YCombinator, the American startup accelerator known for investing in early-stage startups has confirmed an additional eight African participants to its W22 batch, scheduled to hold its demo presentations next week. Seven of them are Nigerians, and one is Sudanese.
This underscores the expanding tech ecosystem in Lagos that has produced giants, including Flutterwave and PayStack, the latter now owned by Stripe, the American payments platform. Both PayStack and Flutterwave are alumni of the YCombinator program.
This brings the total number of African participants in this batch to 23, out of 350 in all. While 23 is a better number compared to S21 with only 15 African participants, they both show the significant work Africans have put in place to compete in the international market, typically with more regulations.
For instance, cryptocurrency has been banned in Nigeria, and the CBN regularly rolls out regulations that upend projects by tech founders seeking to provide solutions.
YC had earlier announced that it was going to be increasing the funds that it pumps into the participants from $125,000 to $500,000.
Meet the new eight participants below:
Payourse
Founders: Hakeem Adeyemi Orewole, Bashir Aminu and John Anisere
Location: Lagos, Nigeria
A startup that “builds the tools and infrastructure that make it easier, faster and cheaper for anyone in Africa easy, fast and cheap access to crypto and web3.”
Simplifyd
Founders: Tomi Amao and Sam Keiru
Location: Lagos, Nigeria
Simplifyd “enables businesses deliver their internet apps (websites/mobile apps) data-free, similar to toll-free telephone lines.”
Sendme
Founder: Daniel Afolayan
Location: Ibadan, Nigeria
“An on-demand provider of clean meat to individuals and food businesses. We built a chatbot that lets customers place orders for meat on WhatsApp and they get it within 3 hours.”
Vendy
Founders: Kayode Disu and Peter Ekunkoya
Location: Lagos, Nigeria
“Provides an alternative payment infrastructure without the need for a payment card or consumer app that enables customers pay businesses on their phones without internet access.”
Convoy
Founders: Emmanuel Aina and Subomi Oluwalana
Location: Lagos, Nigeria
“An open-source cloud-native webhook service, with out-of-the-box security, reliability, and scalability for your webhooks infrastructure.”
Curacel
Founders: John Flash Dada and Henry Mascot
Location: Lagos, Nigeria
“Making it easy and pleasant to get and use insurance in emerging markets. We are building the rails to make insurance work for the next billion Africans.”
Plumter
Founders: Yinka Elujoba and Eni Joshua
Location: Lagos, Nigeria
“Providing payment rails and APIs to help African merchants and consumers easily move money in and out of Africa.”
Bloom
Founders: Abdigani Diriye, Ahmed Ismail, Khalid Keenan and Youcef Oudjidane
Location: Khartoum, Sudan
“Stable savings for East Africa.”
