Nigeria’s Klasha and South Africa’s Akiba Digital have been accepted into Expert DOJO International Accelerator program, a Southern California-based accelerator that invests $100,000 into each of its startups and helps them get traction and scale faster than they could ever do by themselves.
Nigeria’s Klasha and South Africa’s Akiba Digital will join 11 other startups from across the globe in the international early-stage startup accelerator which has invested in over 100 startups with 41% of them female-founded/led companies.
“We are excited to welcome this year’s first cohort to our 3-month extensive accelerator program,” said Brian Mac Mahon, Founder and CEO of Expert DOJO. “The foundation of every great unicorn is explosive growth. We believe that all of our founders demonstrate this ability to scale and that our program will help them get there quicker.”
Klasha and Akiba Digital will join Expert Dojo’s Spring 2021 cohort for their International Accelerator program. Klasha is an online universal checkout that allows international retailers to accept online payments in African currencies and is expected to reach $4.5M in MRR by the end of 2021 while Akiba Digital is a financial data aggregation company that houses an agnostic data consolidation and enrichment engine that clusters, visualizes and predicts consumer behaviour. Akiba Digital established partnerships with IBM and TransUnion as well as a commercial contract with BNP Paribas.
Other startups in this cohort include:
- Czar-Power – Based in Boston, MA. A cleantech company that brings energy independence to every American by combining solar power inversion, electric vehicle fast charging and stationary storage connection in one customizable and patented system. Czar-Power has strong relationships with MIT, Eversource Energy, Tufts University, iSun Energy, Boston Solar, National Grid and the MassCEC.
- Adgero – Based in Hampshire, U.K. A cleantech company that makes retrofittable kinetic energy recovery systems for Class 7 and 8 trucks that can be upgraded to full electric systems when charging infrastructure allows. With Adgero, companies can start using up to 30% less fuel on the first day and with no investment in charging infrastructure.
- DataCalculus – Based in Tallinn, Estonia. A data analytic tech SaaS company that allows data experts to be 4x more productive and enables executives to develop AI-Driven strategies in one day. DataCalculus is expected to reach €100K in MRR by the end of 2021.
- Formaloo – Based in Tallinn, Estonia. A data analytic tech SaaS company that provides a full analytics report of customers & products to improve conversion rate. Formaloo has 12,000+ Clients, analyzed 1.7M+ Customer Data, 2000+ backend integrations in businesses.
- imMail – Based in Alberta, Canada. An AI SaaS real-time messaging and collaboration platform that offers chat, drive, task management and video conference in one single app. imMail has more than 1,000 companies registered and 12k active users.
- Xicama– Based in Venice, CA. A CPG company that offers innovative, sustainable and first-to-market jicama-based functional (prebiotic) health products. Xicama was the official beverage of Coachella in 2019.
- Tunedly – Based in St Louis, Missouri. A one-of-its-kind online music recording studio platform that allows fans to discover new artists and become partial owners of the next chart topper. Tunedly established partnership with Harvey Mason Jr. (CEO of Grammys), Mathew Knowles (Father of Beyonce) and Spirit Music Group (one of the world’s largest independent music publishers).
- SolidBlock– Based in Jerusalem, Israel. Real Estate tech company that offers a compliant global platform for the issuance and trade of digital securities backed by real estate & other assets. SolidBlock is expected to reach $700k in MRR by the end of 2021.
- ContentMap – Based in Göteborg, Sweden. A SaaS platform that finds, manages and shares files and information, across multiple storage places and apps, simultaneously. With ContentMap, information is found up to 350% faster and the number of mistakes is reduced by 90%.
- Instoried – Based in Bangalore, India. A martech company that uses AI to help large companies optimize their marketing and communications content-sentiment for better engagement and ROI. Instoried grew 4X during Covid-19 as well as received 3 acquisition offers and refused all.
- Moodbit – Based in New York, NY. A HR tech company that helps HR managers communicate and understand their teams in real-time as well as help employees improve their wellbeing and productivity without the need to fill out surveys. Moodbit is currently working with 200+ SMB and Fortune 500 companies such as NEC, NTT and Latam Airlines.
“After the success of these incredible startups in our current cohort, we plan to invest in 80 more globally diverse founders this year,” said Brian.
Klasha was started with a $120,000 investment from Techstars, an accelerator program, and Dubai-based Ginco Investments. it has also been part of Alibaba and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s (UNCTAD) eFounders initiative. Klasha is headquartered in Dubai and has offices in Lagos and a studio in Los Angeles.