Investing in Tambua Health, Brass and FunnelJoy
We have spent the last 3+ years making early bets on companies building the future of Africa.
Today, despite the reality of the current COVID-19 pandemic and its far-reaching 2nd and 3rd order social and economic effects, our convictions haven’t changed as we believe that this pandemic makes a stronger case for investing in innovative startups that are nimble and able to benefit from a boost in user adoption and lower customer education costs as people find new ways to live, work and communicate.
Moreover, the way we get out of rot is by building.
In furtherance of this mission, we are happy to back Tambua Health, Brass, and Funneljoy.
The first time we spoke to Lewis, we were immediately blown away by the “why” behind Tambua, it was a compelling and deeply personal conviction around solving the problem he and his team were going after.
Lung related disease is an enormous and growing burden on society, resulting in one-in-six (16.7%) deaths globally, that’s about 2.5 million deaths annually across the world, More than $25 billion is spent each year on respiratory diagnostic procedures globally. While most respiratory diseases have a cure and are manageable, early diagnosis is the most essential for successful treatment. Unfortunately, medical imaging devices are invasive and expensive making them out of reach of some health care facilities and in facilities where they are available the associated cost is quite expensive making it increasingly difficult for everyday individuals to access quality healthcare service, which explains why the acoustic-based lung imaging and lung function test device built by Tambua is in itself revolutionary.
Tambua Health is using lung sound analysis to transform the diagnosis and treatment of respiratory diseases globally. They have built a hardware device called the T-sense that generates images of the lungs by detecting the vibrations of sound as air moves in and out of the lungs using sensor arrays put on the back of the patient. The team has approached this in a fundamentally different way using first principles and has brought new ideas and advances in machine learning, acoustics, biomedical engineering, and electronics to lung diagnostic. Schedule a demo here, if you would like to see how it works.
Operating a business account for most small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) is expensive on average, opening an account requires several walk-ins to the bank, starting minimum balance, fees at every step of the way, a 10-page+ form and a lot of friction, not to mention limited access to credit or tools, basically no real value asides being able to receive and send money inefficiently. Within our portfolio, we also observed how companies string together multiple tools just to run their finances semi-efficiently.
And so when Sola shared his vision of 100% digital bank, tailored specifically for SMBs, designed to provide them with superior banking experience and tools to help them run more efficiently and increase revenue, we were sold.
Traditional banks have not applied anywhere near the same degree of innovation to SMEs as they have done to consumer retail banking, even if the later still begs for improvement. While they are great at treasury management, they have massively underinvested in creating tools and services that enable SMBs to succeed, thus creating massive white space for a product like Brass.
Brass is a digital bank for SMB 100% online, no walk-ins, that provides them with a suite of product and tools designed to help them grow their business and significantly reduce the friction of doing business. Join the waitlist here to get notified when they go public.
When we met Sam late last year, his thinking around solving a problem for digital entrepreneurs across the world and in the process building a globally relevant product deeply resonated with us, as we have always wondered why African founders weren’t building for global markets, More importantly, he had also spent the last 4 years selling multiple digital products across multiple continents and understood the challenges around doing this on a deep level.
FunnelJoy is an all in one tool designed for digital entrepreneurs, marketers, and creators to help them capture, convert and engage leads and sell products online, FunnelJoy was built to simplify the process and offer an easy to use sales funnel tool to online entrepreneurs (something they can set up without the help of a web developer) that helps them convert visitors to actual leads or purchases. It’s a simple drag and drop tool to create landing pages and sales/membership funnels. The alternatives are expensive, non-intuitive, complex and require developers, designers, and “so-called ” experts to help build
The marketing automation software market is a $25B+ industry and expected to reach $32B in 2024, Today, a lot of digital entrepreneurs rely on sales funnel tools to market and sell their products online and as more people explore digital commerce for the first time, Funneljoy offers them just the right tool to do that.
Interestingly >90% of the companies customers come from the US and European market and the product has a high retention rate. This speaks to how founders can build great products, loved by users all around the world irrespective of their geography. You can start a 14-day free trial here.
So today, we are super excited to announce our investments in Lewis, Sola, Samuel, and their teams. They are some of the most talented founders building today and it is a privilege to partner with them.
Kayode Oyewole
Partner, Ventures Platform Fund
About Ventures Platform Fund
Ventures Platform Fund invests early in mission-driven founders that are building capital-efficient platforms that democratize prosperity, plug infrastructural gaps, connect underrepresented communities, create efficiencies, solve for non-consumption, and improve livelihoods.
