As startups in Africa continue to grow and raise money at a ridiculous pace, so too will their cap tables expand. Most African startups’ bulk of VC money is from foreign investors, making it imperative for African startups to incorporate abroad, especially in the U.S.

The processes for incorporation are quite complicated, and even though most founders still get the hang of it, they risk the chance of messing up their cap tables. For instance, some Nigerian startups are guilty of issuing preferred shares in naira and then canceling to issue dollar-denominated SAFEs when they get incorporated in the U.S.

Raise, a startup building Africa’s Carta is tackling these challenges and has received backing from 500 Startups to scale its technology.

In 2019, Marvin Coleby, Tina Nyamache and Eugene Mutai set out to create a blockchain solution that would make it easier for people to buy and sell shares in pre-IPO companies in Africa. After running several iterations, they found out that most companies still struggled with the concept of equity and liquidity. They spent money managing corporate structures for holding companies in Delaware, Canada, and Europe but maintained paper-based subsidiaries across Africa.

According to Coleby, most of the equity across Africa is still stored, tracked and updated using paper certificates, manual processes and fragmented government databases. This raises transaction costs to manage subsidiaries and issue employee stock options. It also inflates costs to enter and exit positions in private and public companies.

So they started Raise to help startups, investors, employees, and law firms manage deals, cap tables and corporate compliance. 

On the platform, Raise customers can also automate due diligence, set valuations, track employee stock vesting and make routine documentation for licenses and government documents in Nigeria and Kenya. 

When Raise launched in 2019, it was in private beta and was backed by Binance Labs, the sole investor in its pre-seed round. Since proceeding to a public beta in 2020, Raise has onboarded customers like Anjarwalla & Khanna, Africa’s largest law firm; startups Bamboo, Workpay and Mono; and VC firms like Microtraction and Chrysalis Capital.

But the long-term problem Raise is trying to solve is liquidity, Coleby tells TechCrunch on a call.

“Everything we do is to find a way to make it easier for founders, customers, employees, investors to get liquidity from investing in companies,” he said. “Companies are raising money, people are investing, and employees are getting stock options. However, there are only one or two exits now and then. That’s because we build with the Silicon Valley model where we have to grow, scale until we get some big exit. From our perspective, liquidity doesn’t have to be that way. It can be small little pieces of liquidity that employees and investors get over time.”

By that measure, Africa’s capital markets for private and public companies are painfully illiquid. It takes several months or years to buy or sell equity, and, according to Raise, over $1 trillion of stock in Africa is “illiquid, paper-based and priced in inflationary currencies.”

Nigerian stock trading platforms like Chaka, Bamboo and Trove help Nigerians create liquidity for assets locally and internationally. However, Raise aims to build the platform behind them to streamline more asset classes and investment opportunities.

While that’s still in the works, Raise organizes ownership data for African companies and makes them accessible. It’s a similar play to what Carta, a $3 billion company offering cap table software, does for U.S. companies.

Over time, onboarding cap tables and equity data will also open up use cases for Carta to become a blockchain-based digital asset platform. The plan is to become more like Africa’s Nasdaq for private companies as it hopes to sell indexes, ETFs, futures, and assets for them. Coleby says in that way, Raise will become an equity engine for processing Africa’s hundreds of billion dollars of trade and securities volume.

Coleby says the number of companies going live is increasing 60% month-on-month. The platform manages about 200 cap tables with assets worth more than $400 million. The next phase of growth, according to Coleby, will be onboarding Series A and growth-stage companies onto the platform.

The company is active in Nigeria and Kenya. Coleby says a seed round is in the works to continue growing deeper into those markets and experiment with funding and liquidity operations across the African VC space.

Next, Raise is building a marketplace that continues connecting and educating investors, employees, and founders in one platform with their law firms to use trusted and verified data to do deals and issue stock options to employees.

Less than a year after its $3 million seed round, Verifiable snapped up another $17 million for its healthcare provider credentialing API toolkit.

The Austin-based company’s technology creates an infrastructure for healthcare provider data management that puts providers at the center. Verifiable founder Nick Macario told TechCrunch that data fuels critical operations across health systems and insurance carriers, like contracting, credentialing, enrollment, claims and directories. All of this is being done manually now, and often inaccurately, which is leading to billions of dollars of annual waste.

Verifiable’s infrastructure manages healthcare providers and automates the verification of provider data, enabling automation of business processes like credentialing, payer enrollment and network management for virtual healthcare platforms, health systems and insurance payers. It is able to reduce credentialing turnaround times by over 70%, Macario said.

Insurance payers is the newest part of the company’s expansion that includes verifying provider directories. For example, the information that pops up when someone performs an in-network search on their healthcare plan’s website to find a certain provider in their area.

The Altman brothers led the $17 million Series A round and was joined by David Sacks/Craft Ventures and a group of individual investors including Flexport’s Ryan Petersen, Rippling’s Parker Conrad, Front’s Mathilde Collin, Syapse’s Jonathan Hirsch, Todd Goldberg and Rahul Vohra. Tiger Global and existing investors also participated in the round.

