17 October, 2024
Seedstars Africa Ventures gets $30M backing from EIB Global to invest in early-stage startups
Seedstars Africa Ventures has received a $30 million capital commitment from EIB Global, an arm of the European Investment Bank, which becomes the first major institutional investment for its first pan-African venture capital fund.
The new commitment follows an $8 million investment from the fund’s anchor investor, French private equity firm LBO France. The fund targets to close at between $80 million and $100 million to back seed and Series A startups, and offer follow-on funding up to Series B, bridging an extensive capital gap, and supporting startups beyond accelerator programs.
To launch the fund, the VC firm’s partners Maxime Bouan, Tamim El Zein and Bruce Nsereko-Lule teamed up with the Seedstars Group, an emerging markets accelerator, tapping its infrastructure and market access in Africa.
The firm said the larger-than-average fund (for Africa) will provide “capital well suited to the needs of entrepreneurs” in the continent, bridge funding gaps in regions beyond the big four (Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa) and provide operational and business support to founders.
“When the team launched in 2020, there was very little capital available beyond acceleration, so there was a clear need to provide more capital at this stage. The team wanted to be pan-African from the onset and be able to provide hands-on support to portfolio companies through a targeted early-stage investment strategy,” said Bouan.
“We approached Seedstars with a win-win opportunity to build a complementary post-acceleration fund that would leverage some of the resources and market access that they had already built. This would contribute to strengthening the continuum of capital by offering different types of funding suited to the entrepreneurs’ maturity, and catalyzing international and local follower investor capital.”
Seedstars Africa Ventures appoints new partner to back more founders in the continent
The Paris and Nairobi-based VC firm will make initial investment of $250,000 to $2 million, and follow-on funding of up to $5 million, in up to 30 startups. This is in addition to granting the entrepreneurs access to Seedstars’ tools, networks and visibility. The VC firm says the combination of capital and strong support for early-stage startups is needed but still relatively rare on the continent.
Seedstars Africa Ventures said that while the fund is sector-agnostic, it is keen on startups that address basic needs such as education, healthcare and utilities, or enhancing goods, services and efficiency.
Additionally, they are big on tech startups but do not “shy away from investing in innovative brick-and-mortar businesses that get an unfair advantage from digitalization.”
The firm also plans to invest up to 50% of the fund in Francophone Africa, a region that continues to be an investment destination for emerging VCs owing to lower competition, a massive market opportunity and high-quality and better-priced deals, in comparison to the more mature Anglophone regions.
Commenting on the investment, which is backed by EU’s ACP Trust Fund and Boost Africa program, EIB head of regional hub for East Africa Edward Claessen highlighted the importance of backing funds in Africa saying they play an important role in growing and strengthening the continent’s startup ecosystem. Besides, he noted funds like Seedstars Africa Ventures are invested in the continent and back founders that create jobs and contribute to the growth of economies.
Through initial funding from LBO France, the VC firm has already invested in four businesses, including Kenya’s internet service provider Poa Internet; Nigeria’s grid management SaaS for electricity distribution utilities, Beacon; Power Services agritech Shamba Pride; and payments company Bizao. It is now set to accelerate investments following the new funding.
Outside the pan-African fund, the Seedstars Group has also invested in 26 companies in Africa through its Seedstars International Ventures Funds I and II.
Seedstars, Fondation Botnar partner to back African startups focused on youth wellbeing
Seedstars Africa Ventures gets $30M backing from EIB Global to invest in early-stage startups
Seedstars Africa Ventures has received a $30 million capital commitment from EIB Global, an arm of the European Investment Bank, which becomes the first major institutional investment for its first pan-African venture capital fund.
The new commitment follows an $8 million investment from the fund’s anchor investor, French private equity firm LBO France. The fund targets to close at between $80 million and $100 million to back seed and Series A startups, and offer follow-on funding up to Series B, bridging an extensive capital gap, and supporting startups beyond accelerator programs.
To launch the fund, the VC firm’s partners Maxime Bouan, Tamim El Zein and Bruce Nsereko-Lule teamed up with the Seedstars Group, an emerging markets accelerator, tapping its infrastructure and market access in Africa.
The firm said the larger-than-average fund (for Africa) will provide “capital well suited to the needs of entrepreneurs” in the continent, bridge funding gaps in regions beyond the big four (Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa) and provide operational and business support to founders.
“When the team launched in 2020, there was very little capital available beyond acceleration, so there was a clear need to provide more capital at this stage. The team wanted to be pan-African from the onset and be able to provide hands-on support to portfolio companies through a targeted early-stage investment strategy,” said Bouan.
