Aidi, Amazon Partner to Accelerate African Businesses

By Adedapo Adesanya

Aidi Africa, an African venture builder, has partnered with Amazon Web Service’s Activate (An arm of AWS that supports early businesses) to accelerate early-stage African startups to investor-ready status.

In past months, Aidi Africa, run by its portfolio manager, Mr Tolulope Obademi, has provided support, through its angel syndicate, to industry-leading startups namely, Termii (YC W20), Payhippo (YC W21), Dash (Techstars 21), Raise (500 Startups 21), Bumpa, Cova, Nigenius and Swipe.

Founded in 2019, the venture builder includes a group of successful founders in the African ecosystem to include Deborah Gbolade (Aidi Ventures), Ham Serungoji (Chipper Cash), Emmanuel Gbolade (Termii), Tayo Oviousu (Paga), Francis Osifo (54gene), Francis Sanni (Magic) and Emmanuel Okeleji (Seamless HR).

Positioning itself as an African founder-focused accelerator, Aidi teamed up with Amazon Web Service last month to begin a 4-week program to get African startups market and investor-ready.

These companies were exposed to pieces of training from other successful industry founders and professionals around key areas which include culture building, product scaling, and the art of fundraising.

So far, Aidi has been successful in supporting its startup portfolios on their journey into major global accelerators, as well as guiding them through the process of raising over $8 Million in funding, with valuations running into $70 Million.

Startups in Current Batch

Companies participating in Aidi Africa’s summer 21 batch includes:

Zemo – www.zemocard.com

A Kenyan-based fintech that allows businesses to eliminate wasteful & fraudulent spending, as well as, access cashflow credit using its unique credit card service.

Moni – www.moni.africa

A fintech lending platform for mobile money agents which uses a social accountability model to provide agents with float and the ability to build their credit history.

MediSpark – www.swiftmedispark.com

A unified health-tech startup building solutions that connect and power businesses in the African health sector.

Vite – www.viteapp.co

An all-in-one logistics platform that allows people to easily and affordably access transport and delivery services across 70+ tier 1 and tier 2 underserved cities in the Southern African Development Community (SADC), starting with Mauritius.

Speaking on this, Mr Obademi said that the firm was looking to double down on its accelerator program twice every year while focusing on establishing partnerships between its startup alumni community and large corporates, both within Africa and across Silicon Valley.

Asides from AWS, other big corporates who have thrown their support toward Aidi’s initiatives include Hatch (An Arm of Digital Ocean), FirstBase, Brex, and Mercury.

Looking ahead, the team at Aidi expects to partner with more organizations before the year ends, as well as increase the number of business angels within its angel support community.