Foundry’s Pitch Night — A Celebration of Creativity, Technology and Innovation.
In the past three years, the Nest hub has consistently showed up to her promise of facilitating growth in various spheres of influence in Nigeria and abroad.
Foundry, an initiative of the Nest is doing exceptional in supporting innovative businesses build fast growth tech-enabled businesses through mentorship and funding. The Pitch Night, an initiative of Foundry is an experience uniquely designed to offer these resources to start-ups on a platter.
To mark the Nest’s third year anniversary, the hub hosted the Pitch Night 2.0.
This year’s Pitch Night was particularly inspiring as it celebrated creativity and innovation in a grand style.
What happens at The Pitch Night?
At the Pitch Night, investment-ready start-ups are introduced to prospective investment opportunities.
This initiative provides an opportunity for early-stage start-ups to present their products or services to an audience that can provide the resources needed for them to scale. Start-ups use this opportunity to get feedback on their business, validate and idealise their products, raise awareness, seek talent and help to grow their products.
In addition, the Pitch night provides accepted start-ups with the opportunity to interact with potential investors under the same roof, which is a golden leverage for start-ups to scale.
Foundry did a beautiful job in ensuring all the boxes are checked to make this year’s Pitch Night remarkable.
The Pitch Night 2.0 featured a balanced mix of start-ups across different sectors; start-ups addressing different issues across diverse sectors.
It is worthy to note that getting a slot as a start-up in the Pitch Night is not a walk in the park, start-ups have a list of criteria to meet.
The six start-ups presented in this last event each have a team working full time on their product/service (including co-founders) and have been operating for a minimum of 12 months. Also, the start-ups have proven MVP and incorporated.
In attendance were ten highly meticulous investors, among them are; Taiwo Shotubo, Nonso Magulike, Tobi Obasai, Representatives of Midlothian Angel Investors, Dr. Wale Olasoji of Chevron Corporative, Oyeyinka Oyekan of Luxant Limited, Timi from Magic Funds, and Olayinka Oke of Ingressive Capital.
With the calibre of investors present, you can tell that the presenting start-ups had to bring their A-game.
Six start-ups providing remarkable solutions across different sectors presented at The Pitch Night, they are:
Start-up 1: Kodobe
Industry: Gamification
Founder(s): Fikayo Otun, Tofunmi Babatunde
Foluso Adulojo (Customer success)
This company provides low-code gamification tools and APIs that allow businesses to grow key customer metrics by up to 4x. These metrics include customer acquisition, conversions, engagements (transactions) and retention using engaging gamification tools. The beauty is their acquisition and on-boarding process. New businesses can be on-boarded and roll out gamification services in as little as 3 clicks.
They currently have: $81k Total Revenue till date, 4 enterprise customers. 2 of them are banks and they are about to on-board a 3rd. Projected 2022 revenue is $2m.
Start-up 2: Drugstore
Industry: Pharmatech
Founder: Adeyemi Olutoye
This company operates as an e-pharmacy marketplace that helps patients buy drugs, medical and hospital equipment from registered pharmacies in Nigeria with the option of picking it up at the pharmacy or door delivery. The sweet part about this business is their steady 30% MoM growth till date, plus the fact that they have been profitable from day 1.
With over a million monthly impressions, and 10,000 conversions (monthly order), their current sales traction is $35,000 monthly.
Start-up 3: Keble
Industry: PropTech/Fintech
Founder: Emmanuel Oballa (CEO)
Jose Maria Agulanna(COO)
This company is a fractional real estate investment platform that allows Africans to invest in premium properties with as little as $10. Their vetted assets start Africans on the path to wealth management and financial inclusion at their own pace. Yes, they have decided to build crowd-funding to the property sector and billed to become major disruptors.
They have processed $122k assets under management, paid out $95k on dividends and made $12k on revenue across 300 users pre — launch with a $2,000,000 Valuation Cap.
Start-up 3: Staarm
Industry: Mobility
Founder(s): Simi Adejumo, Quadri Agboluaje
This company operates as a peer-to-peer marketplace where individuals can hire out the extra cars in their pools to customers who prefer to drive themselves. Yes, new to Nigeria, but if you travel a lot, we all use this. Think about the wedding, parties and funerals and general trips that you would rather use a Ferrari or Jaguar. They started with the urge to simplify the mundane and tedious process of renting a vehicle, removing hassle of paper works, long queues and limited variety.
They have carried out over $17,000 in transactions so far with their mobile app out on the Android and iOS platforms. A slight but interesting discovery: They realised people want credit and are willing to buy cars for this and have also uncovered asset financing.
Start-up 4: Learners Corner
Industry: EduTech
Cofounder: Julius Ilori
This company is dedicated to revolutionising online education in Africa by helping learners reach their full academic potentials, build capacity, enhance and engage digital learning experience to achieve academic excellence. Their work also include the capacity development of educators and the provision of a platform that supports them to respond to 21st-century education trends or demands.
Compared to other Edutech start-ups, this company employs a three prolong model of operation; the learners corner web app, educational content creation for other organisations, teachers’ development Program and learners corner educational research.
Start-up 5: Scrapay
Industry: WasteTech
Cofounder: Tope Sulaimon
This company is creating the operating system infrastructure for the recycling value chain. For those who believe in going green and monitoring the growth of recycling companies, this is one start-up to watch out for. They are creating the tech infrastructure to service these firms.
They do this by using a fusion of online and offline technologies that allow individuals to start, grow, and scale their mini-recycling businesses.
With a traction of; network size — 315, volume — 311,000, users — 7,545 and revenue -$158,000, their model is a fusion of Finance, Technology, and Recycling, powering the future of Recycling as a Business.
It was indeed a competitive and inspiring atmosphere at the Pitch Night 2.0. The start-ups did their best to intrigue and win over the investors by presenting their solutions, as well as answering pertinent questions.
The Foundry came through in making this year’s event remarkable. What a beautiful execution presenting opportunities on a platter in the tech ecosystem.
We are proud of this accomplishment and the Nest couldn’t have celebrated her anniversary any better than celebrating solution-providers.
Cheers to more years of impact in the innovation and tech space!
