EMURGO Africa to provide strategic resources
Recently, EMURGO announced the launch of EMURGO Africa – a newly established entity that will invest $100 million over the next few years in African tech startups – to help spur adoption of Cardano as the standard tech infrastructure platform for Africa’s emerging industrial innovation.
To mark the official launch, EMURGO Africa made an investment and formed a strategic partnership with Adanian Labs – a successful pan-African venture studio and incubator that builds, nurtures, and incubates high potential tech startups.
As a founding entity of the Cardano blockchain, EMURGO and its new entity EMURGO Africa provide technical expertise and understanding of the Cardano ecosystem along with a network of industry partners to support Adanian Labs and selected startups to build socially impactful solutions on Cardano.
Cardano’s mission to grow the ecosystem globally through the adoption of its protocol for real use cases, including financial inclusion and social empowerment, and its technical design offering blockchain sustainability, scalability, and interoperability, aligns with Adanian Labs’ mission to provide opportunities for African tech startups to thrive and access key resources in order to launch and grow sustainably.
Startup solutions to foster sustainable growth and increasing middle class
Since its inception in 2020, Adanian Labs has built 14 startups across a variety of key sectors including healthtech, agritech, SME tech, fintech, adtech, women in tech and more.
Some of these notable startups 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, Reward Adz, and Ada Animation.
As a smart technologies lab, it also has two centers of excellence on AI and Blockchain, AICE Africa (AI Center of Excellence Africa) and The Africa Blockchain Center (The ABC).
To achieve its mission, Adanian Labs looks to help build startups by applying “lean startup” principles in processes, learning, iteration, scaling, and innovating in order to create sustainable and socially impactful solutions that will power Africa’s youth and economy while creating massive impact.
Adanian Labs also provides all the critical support startups need to launch and scale in the continent including, access to funding, technology development, technical support, go-to-market strategies and partnerships.
Adanian Labs uses its unique positioning to provide these resources, by building a socio-economic ecosystem revolving around the sharing of resources, creation, production, distribution, trade, and consumption.
Through these combined resources with EMURGO Africa’s connection to the Cardano ecosystem, the partnership will incubate local startups that will foster private sector growth, drive Cardano adoption, and catalyze a burgeoning African middle class.
Leveraging know-how in African industrial innovation
Adanian Labs recognizes the specific needs and challenges Africa startups must meet to successfully build services and solutions for the continent.
Adanian Labs’ incubation model runs for a full year and leverages ecosystem collaboration, resource sharing, and competitive joint ventures with industries to build quicker, scale faster and optimize capitalization providing a win-win benefit to all parties involved.
Leveraging their past and current successful experiences in African industrial innovation, Adanian Labs possesses the necessary resources to help tech startups enter the marketplace.
Some of these notable projects include:
– A blockchain smart city project in Entebbe
Adanian Labs partnered with the city of Entebbe, Uganda to turn the city into a blockchain smart city driven by the value of cryptocurrency and digital assets.
Powered by a pilot relief fund in partnership with Paxful, it empowers 70,000 people who can use their tokens to pay for utility and other services.
This is underpinned by a massive capacity building program to train blockchain developers helping to transform some of the city services by utilizing blockchain, including KYC verification processes, revenue collection, and city remittance services.
Entebbe’s mayor Fabrice Rulinda has expressed a strong willingness to pilot this project and is exploring plans to launch a sandbox solution for companies looking to come to Entebbe for blockchain projects in partnership with Adanian Labs, including potential startups building on Cardano.
Recently, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between Adanian Labs, the City of Entebbe, and Paxful to launch the project.
– Professional career and skills building programs for youth in Kenya
Adanian Labs has also partnered with various county governments including Nairobi City and Isiolo counties, and over 50 higher learning institutions, associations and technical vocational colleges across Kenya to train young people in technology programming and digital skills with a special focus on displaced and underprivileged youths.
These skills building programs have extended to include corporate support from entities like Family Group Foundation and FSDK to train and upskill AI Data scientists, creatives and animators and software developers.
Adanian Labs plans to roll out a massive training program across 5 countries in Africa in the next year for AI and data science, blockchain programming, creatives and animation and software development to create employability for thousands of young people on the continent.
Are you a pre-seed tech startup interested in applying for funding?
As a founding entity of the Cardano blockchain, EMURGO and EMURGO Africa will selectively provide funding to pre-seed Africa-based projects that want to build dApps on Cardano or migrate from other protocols.
Among the advantages of EMURGO Africa funding are:
1) EMURGO funding accelerates business growth and connects networks in the Cardano ecosystem.
2) Direct contact with the EMURGO R&D team and the Yoroi wallet will expedite development and user acquisition.
3) Connect with EMURGO’s Cardano education to become acquainted quickly with the Plutus language.
If you have are a pre-seed Africa-based startup and have:
– An MVP or prototype but no funds
– A strong technical team but lack of business experience in topics such as tokenomics
– Solid technical skills, but no marketing presence in the Cardano ecosystem
– A great business idea but no partners
Please feel free to go to emurgoafrica.vc and contact us for more information about funding and partnership opportunities.
For other projects based in other markets, please visit emurgo.vc and contact us there with more of your information.
About EMURGO
- Official Homepage: emurgo.io
- Twitter (Global): @EMURGO_io
- YouTube: EMURGO channel
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- LinkedIn: @EMURGO_io
