Y Combinator added 8 additional African startups to its W22 cohort, bringing the total to 23
Eight more African firms have been confirmed as members in the famed Silicon Valley-based Y Combinator accelerator’s W22 cohort, bringing the total number of African startups to 23.
The W22 batch of the Y Combinator programme is presently in session and will culminate with a demo day next week. Y Combinator has played a role in the early days of firms such as Airbnb, Coinbase, and Dropbox, among others.
At a demo day, participants earn initial financing as well as further investment options. The accelerator’s S21 iteration has the most African participants yet, with 15, and Disrupt Africa just reported on the first 15 confirmed African participants in the W22 batch.
With almost 350 firms now confirmed to participate, eight more African names have been added to the list, bringing the total number of African participants to 23, well exceeding the number of African participants in S21.
Nigeria is responsible for seven of the new confirmations. Payourse is a cryptocurrency platform, Simplifyd is a data-free internet service, Sendme is an on-demand clean meat provider, Vendy is a payments business, Convoy is an open-source cloud-native webhook service, Curacel is an insurtech firm, and Plumter is a payment API provider. Bloom, a Sudanese financial platform, is the other chosen business.
Continental aristocracy such as Flutterwave, Paystack, and Kobo360 are among Y Combinator’s graduates (not to mention Cowrywise, MarketForce, Kudi, WaystoCap, WorkPay, Healthlane, Trella, 54gene, CredPal, NALA and Breadfast).
The accelerator has an equivocal place in the continent’s startup environment, but entrepreneurs praise it for having a good influence on their enterprises.
