Africa-focused seed investment firm, Savannah Fund has announced its second batch of startups. The fund gave the four startups from Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda and Kenya $25,000 each to develop their business.
The four startups were selected from over 80 applicants who applied to the fund after a ‘month long competitive process.’
According to Mbana Alliy, Savannah Fund Partner in a blog post, “We are excited to announce our next cohort of startups for the Savannah Fund accelerator. 4 startups began working from the mLab office space within the ihub this week. The startup founders hail from 4 countries inc. Kenya, Uganda and Ghana and Nigeria.”
The startups include Kenya’s Cardplanet solution, a payment card solutions firm for students and schools, Uganda’s Inforex,a foreign exchange network to allow users check and trade currencies amongst each other in Africa, Kenya’s Zatiti.com, :an SME e-commerce platform and applications builder and Nigeria’s and Ghana’s Zished, a loyalty and gifting ecommerce platform for users in the diaspora and locally.
Alliy added that the 80 applicants were less compared to their first batch though they were refined than their first. “Whilst we received less applications this batch than the last (180), the quality was higher- 22% of the applicants reported to have generated revenue compared to 15% from the last application pool. 72% of startups had a prototype vs 62% in the previous class.”
The 4 startups had their 1st accelerator session with Silicon Valley’s Joyce Kim, co-founder of simplehoney, a mobile commerce startup and a mentor at 500 Startups and Jed McCaleb, the original developer of leading Bitcoin exchange, MtGox, founder of OpenCoin and Andreesen- Horowitz backed Ripple. The mentors took them through aspects of building a company from financing to monetization.
