YC’s Latest Batch Of Chosen Startups: This Is The First Time An African Country Is Appearing In The Top Three
Y Combinator’s latest batch — W22 — features 414 startups from 42 countries, representing more than 80 sectors. America reportedly has the most representation while India comes in second with 32 startups and Nigeria sits in third, having delivered 18 startups. This is the first time an African country is appearing in the top three.
The W22 batch of the Y Combinator programme, which played a role in the early days of companies like Airbnb, Coinbase and Dropbox among others, is currently taking place, and concludes with a demo day end of March.
Participants receive seed funding as well as further investment opportunities at a demo day. The S21 edition of the accelerator had 15 African participants.
Africa as a whole has 24 startups in this new batch, a record best.
Below are some of the Black owned startups chosen for this year’s investment
Boya
Website: https://boya.co/
Founded in: 2021
Team size: 10
Location: Nairobi, Kenya
Function?: A platform for corporate expense cards and spend management for businesses in Africa.
Founders: Alphas Sinja, Boya’s chief executive officer, has over eight years of experience in the banking and finance sectors. Robert Nyangate is the company’s CTO.
Curacel
Website: https://curacel.co
Founded in: 2019
Team size: 30
Location: Lagos, Nigeria
Function?: Building Plaid for insurance in Africa.
Founders: Henry Mascot started a company in 2017 to help hospitals digitize records. He teamed up with John Dada two years later to build Curacel, a fraud detection system for health companies at the time.
Duplo
Website: www.tryduplo.com
Founded in: 2021
Team size: 6
Location: Lagos, Nigeria
Function?: Venmo for B2B in Africa.
Founders: Among them is Yele Oyekola, the chief executive, who worked at Carbon and was an economic policy officer at the UN. He previously launched a buy now, pay later product in East Africa.
Other companies include pharma-focused health startup Remedial Health; fintech startup Duplo, which works to digitise payment flows for B2B companies; Grey, formerly Aboki Africa, which provides foreign currency accounts for Africans; and Heyfood, which makes it easy for restaurants to run their food ordering and delivery business.
