Using tech to solve Africa’s business and growth challenges
A technologist at heart, Nzwisisa Chidembo specialises in using technology to solve business problems. Nzwi’s belief in the power of transformative tech goes beyond the qualitative, enabled by two ICT degrees, a litany of licences and certifications, and over 15 years of experience within the tech industry.
Beyond Nzwi complementing the archetype of the tech-savvy African entrepreneur who moves the continent toward an era of rapid growth through tech, his stellar career has also been focused on meeting consumer needs, including his most recent role as Head of Engineering at Founders Factory Africa.
As his career has progressed, Nzwi has become increasingly convinced that the growth potential of African startups can drive economic vitality across the continent, with the power of digital assets and telecommunications vital in catalysing this growth. Over time, his technical expertise has been augmented through his varied working experiences, ranging from IT administrator, business analyst, and product manager to researcher and founder. He is also an internationally published author and speaker on payment systems, fintech, and digital assets.
“On the African continent, the mobile phone was introduced late compared to other markets. However, the solutions that were developed leveraging mobile technology, such as mobile payments, evolved at such a rate that we were able to overtake developed economies and create new payment methods that were incredibly powerful,” he says.
“For me, that was an indication that Africa can do it. This has been my perception throughout — if we see a new developing technology in the world that can revolutionise how we live, there is great potential that Africa can do it better than anyone else.”
A belief in tech forged at an early age
Nzwi has been interested in the power of tech from a very early age, first seeing the catalysing effect of tech on business by watching his father contribute to the Econet Wireless team that greatly expanded Africa’s telecommunications capacity in the 1990s. These seed experiences would echo in Nzwi’s own career, where he has spent significant time working with entrepreneurs and leveraging technology to grow businesses in several industries.
As both a founder and facilitator of African tech startups, Nzwi aligns strongly with the Founders Factory Africa proposition. This proposition is that the difference between Africa’s would-be founders pursuing an idea, or filing it away for “future reference”, is receiving the expert support they need to move their startups from ideation to reality.
His first tech startup combined mobile payments and e-commerce platforms — at a time when both were still nascent in southern Africa — to market digital devices online, transcending national borders and brick-and-mortar business models. Moreover, Nzwi’s quest for more efficient payment rails for the continent led him to invest in cryptocurrencies and experiment with crypto mining, complemented by his ongoing efforts to educate others on digital assets.
These early forays and experiences within the tech ecosystem led Nzwi to form relationships with other ecosystem players, such as Bongani Sithole, where they compared notes on building scalable African businesses and how to respond to challenges facing its entrepreneurs. When Bongani was tapped for the Founders Factory Africa founding team in 2018, he reached out to Nzwi to lead the engineering function and put their years of conversation into action.
🚀 Nzwi and his journey with Founders Factory Africa
During his tenure at Founders Factory Africa, Nzwi has learned much about the startup process and how best to support founders through it. He credits the depth and breadth of his experience to Founders Factory Africa’s team structure and the open collaboration between teams, a key distinguishing factor for Nzwi from other work environments.
“The teams here [at Founders Factory Africa] are not the traditional teams you’d find in most corporates, where engineers work with only engineers all day. Rather than working within a siloed function, I’ve benefited from exposure to the full range of functions — interacting with everyone from product specialists to creatives, partnerships specialists, and investment managers for a 360-degree view of what it takes to build a fast-scaling startup.”
Nzwi also had a front-row view of the relational dynamics between the Founders Factory Africa team and its portfolio of startups. Eschewing standardised programs and restrictive curriculum- or cohort-based approaches, Founders Factory Africa tailors interactions toward identifying and overcoming venture-specific challenges, focusing on rapid learning and market-centric solutions.
“From the moment I joined, the message we’ve been driving is bespoke support. Because not all founders are the same and not at the same point in their growth phases, a collaborative approach is needed — with lots of sharing, insight identification, and reading, and ensuring alignment to zoom in on what is important for each founder to reach their next milestone. Founders also benefit from the experience and empathy of a team with so much collective entrepreneurial experience to guide them through their decisions, opportunities, and challenges.”
Founders Factory Africa is supported by institutional investment from Standard Bank, Netcare, and the Small Foundation. It is staffed by a global team of nearly 40 people that is, so far, based in Johannesburg (headquarters), Lagos, London, Cape Town, Nairobi, and Accra. In addition to initial funding and workspace, Founders Factory Africa provides its portfolio companies access to a hands-on, multidisciplinary operations team. This team includes sector experts, product designers, software engineers, growth specialists, and support for functions like talent, PR and communications, legal, fundraising, and business development.
