Meet the African startups participating in Y Combinator’s 2022 Winter batch

These African startups are among the over 230 startups that will be participating in the Y Combinator Winter 2022 batch. Ten African companies participated in the last Winter batch.

Launched in March 2005, the Silicon Valley-based accelerator has invested in 72 African startups including: Flutterwave, Wave, Cowrywise, Hellicarrier, and Paystack. YC runs two three-month funding cycles every year, one from January through March and another from June to August.

A Demo Day is held at the end of every cycle. At this event, the participating startups present themselves to an audience that includes top investors.

After Demo Day, what the startups usually have is a bunch of great contacts. If a startup plans to raise money after YC, these contacts are a great place to start. Our default advice is to do a breadth-first search, weighted by expected value.

YC recently announced a $500,000 standard deal divided into two separate SAFEs: the $125,000 safe — $125,000 on a post-money safe in return for 7% equity — and  the MFN safe — $375,000 on an uncapped safe with a most favored nation (MFN) provision. (Safe is a simple agreement for future equity.)

This 2022 YC winter batch will be the first to benefit from the new YC standard deal. Initially, the batch had nine African companies in the cohort, including: Nigeria's Dojah, Moni, Topship, Identitypass, Frain Technologies and Touch and Pay, Ethiopia's beU delivery, Ghana's Tendo and Uganda's Numida.

However, the list seems to be growing everyday. YC W22 has the largest group of African startup yet, surpassing the summer cohort in 2021 that had 15 startups.

1. Dojah (Nigeria)

Dojah allows teams to connect to a variety of identity and verification APIs for various purposes with just one integration.

Founded in 2021 by Tobi Ololade and Ayomide Oso, the Lagos-based startup identifies and verifies individuals and businesses via access to simple, easy-to-understand APIs. With their various data points and biometric verification techniques, you can easily identify and verify customers.

2. Moni (Nigeria)

Mobile money agents are like human ATMs. Nine out of ten mobile money agents lack liquidity for cash withdrawal and deposits to their customers, Moni offers low-interest loans to communities of mobile money agents through a referral and trust vetting system. Femi Iromini and Dapo Sobayo founded the startup in 2021.

3. Topship (Nigeria)

Topship makes international shipping easy for African businesses. Founded by Moses Enewali and Babatunde Junaid in 2020, the logistics startup provides technology and services that simplify the shipping of cargo, freight and parcels. With the goal to build a global distribution system that makes delivery of parcels, cargo and freight easy for African businesses.

4. Touch and Pay Technologies Limited (Nigeria)

Touch and Pay commenced operations in 2017 by Michael Oluwole and Olamide Afolabi with the aim of reducing the amount of physical cash in circulation by encouraging the use of electronics for payment for goods and services.

Related: How to get into Y Combinator as an African founder

5. Identitypass (Nigeria)

Identitypass is a  Nigerian digital compliance and security company that delivers seamless identity verification solutions to businesses in Africa. Launched in January 2021 by Lanre Ogungbe, Niyi Adegboye and David Obi, Identitypass’s vision is to build a world-class compliance and security infrastructure for Africa free from identity theft and compliance bottlenecks.

6. Tendo (Ghana)

Tendo enables anyone in Africa to sell online with zero upfront inventory - our mobile app connects drop-shippers to local wholesalers. The sellers on the platform are able to source products through Tendo and resell items using social commerce tools, such as WhatsApp, arrange delivery, and get paid, all through the Tendo mobile app.

The Accra-based startup was founded by Derrick Mungai, Evans Darbo Boateng, Felix Manford, Primerose Katena in 2020.

7. beU delivery (Ethiopia)

beU delivery is an on-demand food delivery service in Africa founded in 2021 by Almas Beleshov, Matvei Vasilev and Hao Zheng. beU provides its delivery services 67% cheaper than its competitors.

8. Numida (Uganda)

Numida uses proprietary credit models and tech-enabled underwriting workflows to provide unsecured working capital loans to semiformal African micro-businesses. Ben Best, Catherine Denis and Mina Shahid, Numida is a growing fintech startup in Eastern Africa.

9. Frain Technologies (Nigeria)

Frain Technologies — a Nigerian developer-tooling startup building webhook infrastructure. Frain started in February 2021, when Subomi Oluwalana, co-founder and CEO, quit his job as a backend developer at Tangerine Life, one of Nigeria’s leading fintech startups, to build APIs for fintech. Alongside co-founder and COO, Emmanuel Aina, the team tried to sell APIs to startups for several months without much success.

10. Heyfood (Nigeria)

Heyfood is building the "Doordash for Africa". The food delivery startup is founded by Taiwo Akinropo and Demilade Odetara.

