Y Combinator hasn’t looked back since its first investment in Nigerian startup Flutterwave in 2016. It now has 30 Nigerian technology businesses in its portfolio.
The startup accelerator runs two types of funding projects each year, known as the summer (S) and winter (W) batches, and some recipients have included Nigerian-owned firms such as 54Gene, Mono, Paystack, Flutterwave, and Helium Health.
Y Combinator, a well-known startup accelerator, was founded in March 2005 and selects innovative businesses to participate in its program twice a year. Seed investment is the accelerator’s first round of venture capital, used to cover the costs of getting a company off the ground.
While some businesses only require seed investment, others require multiple rounds of funding. For this, ten firms that received money from Y Combinator are being recognized in terms of their expansion and acquisitions.
Nigeria is home to 50 of the 60 African digital startups that have received funding from Y Combinator. Fintechs account for half of the 30 companies, with healthtech accounting for 16.6%, agritech for 10%, crypto, logistics, and autotech accounting for 6.6 percent apiece, and edutech accounting for 3.3 percent.
In this post, we examined how four firms have progressed following receiving funding from Y Combinator.
The first company on our list is Helium Health (healthtech). Helium Health develops technology for healthcare providers, payers, and patients in Africa, including the first electronic medical records (EMR) and hospital management information systems (HMIS) for emerging countries.
The company was founded in 2016 by Adegoke Olubisi as ‘One medical,’ and was accepted into Y Combinator as part of the S17 funding batch. In May 2017, the company rebranded to Helium Health, and a two million seed round was closed the same year.
Helium Health introduced its EMR solution in Nigeria in 2018, and it was quickly adopted by both commercial and public facilities, leading to the acquisition of EMR providers MedicPlus and SmartDoctor.
On November 10, 2021, the firm bought Meddy after raising $12.2 million in five rounds of funding.
Flutterwave is the following one (fintech). Flutterwave is a payment service that allows businesses to send and receive payments from anywhere in Africa. It was a part of the S16 investment round months after it started operations.
Flutterwave was started in 2016 by Olugbenga Agboola and Iyinioluwa Aboyeji and has since risen to become one of the world’s fastest-growing payment firms. Flutterwave has processed around $2 billion in payments and 25 million transactions since its debut in over 33 African countries.
During the Apps Africa Innovation Awards in 2017, Flutterwave was crowned Africa’s finest finance firm. Their most recent fundraising, $170 million, came from a Series C round in March 2021, which helped the company become a Unicorn.
Flutterwave purchased Disha in November and December of that year, and the business also invested $2.4 million in CINETPAY in a seed round.
Flutterwave Store, an online marketplace for merchants, Flutterwave Grow, which assists users in registering and incorporating their businesses in the United States and the United Kingdom, and Flutterwave Mobile, an app that allows medium and small medium enterprises to use their phones as point-of-sale (POS) machines, are among the new products.
To round off the year 2021, the firm launched Send, a product that aims to expand payment services to a worldwide level through a partnership with prominent Nigerian musician Wizkid. Wizkid’s fan base will aid Flutterwave’s goal of raising global awareness of the low-cost remittance service.
Another business that has benefited from Y Combinator is Kobo360 (logistics). Kobo is a technology business that helps SMEs overcome hurdles to their ability to scale. By connecting asset owners in the logistics business with SMEs who use their services, these solutions drive efficiency and growth in the industry.
Kobo is ready to join the agro-trading area by building a platform that connects farmers with buyers all around the world, following its participation in the S18 investment round. Smallholder farmers will benefit from the marketplace since it will eliminate the high expense of middlemen and improve their income.
Ife Oyedele and Obi Ozor co-founded the company in 2016, and it claims to have over 10,000 drivers and trucks using its app, as well as clients such as Honeywell, Olam, Unilever, and Dangote.
Because Y Combinator recognizes the importance of agriculture in a country, it aided Releaf (agritech). Releaf is a company that creates cutting-edge industrial processing technology for African crops. This is a pre-processing technique that allows farmers to improve the quality and quantity of raw materials supplied to African food processors.
Domestic demand is targeted in areas where the company can create pre-processing technology to improve the amount of addressable, high-quality raw material that can be purchased directly from farmers.
The startup palm nut processing technology, founded in 2017 by Uzoma Ayogu and Ikenna Nzewi, has garnered prominence with unique financing capabilities to alter the continent’s decentralized food production industry.
In September 2021, it received a $4.2 million seed round to address distance and logistics issues between farmers and consumers, bringing its total funding to $5.7 million.
Y Combinator has helped a number of startups, including the ones listed above. However, for the time being, we limit our information to them.
Source: Nyscinfo