Are you a founder turning one of Africa’s biggest challenges into a global business? 

In partnership with Future Africa and Prosper Africa, Accelerate is offering 10 spots for the continent's top founders. The program will run from April 1 - May 31, 2024

During this time, you will learn to: 

• craft a compelling mission, vision and story of impact
• assemble, motivate, and lead a high performing team
• find your path to the first million dollars in revenue
• build a product that your customers can’t live without
• fundraise from the world’s best investors on demo day

Two of the top operator VCs in Africa will be supporting you. Iyinoluwa Aboyeji and Mia von Koschitzky-Kimani have built, funded and advised hundreds of African founding teams like Andela, Flutterwave, Moove BV, Daystar Power, DukaConnect amongst others, on how to build global businesses from Africa by solving our continent’s biggest challenges. Many of those businesses have grown to become billion-dollar companies with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues, or been acquired by global businesses like Mastercard and Shell. 

Over the last decade, these two have also been advising startups like yours and supporting their path to global accelerators, including about 25+ founders who have been admitted to date. Increasingly, our team realized that many of these accelerators do not have the local market context to help founders succeed in a way that matches the complexities of building in Africa, but rather than wait for a solution, we decided to build one. 

While building a global accelerator was not in the original plans, we see the importance and opportunity to fill a gap for the ecosystem and aim to build the YC of Africa. 

Applications are open now through February 16th, program begins on April 1st, and Demo Day is planned for May 30. Costs for accommodations and food are covered for the 2 week onsite period, which runs during the last two weeks of May. 

For the 10 spots, we are looking for founders with lived experience, solving the kinds of problems that can become global businesses. Founders who can build global companies come in a variety of backgrounds, abilities, languages, genders, ages, ethnicities, and more. 40% of our portfolio have women founders. Our oldest founders are in their 60s and 70s. We have 10+ African countries represented in our portfolio. We seek founders who don’t fit the traditional mold and are partnering with a variety of organizations to ensure that our application is seen by a variety of founders. If you would like to partner with us on this effort, please reach out at [email protected]. 

Stay tuned for Q&A sessions and see more info about the program details, timelines, and FAQs by going to www.acceler8.africa