Since its inception in January 2020 Adanian Labs, the “start-up that builds start-ups” has fast-tracked its value proposition in Venture building across the African continent by providing a platform for African Tech start-ups to access key resources, financing, and scale.
With Pan African co-founders Bendon Murgor, (Kenya), Irene Kiwia (Tanzania), and John Kamara (Nigeria) at the helm, Adanian Labs is on a mission to build 300 impact-driven tech start-ups that are commercially viable and are positioned to accelerate the growth of African economies.
As the first of its kind venture studio in Africa, Adanian Labs commits internal resources including everything from pre-seed funding, software development talent, and sales expertise to marketing resources, finance support, HR infrastructure, and legal counsel — all in return for equity in the business. This hands-on approach helps de-risk the potential for the startup to fail.
A globally found that of the 415 companies they created, only 9% have failed, 3% have successfully exited and the rest are still active and growing with average yearly revenue of more than $1 million.
In 2021 Adanian Labs established the first-in-Africa partnership with Emurgo Africa, a vehicle of EMURGO, the commercial arm of Cardano in their quest to invest $100M in African startups to spur blockchain development as a tech infrastructure.
While still in its first year, Adanian Labs incubated fifteen tech start-ups across various sectors in their first cohort. Notable start-ups from the 2020 cohort include:
– Afya Rekod – a consumer-driven digital health data platform
– Phema Agri – an agriculture crowdfunding platform
– Paylend – an SME credit lending solution and others such as Twaa, eCobba, Bloow, Moovebeta, Reward Adz and Ada Animation. Out of the initial cohort, 4 startups have raised an average of $ 2 million and graduated from the Lab to scale their innovations across Africa.
This year Adanian Labs has taken in 20 new start-ups from Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Nigeria, and Zambia to participate in the year-long venture building programme.
“We aim to create CAMELS – strong, resilient companies, entrepreneurs, and youth who will sustain African economies, even with limited resources. We coined #TheCamelTheory knowing the challenges in terms of equity that Africa has in its spin towards the #4IR,” says co-founder and CEO of Adanian Labs, tech entrepreneur John Kamara whose footprint in new market acquisitions across various technology verticals in Europe, America, Asia, and Africa is at the forefront of revolutionizing a Pan African ecosystem in global markets.
The Adanian Labs venture building program offers a blend of technology development, technical support, business mentorship, access to the market, partnerships, and funding while helping start-ups apply lean principles in processes, learning, iteration, and scaling of their innovations.
Each year the diversity of applications grows with this year’s cohorts spanning sectors from Gaming, Beauty, and Health to Energy, Agriculture, and Finance.
‘Our model is intentional and is heavily focussed on developing exponential impact, scale, and growth. With 90% of tech start-ups failing to get off the ground in their first 24 months, the core of the values of Adanian Labs is to backtrack and look at why start-ups fail and why simple funding is not enough. Our venture studio lab equips start-ups to leverage our internal resources in a borderless Pan African ecosystem, while at the same time connecting them with a wider pool of partners and investment communities to accelerate their businesses and allow their innovation to be anchored in a turn-key evolution of support,’ says Kamara whose vision to build 300 high impact-driven tech start-ups on the continent is progressively getting nearer to his targets.
Adanian Labs has invested in 35 startups to date across 5 countries in Africa including in 3 of the countries known to have the most advanced innovation ecosystems being Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa.
Adanian Labs also has two centers of excellence dedicated to capacity building in the smart tech ecosystem underpinned by its mission of accelerating the technology revolution in Africa.
The two centers are the AI Centre of Excellence Africa (AICE Africa) and the Africa Blockchain Centre (The ABC) for AI and blockchain capacity building.
The 20 startups joining the Adanian Labs 2022 Cohort 2 Venture Building program across the five regions where Adanian Labs offices are, include the following:
Adanian Labs Tanzania
E-Commerce Tech Startup FoundHer is a marketplace platform powered by an SME ERP solution purposed to verify, standardize and scale female lead businesses in Africa.
Bizzy is a full-featured business and financial management suite complete with tools for accounting, inventory, payroll, tax filing, invoicing, bank account tracking and reconciliation, expense management, budgeting, payment processing, and accounts receivable and accounts payable management.
Tayari Payments is a Digital hospitality solution that can make reservations, take orders and receive payments operating in the foods and beverage market
Adanian Labs Zambia
Lendbox – A Fintech platform that allows users to seamlessly manage loans, borrowers, finances, and investors through automation and data visibility.
Ecocube Waste management system that connects waste collectors to smart bins.
Twende is an e-Commerce delivery app designed to help manage orders and create efficiency in e-commerce
Adanian Labs South Africa
Africa -Entrepreneur Connect Africa is an AI-enabled digital platform to connect SMMEs to existing and potential customers. The platform will act as a connector, enabling businesses to list their offerings and expand their reach within their geographic areas.
Airbuy Fintech is an alternative online payment gateway that enables online stores to accept payments from users who do not wish to pay using their banking details reducing exposure to fraud.
Adanian Labs Nigeria
Basira – A platform that provides a seamless and secure platform for pair-pair cryptocurrency trading as well as a short-time escrow account for transactions using blockchain token (stablecoin) for borderless transactions.
Betalyfe – A platform bridging the gap between blood donors and patients by putting in place a smart connection where patients can receive immediate and compatible blood types at any point in time across Nigeria helping save thousands of lives and providing employment opportunities.
Stritch – A platform that connects listed SMEs to customers using Ai. Helps hire artisans, buy food, get your clothes laundered, etc.
Smartify – comprises a smart solar panel that uses artificial intelligence to predict the best position for the solar panels, and turn/rotate the solar panels to receive the maximum output from the sun.
Adanian Labs Kenya
Thorium Organic Foods – A tool for tracking all farming activities, predicting harvests, and a marketplace for all organic produce.
TausiApp is a platform that Connects Clients to Quality Beauticians with a push of a button! Call us the Uber Of Beauty.
Agricap – A mobile B2C financial service that enables Smallholder farmers to access their earned payments immediately upon delivery of their commodities to Agriprocessors.
Serapay is a revolutionized digital escrow and logistics service that will help boost the safety of peer to peer social commerce transactions to help make social commerce in Africa frictionless and thus increase SME growth in Africa
M-jenzi.com is a MARKET-PLACE platform that allows merchants of construction materials and home improvement products and services to showcase their products and services to potential buyers globally, and in turn, allowing buyers shopping for these items the ease and safety of doing so from the comfort of their phones or laptops.
Karbala – Fronti is a VOD/OTT platform designed to stream the best African content to a worldwide audience.
Jungopharm is a SaaS platform that simplifies the medicine procurement process in Africa and logistics while decentralizing medicine from urban areas to rural areas. This is done by linking pharma manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, and consumers on our platform.
Jobzy is a peer-to-peer service marketplace and financial services platform that effectively matches the large pool of available labor with demand and leverages the data from the services to give informal sector workers access to financial services.
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