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Bitcoin Foundation director Llew Claasen is among Top African VC’s & entrepreneurs set to speak at DEMO Africa 2016 raising speculations he might champion for the adoption of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on the continent.
The Bitcoin Foundation is the oldest and largest industry group focused on Bitcoin and has a variety of corporate members, individuals and international chapters. The primary focus areas of the Bitcoin Foundation are on increasing adoption, fostering more Bitcoin development such as through the DevCore event series and encouraging global decision makers to seek technical over regulatory solutions for Bitcoin related matters.
Apart from that, Claasen, together with VC Vinny Lingham founded Newtown Partners, a venture capital firm based in Cape Town, South Africa with a focus on making early stage investments in pure internet and mobile technology as well as e-commerce startups in South Africa.
Other top African investors and entrepreneurs set to take centre stage at the DEMO Africa 2016 include Arthur Goldstuck, a journalist & researcher. Goldstuck heads the World Wide Worx research organisation, leading groundbreaking market research into how change is affecting business and society, and presents his findings and insights to audiences across the globe.
Another key mind is Lexi Novitske, a Principal Investment Officer at Africa Singularity Investments. Lexi worked for Verod Capital Management, a Nigeria-based private equity firm. Prior to joining Verod, she had spent her career developing an expertise in financial services through her time at New York-based Sandler O’Neill Asset Management.
Now in its fifth year DEMO Africa is one of the flagship initiatives of [email protected] and aims to connect African startups to the global ecosystem. DEMO Africa is the place where the most innovative companies from African countries get a platform to launch their products and announce to Africa and the world what they have developed.
The initiative has hosted 150 startups in the past four years raising more than US$14million in both investment and business value. We have seen series impact in the last 4 years, one of the startups launched in 2014 has since gone to raise more than US$2 million and employed more than 150 people.
This year’s event will feature a special area called the “DealZone” where investors and entrepreneurs can have investment discussions.
DEMO Africa 2016 saw over 700 technology startups from 27 African countries apply to launch at the event. They were then narrowed down to 30 start-ups with South Africa having the highest representation of up to 11 startups followed by Nigeria 6, Kenya 5 and Ghana 3. For the first time Morocco will have a representative in the continental faire. Other countries include Egypt, Tanzania, Uganda, and Rwanda.
Eric Osiakwan, a Managing Partner at Chanzo Capital will also speak. Osiakwan is a Tech Entrepreneur and Angel investor with 15 years of ICT industry leadership across Africa and the world. He has worked in 32 African countries setting up ISPs, ISPAs, IXPs and high-tech startups.
