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  • Tech - News - Startups
  • Updated: March 23, 2021

Meet The Nigerian Startups Pitching At Y Combinator’s W21 Batch Demo Day

Meet The Nigerian Startups Pitching At Y Combinator’s W21

It can only keep getting better for technology-based businesses in Nigeria as five Nigerian startups have been confirmed to be among the ten African Y Combinator Winter ‘21 batch's participants pitching at today's demo day.

Y Combinator is an American seed money startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch over 2,000 companies, including Stripe, Airbnb, Paystack, DoorDash, Coinbase, Flutterwave, Dropbox, Twitch, and Reddit.

READ ALSO: Five Nigerian Fintech Startups That Could Become The Next Paystack

This year's batch is having selected startups receive US$125,000 in seed funding as well as further investment opportunities at a demo day.

Here are the five Nigerian startups that will be pitching at Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 batch demo day:

1. Mono

mono founders

Founded in August 2020 by Prakhar Singh and ex-Paystack employee Abdul Hassan , Mono helps digital businesses in Africa access their customers’ financial and identity data.

Mono is a fintech and data startup that has created and launched an all-in-one financial platform that will allow businesses and companies to access customers’ financial accounts, initiate bank payments and collect bank statements at the user’s discretion. Its main goal for the startup is to lower the barrier for underbanked and unbanked individuals and provide large-scale access to financial tools. Mono is a startup considered both in open-banking and open-finance.

“Mono is the API for financial accounts. Our API enables businesses and developers to build applications that connect with their users’ financial accounts in a manner that is many more times reliable, predictable, performant, and fair than anything else available,” Abdul Hassan, founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Mono said about the company last year.

The startup raised US$500,000 in December last year in pre-seed funding from Ventures platform, Rally Cap Ventures, Ingressive Capital, and a handful of angel investors and VCs, with Hassan saying the money was raised to build out the team.

READ ALSO: Nigerian Startup Termii Raises $1.4m Seed Funding Round

2. Vendease

vendease

Founded by Tunde KaraOlumide FayankinGatumi Aliyu, and Wale Oyepeju, this startup is solving the procurement problem of many hotels and restaurants today by giving them a platform to buy directly from food manufacturers and farms.

CEO Tunde Kara described the company as "Amazon Prime" for African restaurants while explaining that the company was set up after its founders noticed that a lot of their favourite restaurants had been shut down because of the difficulty they had in procurement.

These innovators are not newbies in the entrepreneurial space, as Vendease is not their first startup. Their previous attempt was an adtech startup for ride-hailing companies, which didn’t survive for long.

On Vendease, customers can order anything ranging from bread to grains and meat to vegetables on the website. The order notification goes to the farms or food manufacturers, gets processed, and delivery is done within 24 hours.

READ ALSO: Kuda Bank Raises Fresh $25million To Facilitate Digital Payments In Africa

3. Sendbox

Sendbox is a Lagos-based startup founded in 2016 by Emotu Balogun and Olusegun Afolahan. While running their previous business, fashion-focused online marketplace Traclist, Segun and Emotu experienced the trials of building e-commerce startups in Africa.

This startup provides a platform for shipping, escrow payments, and discovery services to merchants and customers who carry out e-commerce transactions using social channels like Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp.

Initially, Afolahan and Balogun self-funded Sendbox, as they wanted to ensure they had a business that would solve a vital problem in the ecosystem. In March 2019, it secured its first external funding, from early-stage VC firm Microtraction, which Afolahan said was needed to help it improve on its existing products and launch a handful more.

READ ALSO: Stellar Development Foundation Invests $750k In Nigeria's Cowrie

4. Prospa

prospaBuilt on the need to help African entrepreneurs grow their businesses, Prospa was founded in September 2019 by Frederick Obasi, Rodney Jackson-Cole, and Chioma Ugo.

This promising startup is solving the business management and growth challenge in Africa by providing banking and financial services intended to help small business owners in opening and operating a business account. The company provides an account number in the company name, facilitates sending and receiving transfers, invoice creation, and opening of sub-accounts, enabling SMBs to solve various financial difficulties and increase productivity.

“To put it in European terms, we provide the platform, not the bank,” said co-founder and CEO, Frederik Obasi about the startup last year.

While the startup currently secured partnerships with Providus and ReadyCash to loop in third-party banking, it operated in stealth since its initial launch, onboarding members only.

5. Flux 

fluxInspired by their own painful experience, Ben Eluan and Osezele Orukpe — two undergraduate software engineers at the time, took it upon themselves to solve a remittance problem by building the payment startup Flux.

Developed by Nigerian fintech startup, Blueloop, the Flux app seeks to ease global remittances for Nigerians to receive money at affordable rates through cryptocurrency. That’s not all, the app also facilitates local money transfers.

In 2019, Eluan and Orukpe were dazed by the difficulty they encountered when they wanted to get paid for a project they executed for a client in the U.K. It took a week for the friends to get their money, and they lost a considerable chunk of it to charges.

This made the duo build a crypto-based remittance platform to override the difficulty of payments to and from Africans to other parts of the world.

Unlike traditional international money transfer operators (IMTOs) which are more expensive and take longer processing times, crypto-based remittance platforms are now the go-to for many Nigerians due to lower charges and faster completion rates.

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