These 9 African startups made it into YC's Summer 21 Batch

9 African startups have so far been announced as part of silicon valley startup accelerator, YCombinator’s Summer 2021 batch.

The YC Summer ‘21 batch will launch this month, with more startups still to be announced, which means that more African startups could potentially be involved.

This comes on the heels of its winter batch announced in March 2021, where 10 African startups were accepted into its accelerator program. Ycombinator provides funding of $125,000 in the startups it accepts into its program, for a 7% equity stake. It is one of the most prominent silicon valley venture firms and has a notable presence in the African startup scene.

YCombinator has invested in over 2900 companies, and as of 2021, has invested in 57 African startups. Getting into YCombinator is always a major springboard that increases the chances of success for a startup. We recently put together some tips for African founders looking to get into Ycombinator.

The summer 2021 batch sees Nigeria and Morocco with the majority representation with 3 startups, followed by Egypt with 2 startups and South Africa completing the group.

Interestingly, the Silicon Valley startup accelerator appears to be shifting away from Fintech as its main investment focus. Unlike the Winter batch in March that had 6 fintech startups admitted into the program, the Summer 21 batch has only 2 traditional fintech companies; Chari.co and Lemonade Finance.

This batch is dominated by Logi-tech and e-commerce platforms with 4 ecommerce and 2 logistics companies admitted. This current batch also scores quite low on diversity, as it features only 1 startup with a female on the founding team:  Morocco’s Chari, a B2B fintech and eCommerce startup.

Here is the complete list of African startups that made it to YC Summer 21 so far:

1. Lemonade Finance (Nigeria): Lemonade is a cross-border payment platform tailor-made for Africans, not just in Africa but also abroad. The startup was founded on the back of endless remittance problems in Africa and allows free transfers for users to the US and Europe. Lemonade finance was founded by Olalere Ridwan in 2020.
   
2. Amenli (Egypt): Amenli is a licensed online insurance brokerage firm founded by Shady el Tohfa and Aham Nauman.
   
3. Odiggo (Egypt): Odiggo is a marketplace that connects users with car parts from accredited vendors. It was founded by Ahmed Nasser and Ahmed Omar in May 2018.
   
4. ShipBlu (Egypt): Shipblu is an eCommerce, logistics, and last-mile delivery and fulfillment company. It was founded in October 2020 by Ali Nasser, Abdelrahman Hosny, and Ahmed El Kawass.
   
5. Chari (Morocco): Chari is a B2B app that combines fintech and eCommerce services for traditional retailers. It was founded by Sophia Alj and Ismael Belkhaya.  
   
6. Freterium (Morocco): Freterium a collaborative SaaS platform that uses a predictive supply chain platform to connect organizations, people, and technologies in the logistics value chain. It helps to deliver real-time visibility and optimized orchestration for its customers. It was founded by engineers Mehdi Cherif Alami and Omar El Kouhene.
   
7. Floatpays (South Africa): Floatpays is an on-demand wage access platform for workers to get the wages they have earned. It was founded by Simon Ward in 2019.
   

This completes the list of African startups for now, but more African startups may still be announced. This batch will present their startups on demo day, which typically signifies the end of the accelerator. During demo day, founders present their companies to an audience of angel investors and venture capitalists.