Kowoka opened applications for his second team Kowoka Ventures, is designed to build startups from the ground up with visionary startup founders in Africa.
In Africa, 75% of venture-backed businesses fail to provide returns to investors. In our experience, this high failure rate can be traced to limited pre-investment validation (such as the absence of idea, customer and business model validations), insufficient access to growth opportunities and a lack of comprehensive support beyond capital injection.
Kowoka’s approach to dealing with the issue
Kowoka has developed a different approach to address this issue:
- Work with founders to identify ideas that focus on the problem.
- Work with customers to validate these ideas through experiments.
- Start a business with a validated business model.
Rethinking the “Winning Bids” approach.
Venture capitalists (VCs) and accelerators typically look for “win deals” by considering factors such as team, market, and social proof (which includes talking to friends and peers). This is not a bad approach in itself. However, the 75% failure rate over the past two decades has revealed the limitations of this model.
Kowoka evolves this model with:
- Working with founders to identify problems that customers really care about.
- Running validation experiments.
- Helping our founders build companies out of these experiments.
- Making small check investments in these startups.
- Providing comprehensive support from business inception to exit, effectively minimizing failure rate.
Resources provided
Kowoka offers a variety of resources including:
- Advice and Guidance: Offering guidance and mentorship to emerging entrepreneurs.
- Fundraising support: Providing introductions to potential investors and offering initials
funding to refine or create minimum viable products (MVPs). - Operational Support: Extending support to services and product credits to start-ups,
facilitating introductions to partners and strategic clients and assisting in specific
aspects of business development. For example, helping to build the sales department of a
get started. - SaaS credits.
Starting criteria
Our criteria for startups that Kowaka works with include:
- Stage: Preferable at pre-sowing stage.
- Business: Technology enabled.
- Sectors: Sector agnostic, but with a preference for agriculture, fintech (excl
paytech), real estate and climate smart businesses. - Investment Status: Accepting startups that have raised $0 to $50k.
- Founding Team: Welcoming solo founders.
- Geography: Mainly works on Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Morocco, Egypt, Ivory Coast and Senegal.
To apply for the next Kowoka Ventures team, visit http://www.kowoka.com/venture-building.
The application deadline is November 30, 2023.
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