Participated · Seed · Aug 2024

Waza offers a payments and liquidity-management platform focused on enabling African businesses, traders and fintechs to pay suppliers and manage cross-border liquidity. The startup began operations in January 2023 after participating in Y Combinator’s winter batch. It serves hundreds of clients across six continents and addresses three customer segments: multinationals operating in Africa, importers/traders, and fintechs needing API infrastructure. Waza’s revenue comes from FX spreads and a 0.75%–1% take rate; transaction volumes and revenues have been growing roughly 20% month over month. Operational traction includes $280,000 in payment volume in its first month and processing up to $70 million in monthly payment volume in May (about $700 million annualized). The founders — CEO Maxwell Obi and CTO Emmanuel Igbodudu — have deep payments and engineering experience; the team plans to expand beyond Ghana and Nigeria and may build business banking, credit/financing, or stablecoin banking products in future.

Participated · Seed · Nov 2023

Shekel Mobility operates a B2B marketplace and mobility fintech that helps auto dealers find inventory, access financing and sell cars across Africa. Its flagship product, Shekel Credit, provides dealers with loans covering up to 70% of vehicle costs (dealers typically contribute 30%), with credit limits up to $200,000 and typical vehicle loans in the $5,000–$20,000 range. The company reports a 0% default rate on its credit product and has powered more than $56 million in transactions, supporting over 1,400 auto dealers and ~7,000 cars to date. Shekel says its ARR is slightly over $2 million and plans to use the new funding to quadruple ARR ahead of a next priced round. The startup is building additional offerings, including Shekel Business to digitize informal trading processes for dealers, plus more digital tools and physical infrastructure to reduce dealership operating costs. Founders Benjamen Oladokun and Sanmi Olukanmi previously built and exited Eazypapers Technologies, and the team aims to create the largest auto-dealer ecosystem with a $10 billion annual transaction target by 2025. Shekel Mobility is a fintech neobank and trading platform offering a simplified financing and operating system for auto dealers in Africa. Dealers pre-approved by the platform provide at least 30% of a vehicle’s value and Shekel disburses the remaining 70% after vetting; purchased vehicles are housed in approved car lots. Since launching operations in January 2022 the company has enrolled over 1,000 dealers and powered more than $19 million in transactions; it has financed about 3,500 vehicles worth roughly $20 million and processes over $2 million in transactions monthly. The company reports a 0% default rate tied to its credit model and says onboarding has enabled dealers to triple sales and grow inventory. Shekel was selected for Y Combinator’s Winter 2023 batch. Planned moves include owning car lot(s) in the coming months and prioritizing additional debt funding to scale across Africa and other emerging markets.

Participated · Seed · Oct 2022

Dandi Technologies provides an analytics platform for advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion by aggregating and analyzing HR data across the employee lifecycle. The platform generates millions of DEI insights and offers intersectional measurement and sophisticated wage-gap analysis to pinpoint equity gaps and inform pay-equity actions. It integrates with leading HR systems including Workday, ADP, SAP, Oracle, Greenhouse and Taleo, and supplies real-time executive dashboards, visualizations, and custom-branded reports and slide exports. Led by CEO Jeff Fernandez and operating from New York City and Stockholm, Dandi helps businesses see how they recruit, retain, promote, and compensate employees. In October 2022 the company raised $3.7M in seed funding and added Courtney Leimkuhler of Springbank to its board. The company intends to use the proceeds to increase the number of people the platform positively impacts globally.