Transforming Africa’s Tech Startup Ecosystem, one Antler cohort at a Time.
In the past few years, Africa has witnessed a tremendous shift towards supporting job creation and entrepreneurship anticipating the overwhelming demand by the continent’s youth. While this is an exciting and much-needed trajectory, there is still a challenge in producing world-class, innovative, tech-enabled, and locally founded startups across the continent. Out of the many reasons for the exceptionally high failure rate of startups across the continent, one fundamental reason is the founder’s
- Disability to technically build systems/software/products,
- Lack of deep industry insight/experience, and
- Lack of access for extremely experienced coaches and mentors to guide their thinking
In addition, a lot of the entrepreneurs across the continent haven’t had a chance to be exposed to work with high performing teams, environments that demand world-class skill sets, and know-how to build tech/business infrastructures. And for that, we are yet to see the most disruptive startups to come out of the continent in numbers.
Antler Nairobi
When we launched Antler in Nairobi, about a year ago, there was a lot of skepticism around our model and our criteria to accept the type of founders we wanted to have joined our program. It was said that it will be hard, if not impossible, to attract such high caliber individuals, some leaving their jobs, others leaving their countries to come to Kenya aspiring to find a co-founding team, and build a world-class tech startup.
However, we kicked off the first cohort on August 5th where more than 1200 applications were screened and 37 founders from 13 countries were accepted to join the program. These founders have an average of 10 years of work experience, have worked in at least 2 countries each and some even had founded startups that generated > $1Mil a year prior to joining Antler. With these brilliant founders, we were able to build 15 founding teams + ideas and invested in 4 startups that were made from scratch at the Antler Program in just 11 weeks.
Check out our Antler Nairobi Cohort I portfolio > Anyi Health, AIfluence, ChapChapGo, and Digiduka.
With the traction we were able to build during our first cohort, we were able to quickly gather momentum in the support and encouragement from the local tech, startup, and investment community. We have now more than 40 phenomenal local Advisors in multiple industries, have secured partnerships with large local and international firms to help accelerate our founders’ journey as they build their startups at an incredible speed and were able to launch the second cohort early in March 2020.
This second cohort of the Nairobi program had also seen an even higher number of applications with more geographic, expertise, and gender diversity. We were able to attract founders with backgrounds in Engineering, Product development, Business Development, Finance, Physics, Medicine, and others from highly renowned institutions across the globe as partially indicated below.
Impact of COVID19 on the Antler Nairobi
With the COVID19 lockdown, we had to take our program 100% online, and to our delight, the founders were able to quickly adapt to the new normal, show a tremendous amount of self-discipline, professionalism, and drive to continue building their startups. With that, we are so proud of the fact that we were able to again invest in 4 startup ideas that were fully developed from scratch during the Antler program, all through a global pandemic.
The Antler Model for Africa
The positive response we have received from both the local and international startup community, the level of engagement we were able to maintain throughout the year with quite minimal marketing, and the fact that the application numbers continue to soar as we are currently witnessing for the 3rd Nairobi cohort, is clear evidence that we are addressing a gap in the tech — investment space in Africa. We believe experienced entrepreneurs and hardcore techies alike are looking for an opportunity to launch their journey as entrepreneurs if the right model is put forward to them.
By the right model, we mean by specifically addressing some of the major challenges most African startups face, such as
- Not finding the right team,
- Founders not having the right skill sets, network, and in-depth industry knowledge
- Not being able to build investable, scalable business models
- Difficulty to monetize tech products,
- Lack of a strong network of advisors and mentors,
- Challenges to access very early-stage capital and
- A disconnect between the risk-averse VC community and the startup community
In order to help alleviate these challenges, Antler provides these founders with
- Headhunting the best founder talent from the continent and the diaspora.
- Startup co-creation before investment,
- Vetting of the business ideas early with a network of Antler industry advisors in terms of market maturity, monetization model, etc.,
- Building on local strengths,
- Exit focus as part of defining the startup idea,
- Startup generator supported by an Antler EA fund, and Follow-up partner funds,
- Focus on the development of a stronger tech startup and investment ecosystem
In addition to the above support by Antler, another main reason why we believe this model works is that these groups of exceptional individuals have a clear spike in experience and knowhow in building tech solutions and businesses. This means each one of them is able to move much faster in making informed decisions, finding out real pains to solve and have the network to rapidly validate their solutions. These brilliant founders make up the Antler Alumni community, which in itself is a strong, resourceful, and supportive group that together with our model, is able to move faster than if the founders would have done on their own.
You can find out more about the program structure here.
To recap, we are quite bullish about our model and the results that we have seen so far have been encouraging to say the least. After all, what better way to do your due diligence on the startups you want to invest in, than starting from the founder? This model requires an extremely efficient global team, vast knowledge in tech, investment, strategy, business development, and venture building. It also requires individuals who are resourceful, passionate about building businesses, and those with very high emotional intelligence as well as a pool of exceptional entrepreneurs ready to build companies that solve real problems
The Antler East Africa team is excited to continue building disruptive tech startups out of Africa and looking forward to welcoming our 3rd cohort of founders joining us in Sept 2020!
Are you thinking of building a new tech venture, with brilliant co-founding partners and a highly supportive environment? apply now!
