Meet the African startups in YC 2023 winter batch

Y Combinator has released a list of 94 companies across the world that are part of the 2023 winter batch. As in previous batches, YC often updates its company directory with new participants who are participating in a batch. This might not be the final list of the YC 2023 winter batch.

Out of these 94 companies, three are African—all Nigerians—building solutions around financial services. Based on the YC standard deal, each of these companies will receive $500,000.

Since its first African investment in 2012 via Wave—Francophone Africa's first unicorn, YC has made investments in over 105 companies on the continent. Based on data available from the YC startup directory, Nigeria is the most preferred investment destination for the accelerator, being home to 60 companies out of the aforementioned total investments across 16 batches.

Related Article: Paystack was the first YC-backed startup from Nigeria, not PetaSales

The African startups that are participating in the Y Combinator 2023 winter batch include:

Shekel Mobility

Founded by Sanmi Olukanmi, Benjamen Oladokun and Valentine Mayaki in 2021 (the company was fully launched in 2022), Shekel Mobility is an African neobank and trading platform for car dealers.

Since its launch, Shekel Mobility has over 1000 car dealers in its network and has actively financed about 3500 vehicles worth $20 million—powering over $2 million transactions on a monthly basis.

The Nigeria-based mobility fintech recently secured $1.95 million in pre-seed funding to pursue its ambition of building the largest Auto dealership ecosystem powering $10 billion dollars by 2025. The funding round was led by Ventures Platform with participation from other strategic investors including Y Combinator, Voltron Capital, Zedcrest and other angel investors.

Bujeti

Bujeti was initially founded in December 2021 by Achille Cossi Arouko as a personal finance platform to enable the planning, organizing, and tracking of funds sent by African immigrants to their families. During the development of the platform, Achille realised that the problems of budgeting, managing and tracking transactions were not only affecting the diaspora. In fact, expense management is a central issue for a majority of African businesses that do not have the capacity to accurately manage and track how their funds are used.

After having been involved in building several AI and fintech startups, and largely contributed to the growth of the Nigerian giant Paystack, the team decided to tackle these expense management issues.

"At the heart of Bujeti is the desire to bring transparency to financial transactions, to promote accountability and enable control," says Achille. "We wanted the Black Tax to be less of a burden on the diaspora, and then realized that we would have even more impact by offering this solution directly to African businesses. We decided to pivot to a full-fledged B2B budgeting and expense management for the African market."

Waza

Waza is a B2B payments infrastructure that provides the rails for global payments and intra-Africa trade. We make it more affordable & seamless for African businesses to fulfil their global payment obligations, treasury and liquidity needs. The fintech company was founded by Emmanuel Igbodudu and Maxwell Obi in 2022.

Editor's Note: This list will be updated with new announcements from YC