Three firms from Nigeria have officially been accepted into the famed Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator’s W23 class. In addition to other advantages, these startups will get US $500,000 in investment.
The W23 batch of the Y Combinator programme is presently in session and will come to a close with a demo day in March. This programme helped launch firms like Airbnb, Coinbase, and Dropbox, among others.
Three startups from Africa—all from Nigeria—represent the first 85 startups for its W23 class. These three are Shekel Mobility, a streamlined financing and operations platform for car dealers, and Bujeti, an end-to-end expenditure management and budgeting platform. Waza is a B2B payments infrastructure that offers the framework for international payments and intra-African commerce.
Over the upcoming months, additional companies will be revealed, with more African businesses expected to be among them. Seven African businesses participated in the accelerator’s most recent batch, S22, however it was the previous batch, W22, which had the greatest number of African startups ever, with 24 participating.
Alumni from Y Combinator include European royalty including Flutterwave, Paystack, and Kobo360 (not to mention Cowrywise, MarketForce, Kudi, WaystoCap, WorkPay, Healthlane, Trella, 54gene, CredPal, NALA and Breadfast).
The accelerator has a murky place in the continent’s startup environment, but entrepreneurs praise it for the beneficial effects it has had on their companies.