Nzwi worked across Founder Factory Africa’s Build and Scale Programs, where he leveraged his skills to help founders avoid common errors such as not speaking enough to their target audience. From his perspective, the Build Program provides significant opportunities to deeply understand the problems businesses are trying to solve, walk the journey of identifying talent and bringing in co-founders, carry out initial experiments and select the most effective tools for a particular startup phase to enable growth. The Scale Program exposed Nzwi to the learnings and challenges businesses face when approaching Series A, such as building in a vacuum and then expecting the user to come after the fact.
The frontline experience Nzwi has gathered over the course of his career and at Founders Factory Africa has led him to recently this knowledge to a startup of his own.
“Over the last three years, I have learned how to build and how not to build — seeing mistakes made at great velocity and observing how people respond to challenges,” he says.
With the global digital asset marketplace growing from just a few crypto coins to more than 15,000 assets by 2021, and after fielding a near-constant barrage of requests for investment suggestions, Nzwi began running experiments on a platform that can evaluate opportunities in this market. Viewing 2021 as an inflection point for the global digital asset industry, the Founders Factory Africa leadership team approached Nzwi to consider building a startup around his working model. This approach began Nzwi’s journey to investment committee approval and the birth of RiskBloq. RiskBloq is a retail investor’s guide to digital assets such as cryptocurrency stablecoins and non-fungible tokens.
RiskBloq seeks to amplify investors’ ability to evaluate assets using ‘on-chain’ and ‘off-chain’ data to create risk profiles and provide additional market insights. Investors can track specific assets’ market performance, assess the risk profile of their portfolios, and buy or sell via the platform, which is currently at the proof-of-concept stage with a limited user base.
Nzwi’s primary concern at this stage is to validate that he genuinely has a viable solution that solves a real user need — something that the Founders Factory Africa Build Program addresses directly with its emphasis on experimentation, iteration, and delivering a solution to market as quickly as possible. RiskBloq entered the Build Program in July 2022 to refine the concept and build the product over the next six months in preparation for the external investment stage.
🏗 From lead role to investor
Nzwi is joining a recent wave of African founders making digital commerce and investment more accessible across the continent. What’s unique about Nzwi’s story is how he’s gone about it — leaving his role as a startup enabler to build one of his own and entrusting his new venture to the support of his former colleagues. When he announced his departure from the core team in June 2022, few people outside Founders Factory Africa knew his next role would see him back in the same building as a recipient of the services he had provided since 2018.
Through an initial investment of $250,000 into the venture, Founders Factory Africa will provide RiskBloq with technical resources, including product, engineering, and legal functions, all critical given the complexity of the sector it operates in. For Nzwi, knowing he has access to this support significantly de-risks his decision to transition from a senior team member in a secure and lucrative role to Employee Number One in a brand-new business.
“Getting help validating the solution is important, as is the initial investment support — I have done this rodeo a couple of times before and know the importance of having funding to fuel the ship. Bootstrapping can be painful!”
The broader message of Nzwi’s transition to the founder side of the Build Program is that with support like that provided by Founders Factory Africa, scalable entrepreneurship is a much more viable option than many potential African founders realise. Concerns around funding, problem-solving, and recruiting should not be obstacles to new business ventures when the resources exist to turn good ideas into great businesses. Partners like Founders Factory Africa can incentivise and enable the execution of high-value concepts that might otherwise remain in the heads of would-be founders by de-risking experienced professionals’ decision to leave the relative comfort and security of corporate employment.
Building tech excellence and transformation in Africa
RiskBloq’s entry into the Founders Factory Africa Build Program is proof of Founder Factory Africa’s belief in its processes, its people, and the vast latent potential of the African tech startup space. Nzwi is betting on himself and his colleagues to transform digital asset markets by informing the decisions of African retail investors. In the process, he is providing a positive example to inform the moves of other African tech founders.
A takeaway for Founders Factory Africa and other ecosystem-enabling organisations is the indispensability of the human element in scaling African startups. This means intentional outreach beyond tight circles and impersonal market scans. Furthermore, it encourages the proliferation of ongoing and organic interactions between those with a foot in the startup and investment scene and those external to it. It means connecting African founders to global networks while avoiding the common pitfall of imposing established models onto new and unique contexts. Local expertise and flexible thinking are critical in delivering the best solutions.
Moreover, expanding and diversifying the pool of potential founders in Africa requires solving the additional problem of de-risking entrepreneurial inclinations. It involves a multiplication of personal and professional networks endowed with money, experience and expertise, and an increase in the number of outward-facing nodes in each of these networks. Accelerators and experts with a penchant for the community have as much responsibility in engaging the uninitiated and seeding new circles of activity as they do in strengthening the internal bonds and productivity of existing ventures. While it may not produce a planned, predictable pipeline of new founders, it will make stories like Nzwi’s — and a thousand variations of it — that much more likely.
