Brian Waswani Odhiambo
How we made it in Africa requested Lagos-based Brian Waswani Odhiambo, a companion at enterprise capital agency Novastar Ventures, to spotlight the verticals inside West Africa’s tech trade that excite him most from an funding perspective. Right here is his response.
1. Fintech / embedded finance
Other than the sheer dimension of the market alternative in financial services throughout Africa, fintech can be an enabler for a lot of different services. Funds, credit score, insurance coverage and remittances are all key capabilities that others can leverage to extend entry and affordability for the tip clients.
With out the flexibility to gather funds, for instance, an organization like MAX – which supplies asset financing and driver administration providers to taxi homeowners and operators throughout Africa – can’t gather funds for the assorted autos it funds. Equally, the flexibility to make funds to suppliers globally through remittance firms allows native companies to import merchandise that they then promote into the native markets. Fintech merchandise are additionally extremely scalable throughout geographies and will be very excessive margin.
We’re more and more seeing firms that didn’t begin out providing any finance merchandise start to companion with fintechs or in some instances develop their very own monetary choices embedded into present choices, e.g. B2B e-commerce firms.
2. Agtech
Whereas agriculture might not be as horny as fintech and subsequently hasn’t attracted loads of consideration from entrepreneurs relative to different industries, I imagine that it is a market ripe for disruption. In West Africa, particularly, the agricultural sector is essentially underdeveloped as nations have targeted on different sources of revenue. Nonetheless, as we noticed with provide disruptions that occurred with the conflict in Ukraine, for instance, nations have to develop native meals manufacturing techniques to diversify from an overreliance on imports. In an effort to obtain some degree of self-reliance shortly sufficient, expertise and innovation can have a giant function to play. I’m always looking out for fascinating agtech companies.
3. Local weather-tech
It is a little bit of a catch all class however any enterprise that leverages expertise to deal with local weather change – both by decreasing carbon from the environment or remodeling current industries to turn out to be extra sustainable and inexperienced – is of curiosity to me. Local weather change is an existential downside and we’re working out of time to forestall disastrous ranges of warming. There are good examples of firms which can be each commercially profitable and generate environmental worth. We’d like extra of those.
