Africa’s startup ecosystem is growing and booming day by day leading to massive competition to for users, seed or VC money and clients for the benefit of the local users.
We have identified a number of the fastest growing and probably the most promising startups but today we shall present only five of them as we get the rest of the list complete under various categories.
Ghaflakenya, Kenya
Kenya’s biggest, hottest entertainment news website with. Banned at one time on campuses, Ghafla is frequented by readers of all walsk of life. The startup founded by Samuel Majani currently gets over 720, 000 readers per month , 4,500,000 page views per month ,has over 32,000 Twitter followers and over 27,000 Facebook fans. It’s the most read entertainment site and ranked second after nation on Klout score of over 80%. The startup got funding from 88mph and says it’s already profitable.
Mimiboard, South Africa
Enables local content creation and unlocking access to content across Africa. The startup aims to help communities by making it easy for them to create and share content. Through the establishment of trusted brands (iportals) and virtual noticeboards (Mimiboard) Umuntu Media aim to improve access to information and facilitate user-generated content. It’s currently available in 16 African countries with a growth of 11 million visits this March, the startup aims to reach a billion visits in the next 2 years.Mimiboard is currently used by over 50 media firms on the continent and is working on full integrations of its iportals this June. After the completion all the iportals will run us virtual noticebaords or Mimiboards.
Njorku, Cameroon
Njorku.com is a job aggregator and search engine, just like CareerBuilder.com, but with an African focus. Basically, Njorku.com crawls several African careers and recruitment websites, retrieves job advertisements, and then provides a simple interface for job seekers to search through and filter jobs from all these websites. The speed and simplicity of Njorku along with its accessibility on web and mobile via www.njorku.com and njorku.com/mobile allows job seekers to search for jobs conveniently, wherever they are.
Founded by Churchill Mambe Nanje, a 25 year-old Cameroonian serial tech entrepreneur, Njorku is Africa’s Google for jobs and currently it’s available in over 8 countries with over 500k users.
SasaAfrica Kenya
Sasa Africa, one of DEMO Africa’s 2012 top five startups, is an e-commerce platform connecting offline artisans to buyers online using feature phones. The founders say they saw the need to promote locally manufactured African artifacts such as necklaces, bangles and other jewellery to buyers globally. With $50k in funding and a team around 20 SasaAfrica wants to be Etsy of Africa.
IROKO Partners Nigeria
IROKO Partners is the world’s largest distributor of Nollywood movies. Launched December 2010, the company has built a global audience of over 6 million unique users from 178 different countries.
Dubbed Africa’s Netflix, iROKO Partners task is brutally simple: buys the online licenses of movies and music directly from producers and recording artists and stream them online to a global Diaspora audience. In doing this, iROKO Partners has assembled the world’s largest online library of awesome African content and is Africa’s fastest growing internet company.
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