Investor Updates: March 18 2022 - New Google partnership to empower African entrepreneurs

New Google partnership to empower African entrepreneurs

Highlights

• The Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF) and Google announced an inaugural Google.org Fellowship to provide one million additional Africans with access to TEFConnect, as part of the Foundation’s mission to empower young African entrepreneurs from all 54 African countries.
• TEFConnect is already home to over one million African entrepreneurs and offers tailored tools, market partnerships, and access to coaches and investors to small businesses.
• Meanwhile, the partnership is the first Google.org Fellowship in Africa and will offer enormous opportunities for Africa’s digital community.

Source: Venture Burn

Our Takeaway

Google’s commitment in Africa has progressed from sponsoring projects to collaborative partnerships with established African organizations like the Tony Elumelu Foundation. This strongly reflects an increasing interest in Africa’s emerging economies from foreign investors. Last year, African entrepreneurs raised over $4 billion in funding, more than double the $1.5 billion raised in 2020.

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Rwanda’s legaltech Hence raises $1.8m seed 

Highlights

• Hence Technologies, a Kigali and London-based startup that uses data and AI to match companies with external legal service providers has raised $1.8million in seed funding.
• The startup, which was founded in 2020, uses data from various sources to match the internal legal teams of its client companies with external legal service providers.
• With participation from various institutions and angel investors, the latest round brings the total amount raised by the startup to $2.6 million so far and will allow it to scale its precision matching engine.

Source: TechCrunch

Our Takeaway

The ongoing tech revolution in Africa permeates all sectors, including the legal landscape. A number of startups, each with its own business model and target market, have in recent years emerged to disrupt many aspects of this largely traditional space. But the core idea remains the same: making legal services more easily and cost-effectively accessible to individuals and enterprises with the help of software.

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Senegalese logistics startup Chargel raises $750k pre-seed

Highlights

• Senegalese logistics startup Chargel has raised a $750,000 pre-seed funding round to help it make the trucking industry in Senegal and Francophone West Africa more efficient, reliable, and transparent.
• The round, a mix of equity and debt, saw the participation of Century Oak Capital and Logos Ventures, alongside prominent angel investors from Senegal, Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria.
• Co-founded by Moustapha and Alioune Ndoye, Chargel brings the offline operations of trucking online by matching shippers to the right transporters at the right price, as well as facilitating payments, fuel management, insurance, and other services. 

Source: Disrupt Africa

Our Takeaway

Tech-enabled logistics services are on the rise in Africa, with startups across the continent tackling bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the largely analog and fragmented sector. The budding sector is also part of a wave of Africa’s tech revolution that is attracting investors because of its clear paths to profitability. Togo’s Gozem and Nigeria’s SEND technologies were two tech-enabled African logistic firms that raised over $3 million last year.