Savannah Fund Announces its 4th Accelerator Class with Fintech, Bitcoins Startups

Now in its 3rd year, with investments in over 20 startups in 6 African countries, African-focused Savannah Fund has announced its 4th Accelerator class consisting of financial services/fintech, marketing and ecommerce, bitcoin and B2B startups.

Selected from over 150 applications from across Africa, the successful startups include Bitfinance, Djuaji, Forex and Podozi hail from Zimbabwe, Malawi, Kenya and Nigeria respectively and half the class has at least one woman co-founder.

Mbwana Alliy, Managing Patner Savannah Fund says each startup will get between $25-30,000 investment with graduation and demo day set for end of July 2015.

Kenya’s Forex.co.ke is working with three Kenyan banks to simplify forex trade for the retail segment  and aims to contract 25 banks by the end of August 2015, charging a fee of 0.1% per currency unit traded tot ake on the $2 Billon a month industry. Forex was founded by Amoroso Gombe, Ehtesham Mohammad, Verah Marosi, William Todd and Kenneth Kimani.

The second startup, in no particular order is Nigeria’s Podozi.com is a beauty technology and content-driven ecommerce startup that aims to be biggest beauty ecommerce platform out of Africa selling skincare, makeup, fragrance, bath and body, baby products and men’s products among others.  Founded by Wale Babatunde and Teniola Adejuwon, in January 2015, Podozi.com has listed inventory from over 45 leading international beauty brands such as Maybelline, IMAN, Black Opal, Tara, Neutrogena, Oriflame, Calvin Klein and a host of others.

Founded by Verengai Mabika and Tawanda Kembo, Zimbabwe’s BitFinance wants to help you and me to simply buy and/or sell Bitcoin in Africa and the startup’s flagship product, BitcoinFundi, is an online Bitcoin Exchange that allows people to buy and/or sell Bitcoin with mobile money and/or bank transfer and is optimised for remittances which is the biggest case for Bitcoin use in Africa.

Then last but not least is Malawian and Kenyan Djuaji which aims to facilitates scalable survey-based research to help businesses obtain data at low cost by paying respondents with mobile money. This is expected to help SMEs in Africa use data to take on global giants. Djuaji was founded by Hungai Amuhinda and  Wiza Jalakasi.

Savannah Fund portfolio include Ghana’s Ahonya.com, Eneza Education, Kola Studios, StudySearch, Tunde Kehinde’s ACE, BabyGroup, Buni, Inforex, Wyzetalk, CardPlanet among others.