Microtraction Community Update
On the 17th of July 2017, we announced Microtraction to the world.
7 months and 7 investments later, I have learnt a great deal about what it means to really invest in exceptional African teams at the earliest stages of their venture.
Meet Our Investments
By the end of last year after a successful period of due diligence we closed and wired funds to 7 really promising companies with true $100m annual revenue potential.
We are super excited to work with these founders over the long term and help them build legendary and enduring companies. If you are an investor or potential partner, please fill the form linked below to request access to our portfolio list.
I regularly share progress updates with our investors and advisors, and want to give the ecosystem a look into what we have been doing and what we have observed over the last 7 months.
Stats:
- 620 Companies
- 74 Shortlisted companies
- 24 Investment Committee
- 12 Due Diligence
- 7 Investments
Applications from Everywhere
The majority of our applications have come from Nigerian teams, but we have also seen applications from Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and other African countries. This has given us a bit more insight into the challenges non-African investors face about investing in foreign markets as we have been able to experience the lack of “market context” first hand.
Non-application acquisition channels
In the first two months (July & August) we focused mainly on applications (inbound) to engage founders. However, we have extended our funnel and continue to focus on exploring other outbound channels such as outreach, referrals, partnerships with tech media & payment startups to generate significant leads.
Streamlining Our Application Process
We started out with a rather extensive application form, and four versions later, we have totally streamlined our form into Executive Summary format, to ensure that it is easier for founders to apply but also for the team to to immediately capture relevant information that we will need to make an investment decision.
Scary Things (but we’re working on it!)
There’s been a distinct lack of female founders from the 620+ applications we’ve gotten so far. 30% of the teams we have funded have at least one female founder and we are committed to funding more. We will be launching a series of engagement initiatives and working with organisations that empower women in technology to ensure that this becomes a reality. If you would like to partner with us on our female founder engagement initiatives, connect with us here
5,000+ people in our network
Since launch we’ve been collating and cleaning up all the contacts in our network that we’ve built over the last 18 months — this includes founders, developers, investors, advisors, mentors etc. We think this is a decent network size for Microtraction’s portfolio to have access to and we are excited about building this network.
Founders Class Experiment
Having reviewed over 600 companies since launch, we saw that there were a group of high potential companies with one or two reasons why we weren’t ready to invest yet. We have a hypothesis that these companies would make faster progress & become investable if they were held accountable to growth targets and had regular office hours with us.
We are running an experiment to test this hypothesis with 7 companies that were originally shortlisted for our investment committee but didn’t make the final cut. We hope that if this is successful, we can incorporate this into our deal flow creating a stronger pipeline for us.
Stripe Atlas Partnership
We partnered with Stripe to bring Stripe Atlas to the African tech community. Stripe Atlas users get quick, streamlined incorporation, a bank account within minutes, access to a curated online community of founders and special offers on startup services including AWS credits and legal and tax advice.
Amazon Web Services
Thanks to the guys at Amazon Activate who now give our portfolio companies, $5,000 worth of AWS credits and access to the cloud computing experts to scale their backend infrastructure.
Thanks!
Thanks to everyone one of you who continues to support Microtraction and read these updates. I hope we all have a successful 2018.
Until Next time….
Semper Fi,
YB
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