Nic Haralambous, founder of Nicsocks and co-founder of Motribe has teamed up with Paul Cartmel, the Managing Director (owner) at New Media Labs to launch AfricanUp, a platform connecting startups, tech hubs and accelerators and investors.
AfricanUp will allow both start-ups and investors to tell their own stories, recommend their peers, and grow their profiles and reputations. The platform has four main categories namely Startups, Accelerators, Investors and Tech Hubs where conversations will be facilitated. Already, there are lots of reputable firms on the platform such as iHub, 88mph, 4Di Capital, Savannah Fund, Knife Capital among others.
“There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when launching a platform like AfricanUp. Our goal isn’t to build a revolutionary technology business. Our goal is to connect startups, founders, investors and accelerators from around the world,” says Haralambous in a blog post.
Build on New Media Lab’s Lenticular technology (lenticular.io), and Haralambous’ business-development, the portal will help investors find startups and startups find investors and vice-versa in a move to grow Africa’s technology eco-system.
“When Nic approached me with the idea, I instantly felt that the Lenticular platform New Media Labs has been refining would be perfect for the job. We decided to partner up and launch a minimum viable product to put Nic’s brainchild to the test. Powered by the reputational scoring and social features of Lenticular, AfricanUp has an incredible potential to be much more than a listing of startups, angel investors and hubs in Africa,” Cartmel says.
Haralambous and Cartmel say one of the major requests investors and accelerators around the world asked for was ‘the great startups’. They realised that there is a search problem in the technology startup space and wanted to create a platform to help startups and investors spend less time searching for each other, and more time building great things together.
AfricanUp is not the first such platform. With great resources for investors and entreprenurs, VC4Africa has been Africa’s Angelist for sometime and was late last year followed by IdeasAfrica. However, AfricanUp connects both startups, investors, accelerators and tech hubs rather than just listing startups and investors working in Africa.