11. Eazipay Inc. (Nigeria)

Founded in 2021, Eazipay Inc is building APIs solutions for payroll and corporate taxes for startups and small businesses who up till now process their payrolls and taxes manually with excel sheet, direct debit or through consultants. Eazipay’s USP is that everything happens at the click of a button.

12. Grey — formerly Aboki Africa (Nigeria)

Grey provides foreign (USD, EUR, GBP) accounts for Africans. With these foreign accounts, users can receive their salaries or any other payment from foreign companies or from individuals abroad. They can also hold their savings in foreign currency (e.g USD) or convert them to their local currency.

13. Duplo (Nigeria)

Founded by Yele Oyekola and Tunde Akinnuwa in September 2021, Duplo enables businesses across Africa to simplify their payment flows. Distributors can create unique virtual accounts for retailers and agents to make real-time payments or bank transfers, while the platform helps to reconcile their books automatically.

14. Remedial Health (Nigeria)

Founded in 2020 by Samuel Okwuada, a trained pharmacist and self-taught software developer, together with his co-founder Victor Benjamin, Remedial Health started off as a private label business, focused on contract manufactured products from markets like India, which they would then sell to pharmacies in Nigeria.

The healthtech startup is delivering technology solutions that enable greater efficiency and profitability in Africa’s pharmaceutical sector and supporting the development of a tech-enabled, pharmacy-centered healthcare network across the continent.

Remedial Health recently raised $1 million in pre-seed funding to digitize and drive efficiency in Africa's pharmaceutical sector.

15. Boya (Kenya)

Boya enables businesses to instantly issue corporate cards to employees and provide them with awesome software that gives them control and visibility on all spending in real-time.  

The Kenyan startup founded by Robert Nyangate and Alphas Sinja is building a corporate card and a spend management platform that enables businesses to streamline spend workflows and provide real-time reporting.

16. Lenco (Nigeria)

Lenco is a multi-currency Neobank for businesses in Africa. With Lenco, startups and retail outlets can easily pay vendors, suppliers and perform cross-border payment while having access to growth capital.

In 2021, Andrew Airelobhegbe, Impact Airelobhegbe, Praise Osagie and Godstime Asine co-founded the company.

17. Vendy (Nigeria)

Founded by Kayode Disu and Peter Ekunkoya, Vendy provides an alternative payment infrastructure without the need for a payment card or consumer app that enables customers to pay businesses on their phones without internet access.

18. Bloom (Sudan)

Bloom is a fintech attempting to help Sudanese individuals hedge against this rising devaluation. It offers a “high-yield” savings account, free FX and adjacent digital banking services so customers can save in a stable currency, the dollar, and spend as they go in local currencies.

Founded by Ahmed Ismail, Youcef Oudjidane, Khalid Keenan and Abdigani Diriye in late 2021.

19. Payourse (Nigeria)

Payrouse is a crypto startup that is building the tools and infrastructure that make it easier, faster and cheaper for anyone in Africa to access to crypto. Its founders are Hakeem Adeyemi Orewole, Bashir Aminu and John Anisere

20. Sendme, Inc (Nigeria)

Sendme is an on-demand provider of clean meat to individuals and food businesses.

21. Convoy (Nigeria)

Founded by Emmanuel Aina and Subomi Oluwalana, Convoy is an open-source cloud-native webhook service, with out-of-the-box security, reliability, and scalability for your webhooks infrastructure.

22. Curacel (Nigeria)

Curacel is an insurance infrastructure company that helps insurers, partners in Africa and other emerging markets increase the reach and functionality of insurance through cloud-based tools and APIs.

23. Plumter (Nigeria)

Plumter providing payment rails and APIs to help African merchants and consumers easily move money in and out of Africa.

24. Nash (Kenya)

Nash is an all-in-one finance platform for borderless businesses in Africa. Founded in 2021 by Anthony Wagacha, George Mbuthia and Lione Alushula, all three have experience working at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, KPMG, Microsoft and Central Bank of Kenya.

Editor's note:

• This article was updated after Frain Technologies was announced as one of the participants on the 26th of January 2022.
• Instead of 141, YC has updated their startup directory indicating that 155 startups will be participating in the YC W22.
• In February, YC added more startups to the class making it 205, including 3 African startups. (updated February 9th, 2022)
• 16th February 2022: Boya and Renmedial Health joined the YC W22 batch
• 6th March 2022: Vendy and Lenco were added to the cohort
• 29th March 2022: Boom, Payrouse, Sendme, Convoy, Curacel, Plumter and Nash were added to the cohort