Kowoka has opened up applications for the second cohort of Kowoka Ventures, 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 Addressing the Issue
Kowoka has developed a different approach to tackle this issue:
- Collaborate with founders to identify problem-focused ideas.
- Engage with customers to validate these ideas through experiments.
- Launch a business with a validated business model.
Rethinking the “Winning Deals” Approach
Venture capitalists (VCs) and accelerators typically seek “winning deals” by considering factors like the team, the market, and social proof (which involves talking to friends and peers). This isn’t a bad approach per se. However, the 75% failure rate over the past two decades has exposed the limitations of this model.
Kowoka is evolving this model by:
- Working with founders to identify problems that customers genuinely care about.
- Running validation experiments.
- Assisting our founders in creating companies out of these experiments.
- Making small check investments in these startups.
- Providing comprehensive support from the business’s inception to its exit, effectively minimizing the failure rate.
Resources Provided
Kowoka offers various resources, including:
- Advice and Mentorship: Offering guidance and mentorship to emerging entrepreneurs.
- Fundraising Support: Providing introductions to potential investors and offering initial
funding to help perfect or build the Minimum Viable Products (MVPs). - Operational Support: Extending support in service and product credits to startups,
facilitating introductions to partners and strategic clients, and assisting in specific
aspects of business development. For instance, helping set up the sales department of a
startup. - SaaS credits.
Startup Criteria
Our criteria for startups that Kowaka works with include:
- Stage: Preferred at the pre-seed stage.
- Business: Tech-enabled.
- Sectors: Sector-agnostic, but with a preference for agriculture, fintech (excluding
paytech), real estate, and climate-smart ventures. - Investment Status: Accepting startups that have raised $0 to $50k.
- Founding Team: Welcoming solo founders.
- Geography: Operating primarily in Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Morocco, Egypt, Ivory Coast, and Senegal.
To apply for the next cohort of Kowoka Ventures, visit http://www.kowoka.com/venture-building.
The application deadline is 30th November 2023.
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