“We approached Seedstars with a win-win opportunity to build a complementary post-acceleration fund that would leverage some of the resources and market access that they had already built. This would contribute to strengthening the continuum of capital by offering different types of funding suited to the entrepreneurs’ maturity, and catalyzing international and local follower investor capital.”
Seedstars Africa Ventures appoints new partner to back more founders in the continent
The Paris and Nairobi-based VC firm will make initial investment of $250,000 to $2 million, and follow-on funding of up to $5 million, in up to 30 startups. This is in addition to granting the entrepreneurs access to Seedstars’ tools, networks and visibility. The VC firm says the combination of capital and strong support for early-stage startups is needed but still relatively rare on the continent.
Seedstars Africa Ventures said that while the fund is sector-agnostic, it is keen on startups that address basic needs such as education, healthcare and utilities, or enhancing goods, services and efficiency.
Additionally, they are big on tech startups but do not “shy away from investing in innovative brick-and-mortar businesses that get an unfair advantage from digitalization.”
The firm also plans to invest up to 50% of the fund in Francophone Africa, a region that continues to be an investment destination for emerging VCs owing to lower competition, a massive market opportunity and high-quality and better-priced deals, in comparison to the more mature Anglophone regions.
Commenting on the investment, which is backed by EU’s ACP Trust Fund and Boost Africa program, EIB head of regional hub for East Africa Edward Claessen highlighted the importance of backing funds in Africa saying they play an important role in growing and strengthening the continent’s startup ecosystem. Besides, he noted funds like Seedstars Africa Ventures are invested in the continent and back founders that create jobs and contribute to the growth of economies.
Through initial funding from LBO France, the VC firm has already invested in four businesses, including Kenya’s internet service provider Poa Internet; Nigeria’s grid management SaaS for electricity distribution utilities, Beacon; Power Services agritech Shamba Pride; and payments company Bizao. It is now set to accelerate investments following the new funding.
Outside the pan-African fund, the Seedstars Group has also invested in 26 companies in Africa through its Seedstars International Ventures Funds I and II.
Seedstars, Fondation Botnar partner to back African startups focused on youth wellbeing
3D scanning app Polycam gets backing from YouTube co-founder
Polycam, an app that uses a smartphone’s sensors to capture 3D scans of objects, is raising cash from prominent investors, including Adobe and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley.
Polycam today announced that it closed an $18 million Series A round led by Left Lane Capital with participation from Adobe Ventures, Hurley and others. Chris Heinrich, Polycam’s co-founder and CEO, says that the capital will support new 3D editing and collaboration features, training AI models for rendering 3D objects and new market expansion.
Polycam was founded in early 2021 by Heinrich and Elliott Spelman, who’d met while working together at Ubiquity6, a startup developing mobile 3D scanning and AR tech. Both Heinrich and Spelman believed that 3D capture, enabled by hardware like the lidar sensor on more recent iPhones, could unlock 3D content creation for the masses.
“One of the challenges and opportunities of the 3D modeling space is that the core technology for 3D capture is far from perfect, and it’s not nearly as easy as snapping a photo with an iPhone,” Heinrich told TechCrunch in an email interview. “The good news is that advances in AI-driven 3D capture, when paired with the type of data that Polycam has in droves, are set to dramatically improve quality and ease-of-use over the next few years, which will unlock more use cases and increase adoption.”
Polycam offers a suite of 3D capture and modeling tools, each designed to address a different use case.
On iPhones with a lidar sensor, Polycam can scan a user’s surroundings, like the rooms in their home, in 3D. The app’s “Photo Mode,” available on mobile devices and the web, employs photogrammetry — capturing images and stitching them together — to create 3D models of objects. Polycam can capture “photo spheres” and 360-degree skybox images from smartphone cameras. And — for users looking to incorporate models into a project (a video game, say) without having to capture them — the app hosts a library of free 3D models shared from the Polycam community.
Polycam earns money by charging a $100-per-year subscription for advanced features aimed at pro users.
Now, there are a number of apps on the market for smartphone-based 3D object capture. (See Luma, for one.) But it’s true that Polycam’s benefited from market consolidation in the last few years, with Niantic snatching up Scaniverse, Discord acquiring Ubiquity6 and Snap buying Th3rd.
Today, Polycam has nearly 100,000 paying customers, Heinrich tells me, and its iPhone and Android apps have been downloaded over 10 million times.
