Startups
In nearly a decade, hundreds of entrepreneurs have emerged with innovative startups across the African continent. We provide insights on their experiences and highlight the activities of investors who fund them.
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Below is an extract from a Q&A thread on Quora, highlighting the original question and the most upvoted answer. By Navid Zlofaghari on Quora: 1. Your team is everything. 2. Solve a problem you are passionate about. 3. Never outsource your core competency. 4. Be c̶h̶e̶a̶p̶ lean but don’t be afraid to spend. 5. Chase the vision, not the money.…
Editor’s note: This article was published in 2015 and was relevant to its time. Over the course of the last 5 years, we have seen the rise of many technology powered companies trying to address Nigerian problems with their unique solutions. While many have failed in this quest, a good number have diversified or pivoted…
This article is over 4 years old Unofficially known as the ‘Kenyan tech headquarters’, the Innovation hub — abbreviated as iHub — has been in existence for more than 5 years now. This title is well befitting as it hosts more than 120 events in a year, was the first tech hub to be founded…
Former Director General of Nigeria’s Security and Exchange Commission, Arunma Oteh has joined the league of Nigerians that invest in Nigerian tech startups, even as some seed funding accelerators are exiting the space. Oteh, in an interview with Forbes Africa in Johannesburg, opened up about her angel investing in companies owned by young people who are making…
About a month ago, we informed you about the SME Empowerment Innovation Challenge, which promises at total of $70k in seed investment for the 1st to 3rd place winners. With a focus on East and West Africa, the SME Empowerment Innovation Challenge is anchored by the HiiL Innovating Justice Hub. They are doing this in partnership with the Global Agenda Council on…
Hotel reservation startup, Hotels.ng, has secured an investment of $1.2 million from international investors EchoVC and Omidyar Network. This is the startup’s first investment funding round, following a 2013 seed investment of $225,000 from Jason Njoku’s Spark.ng. Started in 2012, Hotels.ng now covers over 7,000 hotels across 21 regions in Nigeria, with over a million hotel searches on the platform to date. “We’re…
The founders of Ratio, the duo of Olanrewaju Jawando and Bowale Joseph, over the week shared their aspirations and take on the approach that the one-month old company is taking improve the currency exchange industry in the country. Launched on April 28, 2015, Ratio is definitely the youngest startup on our weekly series. However, despite being…
In case you probably have had a terrible experience in the past trying to use one of the numerous online classifieds marketplace as a buyer, such experience might be a thing of the past with Efritin.com. Over the week I tried selling my Smile MiFi and I got a call, not from a buyer but…
Popular eCommerce website, Konga.com will be down for 5 days from the 28th of May to 1st of June, 2015 and it won’t be due to server downtime. As it turns out, Konga has a Big App Sales promotion in the works in a bid to aggressively promote its mobile app. According to our source,…
If you get a “yes” on most of these, your startup idea probably isn’t as great as you think it is
Over the week, I had the opportunity to chat with the duo of Dapo Ademosu and Taiwo Banasko, founders of CityRun. They shared their experience as one of the youngest players in the logistics industry in Nigeria, the challenges and future aspirations. In the beginning “eCommerce seems to be what’s going on in Nigeria now,…
Applications are now open for the African Entrepreneurship Award (AEA), the competition sponsored by The Moroccan Commercial bank BMCE Bank, reports Disrupt Africa. We seek all Africans, around the world, who want to create jobs and improve lives in Africa. Is it hard? Yes! Do we believe this is the best way forward for Africa? Yes! BMCE…
In what is reported by Disrupt Africa to be the largest acquisition of a tech startup in Kenya so far, Financial Technology startup, Weza Tele was acquired by financial services giant, AFB for $1.7 million. Weza Tele is an international company that provides multiple value-added solutions across commerce, supply chain, distribution and mobile payment integration;…
Yesterday at CcHUB we had our community day, it’s a day for sharing ideas with each other and learning some necessary lessons about our tech landscape. While the entire lesson for the day was great and all, there was a particular sub-topic that struck a chord with me, and it was about ‘selling your idea.’…
So I’m just going to go ahead and say what everyone is thinking: Rocket Internet is in absolutely everything these days. Along with its ability to give companies quirky, yet appropriate names, Rocket Internet has perfect the art of launching clone companies. Rocket Internet has just unveiled Vendito (Latin for Hawk or Sell), an online…
Yoruba101, the Yoruba teaching app, released by Genii Games’ Asa brand of African culture is targeted at kids in order to promote the African culture among them through mobile technology.But, and I’m looking at all of you English-speaking 21 and 22 year olds, that cannot speak Yoruba, everyone should get in touch with their culture.…
Here are 4 projects by the African Dev Community that really got us talking and we believe you will find interesting: Cruncher At the top of the list is Cruncher, an app made with Ruby on Rails and Angular to “make sense”/ analyse your GTB transaction statement. Maybe you can find out what you’ve been…
“When you are small, don’t rely on your strength, rely on your creativity.” This week, we will be taking a trip into the world of Faaji Hub, checking out how the event vendors’ listing platform is looking to take over the world. There exists a need for party planners who want to have access to a wide…
As Megan E. Holstein put it, if you can’t explain your solution’s comparative advantage in a short period and clearly, you’re already at a disadvantage. So the question is ‘how best can you give a one-sentence pitch?’ As a follower of Techpoint, you probably would know about the Startup of the Week series, a weekly…
The Co-creation Hub (CcHUB) announced on Monday that three (3) new ventures have been admitted into its Incubation program. The startups will each receive seed funding ($15,000 – $25,000), mentoring, business development support and office space critical to their quest to find repeatable business models that can rapidly grow their business. Grit Systems is an…