Tech in Africa
One of the largest African tech startup cohorts drawn from the continent will participate in this year’s Y Combinator accelerator summer batch 2021.
The batch comprises 3 Nigerian startups, Lemonade Finance a cross-border payment platform for Africans both at home and abroad, Suplias a startup that leverages technology to deliver value to mom-and-pop stores, and Mecho Autotech a Lagos-based automotive startup connecting vehicle part owners with vetted mechanic spare part vendors through an app. South Africa is represented by the Financial wellbeing platform FloatPays.
Given the incredible run, North African startups have enjoyed this year, it is no surprise that 3 come from Egypt namely, ShipBlu a tech-enabled e-commerce delivery & fulfillment company, Pylon, an Infrastructure management software, and licensed online insurance brokerage startup Amenli. In addition, 2 Moroccan startups also qualified, namely, Saas logistics value chain platform Freterium and Chari a B2B e-commerce application.
Kenya was represented by Fringo Africa, a pan-African digital bank, Zambia by card-issuing API Union54, and Ghana’s healthtech Yemaachi Biotechnology.
Y Combinator is a world-leading startup accelerator based in San Francisco and is highly revered for its super-selective nature. Only 1% of startups that apply for the program are successful. The program has a list of successful alumni such as Airbnb, Sendbird, Twitch, Zapier, Stripe, Dropbox, Reddit, and several others.
In addition to an equity investment into the startups, innovators get to present their business pitches to an audience of over 1000 leading international venture capitalists. This is in addition to receiving US$125,000 in seed funding and having the perfect opportunity to build extensive networks.
Also read: 10 African startups participating at the Demo day for Y Combinator’s W21 batch