“Polycam was cash flow positive for numerous months in 2023 and has strong revenue growth,” he added. “We’ve not been noticeably affected by the slowdown in tech, achieving strong revenue growth despite the difficult macro economic environment.”
So why raise outside capital? To “expand more aggressively,” Heinrich said — including through new AI-powered capabilities, launching enterprise subscription tiers and doubling its 22-person workforce by 2025.
To that end, Polycam’s expanding to the Vision Pro, Apple’s AR headset, which will become a key area of the company’s focus in the next few months, Heinrich says. Polycam’s also training AI models to fill in gaps missed in the 3D object scanning process — an investment that’ll increase the overall fidelity of Polycam’s scans, according to Heinrich.
“Even the best scans suffer from bad and incomplete data — for example an inability to scan the underside of a sofa or car,” he said. “This is where AI comes in.”
Kenya’s Ilara Health gets $4.2M backing to expand clinic-support services
Ilara Health, a Kenya-based health tech enabling private clinics to access diagnostic devices and pharmaceutical products, has secured $4.2 million debt-equity in a pre-Series A round. The funds will be used to scale operations in the East African country, and to deepen healthcare access to the masses through the rollout of a B2B health and occupational service that will enable uninsured workers access to care at its network of partner clinics for a fixed monthly fee.
The $2.5 million equity round was led by DOB Equity, with the participation of the Philips Foundation and existing investors like AAIC Investment, Angaza Capital, Black Pearl Investments and Perivoli Innovations. Debt investment came from Alphamundi, Kiva Capital and Boehringer Ingelheim. The new round brings the total debt, equity and grant funding secured by the startup to $11.7 million.
Ilara Health started off by leasing diagnostic devices to clinics in 2019, but has since evolved to enable health centers to acquire pharmaceutical products and other items like hospital furniture, on credit. Emilian Popa, Ilara co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that this strategic move has enabled private healthcare operators to run well-equipped clinics capable of providing quality primary healthcare to patients.
“In Kenya, quality of care, not access, is the issue, and our goal since launch has been to improve the standards of care; these clinics could not provide some services because of lack of diagnostic devices or do small procedures because they lacked the furniture. That is how, over time, we have become a provider or financier of all clinic needs,” said Popa, who co-founded Ilara with Maximilian Mancini (co-CEO) and Sameer Afzal Farooqi (COO).
African governments are collaborating with innovators to strengthen local health supply chains
Ilara Health is tapping the private healthcare sector in Kenya, which has become the preferred alternative for those with medical coverage or those that can afford to pay out of pocket. This is against government-run facilities that continue to ail from underinvestment. The country’s current leadership hopes to improve its healthcare offering facilitated by a new healthcare financing program that promises to change how public healthcare is accessed and delivered. However, it may take some time before enough and well-equipped facilities are established to deal with the soaring demand.
Popa said Ilara serves 3,000 clinics across Kenya, out of the 15,000 he estimates are operational in the country. These clinics are often set up within residential areas making them easily accessible, and a better, but expensive, alternative to public facilities, where occasional equipment breakdown paralyzes service delivery, and immediate care is never guaranteed.
To equip the clinics, the startup has partnered with various manufacturers, including the American company Butterfly Network, to provide devices like the low-cost portable ultrasound tool, which Popa says helps bring scanning services within the reach of target clientele.
The startup also equips the clinics with a monthly subscription-based practice management software (KSh.1000 [$6.25 per today’s exchange rate]), to digitize their operations and improve the management of their businesses.
“They can view their balance sheet, record patient data and get a view of a patient’s journey. They can also report to the Ministry of Health with a touch of a button. The software also gives us a view inside the clinic,” he said, adding that they will use the data for credit rating to support plans to lend out up to $15,000 in working capital.
In Ilara Health’s next phase of growth, they plan to double down on reaching the patients through the B2B health and occupational service, through which they will partner with employers to give employees access to various outpatient services at partner clinics.
“We live in a place where only 2.7% of Kenyans are insured privately and even NHIF (state-run health coverage) does not properly cover outpatient care. We have been building a provider model, and we are now reaching the patients to complete the cycle,” said Popa, who co-founded Ilara Health after working in management consulting, then tech and startup ecosystem in Africa for years. Before launching Ilara Health, Popa worked as an investor at DiGame, a now fully invested Africa-focused fund and a subsidiary of U.K. private equity firm Zouk Capital.
Helium Health gets $30M, backed by AXA IM Alts and 23andMe’s Anne Wojcicki