Announcing ACT 1.0 China – Investment & Collaboration Tour For African Entrepreneurs
WeeTracker has always been about promoting innovation in Africa. Be it through covering stories of African entrepreneurs to crunching the data and derive market signals through THE BASE, if there’s an agenda that runs throughout all our endeavours, it’s the idea that innovation and technology will lead to a BETTER AFRICA.
A few months back, we found very similar thoughts in another company that strives to enable and accelerate innovation in Africa through their learnings in one of the world’s most booming startup ecosystem – China. We’re talking about our partners at Future HUB, an incubator and investment platform backed by the likes of Transsion Holdings, one of the largest mobile phone makers in Sub Saharan Africa and Gobi VC amongst others.
Both of our teams sat down and discussed the potential collaborations between startup ecosystems in Africa & China.
One of the key points that came out was investments into early-stage startups in Africa. We’re not talking about the USD 200-300K in investments; we are talking about investments ranging from USD 1-10 Mn. Through some data crunching at THE BASE (thanks to our fantastic web crawlers that scrapes almost everything about startup and VC), we figured that as much as African VC investments are breaking records year on year, Chinese VCs/CVCs are only betting at much later stages. Circa, USD 160 Mn cash was injected by the likes of Meituan Dianping & Transsion in O-Pay and PalmPay in 2019.
Several Chinese VCs and Corporates are looking at the market carefully and are scouting for Pre-A, A and Series B deals of less than 10 Mn USD. Multiple conversations later, we figured that an investment bridge could be created for African startups with China.
That was it, both of our teams knew what was missing and how will we solve it.
Today, we are announcing the call for application for what we are naming “ACT” – Africa China Trip for entrepreneurs. ACT 1.0 will take place in Beijing, Hungzhou and Shenzhen between 5th to 11th April 2020.
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So, if you are a startup founder in Africa OR an investor in an African startup who is:
- Operational for at least 1 year and less than 6 years old.
- The annual revenue of the business is more than USD 500K OR has an outstanding growth in terms of revenues or user base in the last 6 months.
- Raising more than 1 Million USD;
You should apply and participate in the tour.
What Will you Do In China?
- Visit and be a part of the learning sessions of Chinese-tech companies including Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance, Meituan Dianping, Transsion amongst others.
- Build your network with potential business partners, investors in China through social events.
- Engage in one-on-one meetings with top-level VCs in China to start investment conversations
- Exchange ideas with counterparts and other companies on how to build and scale businesses in emerging and evolving market environments.
Last Date To Apply: 28th February 2020