Nzwi’s next endeavour in the form of RiskBloq exemplifies the broader dynamics and complexities shaping the African founder ecosystem. It also raises pertinent questions concerning the promise and limits of the venture builder-accelerator model within the African startup ecosystem. Nzwi’s decisions to join Founders Factory Africa and, more recently, establish RiskBloq, displays the importance of personal networks (and their double-edged nature) when democratising opportunity.
Separately, Nzwi’s journey both as a technology professional and startup founder illustrates the value of demonstrative democratisation, where the unknown is exactly where a founder (or budding founder) needs to be.
Demonstrative democratisation: Being aware of the unaware
Demonstrative democratisation, as seen through the prism of Nzwi’s journey, is his conscious effort to break into emerging technologies of which many people are unaware. Once Nzwi succeeded in these spaces, he documented them, and used his experience to show others what they could achieve.
As a professional, founder, entrepreneur, and investor, Nzwi has become known for experimenting with and educating others on fintech solutions from payment methodologies to digital currencies based on his own research, a few fortuitous introductions, and the simple belief that he — or anyone else for that matter — could and should access these opportunities as they arise.
Discussing this thought process on a recent episode of the Africa Tech Roundup podcast, Nzwi described crypto-businesses as having the same fundamentals as more conventional and closed investment opportunities, such as equities, but with less gatekeeping and a lower barrier to entry.
“I view myself as someone who is relatively successful, but even with my relative success, I found it very challenging to enter certain investment opportunities, even on the continent. It was clear that even when someone is based within a specific market, it’s tough for them to gain access to certain opportunities simply because they are reserved for individuals with high net worth. Everyone else is just left out.”
His journey affirms this observation. Nzwi went from knowing little about Bitcoin and feeling late to the crypto party in 2016 to teaching himself about the space online and building a public following based on his subject matter knowledge. By 2022, he has been sought out as an early investor in concepts that have become highly lucrative.
Founders Factory Africa’s vision for an accelerated Africa
Founders Factory Africa’s mission is to be a powerful engine for startup growth, partnering with exceptional founders to launch and grow innovative tech-enabled businesses with the potential for massive scale. The team has built and scaled nearly 50 fintech, healthtech, and agritech startups since its founding in 2018. While fintech is now relatively established in Africa, Founders Factory Africa is working hard to support the emergence of innovations within the broader vertical and benefit players in the less entrenched areas of healthtech and agritech. Founders Factory Africa is also leaning into the digital assets space, having recently backed its first two crypto businesses — Revix in 2021 and Ayoken in 2022. RiskBloq represents Founders Factory Africa’s third venture into the industry.
Founders Factory Africa supports ventures across the entire early-stage maturity curve, from idea-stage through to seed:
· The Build Program supports entrepreneurs in the earliest stages of launch, getting product to market and building the foundations required for future rapid growth.
· The Scale Program supports venture growth for companies who have achieved product-market fit by helping them convert validated models into attractive Series A investment cases. It also facilitates community-building initiatives designed for portfolio businesses to learn from one another, socialise the problems they are solving, and trade progress notes with the ecosystem.
This emphasis — perhaps even reliance — on community for discovery and learning leads to a differentiated view of the idealised conception of capital being agnostic to background and the power of personal and professional networks. Africans can now access a broad swathe of business, financial, and investment knowledge through having an internet connection. Yet, despite the apparent efficiency of disembodied market mechanisms in locating and allocating capital to high-potential ventures, accelerators still rely on, to a large extent, the human factor to source talent, secure funding, and identify ventures for evaluation.
Founders Factory Africa is a hybrid venture studio that brings a much more comprehensive and bespoke set of services to building both ventures developed in-house and brought in from the market. Still, the possibilities and limitations of the human factor remain relevant.
On the flip side, half the value of name-brand accelerators to founders may be in providing access to curated networks of investors and the prestige and market credibility of graduating from their programmes. The predication of venture capital on social capital may be a dynamic that technology can digitise but not diminish, placing an asterisk on the “anyone” in “anyone can do this.”
Having a personal interlocutor to guide a founder into the investment world helps, and the compounding effect of the experience and connections one accumulates “on the inside” further distinguishes would-be entrepreneurs and investors with an early on-ramp from those without. The catch is it often takes favourable initial circumstances and connections — a family member in the right field, a tip from a friend on a work project, a recommendation from an industry heavyweight — to generate the snowball of serendipity that accelerates a novice along their path to success.
