You got a lot going on. I'm loving this. Appreciate you making some time coming on the show today. How do people follow up? How do they follow the journey of the companies and silverbacks holdings just in general? How do people connect? So first and foremost, definitely Google silverbacks holdings, our website is silverback.soldings, but most importantly, we invest in media. So we have a podcast called In the Valley Podcast. I repeat, In the Valley Podcast, you'll find it on YouTube and every single streaming platform. We also own Qatar Airways. It's a podcast that we've started from the get go that we own 100% and you have most of the CEO of the business. We back people from other sports league coming to speak as guests. We had for not too long. We had the CEO of move. We had the CEO of NBA Africa and former NBA players coming as guests. You get a chance to know more of our silverbacks, but most importantly, you get a chance of seeing the Africa. They don't show you on TV because Africa has always been in business. Africa has always delivered. It's always been a success. It's not a potential. The talk of potential is just a fiction. Love it. I love it. This is a great story. One that I'm happy to bring to my audience and for everybody listening just so you know, we'll definitely put some links in the show notes so that you can connect and go and check out those podcasts too. You know, we love the podcasting community around here and want to support. So definitely go check it out and subscribe and speak into the audience and speaking of subscribing. If this is your first time with mission matters and you haven't done it yet, this is a daily show. Yes, you heard me right daily. Each and every day we're bringing you new content, new interviews and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button and Ibrahim really appreciate it. And I look forward to continuing to watch the the success of Silverback's holding. So thank you. Thanks Adam. Thanks for having me in the show from podcast with the podcast sir.