Denis Opudo
Here is a look at the African tech startup for the year 2017. Aaron Fu, an MD of the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST), takes a look at how it has been to Africa as far as the technology world is concerned in 2017.
Aaron says that 2017 has been an encouraging year for the African tech startup ecosystem. There have been three main themes to look at, and that’s inspiration, rationalization, and internationalization. An example of rationalization is that MeQasa recently got Jumia house in Accra Ghana representing businesses like Jumia rationalizing resources to concentrate and double down on product lines which have the main alignment with their whole strategy.
Inspiration comes from the two main over $10 million rounds gotten from both the East, with Twiga Foods and the West with Flutterwave. The events won’t be as frequent as people will like them to be, to justify that, there is capital willing to be laid to support high growth founders on the continent and should inspire more founders to work towards building the foundation for potentially explosive businesses.
Lastly concerning internationalization, 2017 saw the launch of yet another global program in Africa, StartupBootcamp in Cape Town, it also saw Alibaba announcing its backing of a Nigerian e-Commerce start-up, outbound we’ve also seen the first ever African participant delivering a strong showing at Asia’s largest FinTech program (Global Fintech Hackcelerator in Singapore).
MEST’s incubators are the rails enabling start-ups, part of the MEST family to scale their products and teams rapidly across key markets in Africa. Meltwater currently has more than 30 portfolio companies and more than 350 alumni across Africa, Meltwater ‘s incubators will be a nexus for them to come together and work with other partners, start-ups and investors that are part of our community to continue building the next. Meltwater successfully launched Lagos and Cape Town in 2017 and are actively exploring Nairobi and Abidjan. The company has invested above $20 million into Meltwater since the launch.
It is easier now than it ever was for African start-ups to succeed, whether that’s due to the increasing interconnectivity of various markets, the increasing amount of capital seen seeking to back African start-ups and also the incredibly strong talent rising locally, as well as from across the world to lead and join start-up teams.
