WeeTracker Spins off TheBASE, Launches It As Data-As-A-Service Platform AfriCo

As the world starts looking at Africa as the next frontier market, reliable and accurate data on African businesses remains a challenge and a problem that needs solving.

With the aim of solving that problem, the team at WeeTracker launched TheBASE last year to address specific pain points surrounding access to African business data.

After launching in September 2019, TheBASE amassed 5,700 registered subscribers by June 2020 who spent an average of 9 minutes on the platform.

“Subscribers came from all over the world, even countries we didn’t expect from including Fiji, Pakistan, Hawaii,” said Rishabh Lawania, CEO of Wee Media, the publishers of WeeTracker, among other platforms.

Thus, it was decided in March 2020 that TheBASE would be spun off as an independent entity with a separate team and leadership. The new entity will now exist as a robust Business Intelligence platform for African data known as AfriCo.

The key difference between TheBASE and AfriCo is that AfriCo focuses on data about not just startups but traditional SMEs, big private and public companies, VCs, PEs, and Investment holding firms across the African continent.

AfriCo already has 15,000+ profiles of African startups, SMEs, corporates, VCs, PEs, and an unrivalled number of deals and transactions dating as far back as 1989.

“We have rebuilt the entire platform in a very short span of time. From the UX to the underlying data model, the whole team has spent months on building logics, classifiers, data quality benchmarks with the end-user in mind,” explained Lawania.

The new platform, AfriCo, will be accessed through a subscription channel. The pricing structure is yet to be made public and pricing details will be communicated with potential clients exclusively.

The platform is targeted at professionals working in Corporate Development, VC/PE, Investment Banking, Universities, and business development arms of companies trying to tap into the African market.

Though the database product is based on a paid membership model, AfriCo will release multiple free reports on the African tech landscape. AfriCo is partnering with renowned media houses in an endeavour to help them access data points on African businesses.

Wee Media’s flagship platform, WeeTracker, recently unveiled a paywall which they call, WT Premium, and announced subscription plans for Africa-focused journalism.

“Search for cobalt mining companies in DR Congo. The whole world knows that DR Congo is one of the key locations for the extraction of important materials that support modern-day tech, from high-end smartphones to electric vehicles. But it’s quite odd that there is no data on which companies are on the ground. None whatsoever. We’re solving that with AfriCo,” added Lawania.

Note: WeeTracker is an editorial partner for AfriCo.