Macario was also planning to raise another round of funding, but he said the combination of an inflection point with the product and Jack Altman’s continued investment interest made it a good time to start scaling the team.

Altman said the general space of healthcare technology has potential. It is also a topic near to him — his wife is a nurse. He was speaking to her about what Verifiable was working on, and she told him that there are still teams of people doing this.

“So much data is flowing through, and because healthcare is such a massive part of the country’s GDP, there is so much potential that can be unlocked,” Altman added. “I love Verifiable’s positioning around the provider. They are the people between the healthcare system and the patient, so to have access to their data, patients can form a relationship with them, which is a powerful position.”

In addition to expanding into insurance payers, Macario intends to use the new funding to double his team of 26 employees by the end of the year. The company has openings for engineers, operations and go-to-market talent.

Verifiable works with companies like Lyra Health, Talkspace, Modern Health, Headway, Wheel, Quartet Health, Forward and provider networks to automate credentialing, compliance processes and provider operations.

“Verifiable’s infrastructure has verified hundreds of thousands of providers and we plan to continue to double down on providers, use cases and payers,” Macario said.

 

U.K.-based open banking bulk payment startup Comma has raised £4.34 million ($6 million) in a seed round of funding led by Octopus Ventures and Connect Ventures. They were joined by investors Village Global, and the founders of Wagestream, Peter Briffett and Portman Wills.

The company says it enables small and micro businesses to bulk-pay bills, salaries and taxes using existing high street small business bank accounts, saving them a lot of time and money in administration. This is because BACS is difficult to obtain and costly, and virtual accounts require KYC to set up and add complexity to bookkeeping.

Comma says that during the pandemic there was a large increase in outsourced financial operations. The availability of open banking bulk payment APIs from several of the high street banks made the product possible, which led to the startup picking up a great deal more business.

The Comma app connects to accounting systems (Xero, QuickBooks, Sage) and allows a business or their accountant to enter and manage supplier bank details without needing bank access. They can pay between 15-50 payees at once and the system posts payments against bills back to the accounting system to mark what has been paid.

Founder Tom Beckenham said: “I worked as COO of a business that was billing across continents and paying hundreds of staff. It was a very manual process. It occurred to me that larger businesses had corporate banking and systems that managed payments. Small businesses did not and were largely ignored. I noticed that traditional methods of solving the problem for small businesses had high setup costs — eliminating most of the market.”

He said he saw an opportunity to use new open banking technology to get to this long tail of businesses and solve payments holistically: “We have just got past the £1,000,000 in payments so far. We will get to £1 million per week by the end of the quarter.”

In the U.K. the startup competes to some extent with Credec, Telleroo and BACS bureaus such as ADP. Internationally, Melio in the U.S. is the closest comparison. Libeo in France is also offering something similar.

This past decade, Nigeria has seen several companies cater to the development and growth of software engineers and tech talent in general. It’s a space many in the Nigerian ecosystem like to think is budding yet overcrowded.

So when Chika Nwobi started Decagon in 2018, the perception was generally “here comes another tech talent accelerator.” Two years on, the entrepreneur who is a household name has significantly scaled the company to new heights.

Today, Decagon is announcing its $1.5 million seed round and a student loan financing facility of $25 million from Nigerian financial institution Sterling Bank.

As a serial founder, Nwobi ran a couple of tech businesses, most notably mobile internet company MTech in the early 2000s. With Decagon, Nwobi is charting new territory in the fast-paced startup world after years of investing via his seed-stage firm called L5Lab.

Nwobi says Decagon aims to address the underrepresentation of black people in tech globally, starting with Nigeria. The West African country is the most populous on the continent and the most populous black nation globally.

The dire need for tech talent in Nigeria has become more evident these days, where startups are raising venture capital at a ridiculous pace. Youth unemployment in the country is at a staggering 50%, and while tech has presented an avenue to create jobs, supply isn’t catching up with demand. And more worrisome is the fact that the country’s best talents are leaving in droves to foreign companies in the U.S, Canada, the U.K., and Germany.

So the issue really is supply. If supply is fixed, everyone is happy. That’s what Decagon hopes for by training and connecting engineers to work remotely with both local and international companies. “Microsoft, Facebook and Google have all invested in building engineering offices in Nigeria, but most other companies can’t afford to do that, so we help them access top talent to work as remote engineers,” Nwobi said.

Decagon runs a six-month software engineering program and selects its candidates based on merit. It’s a paid program, and the software engineers are expected to pay about N2 million (~$4,000) tuition to get in. Then, the company employs an income-sharing model when the engineers find work and start earning upon graduation.

But what if the trainees can not afford the program in the first place? The student loan financing takes care of that, and students who take that option are expected to repay N3 million (~$6,000) in the space of three years.

The company claims to be the first to create such merit-based loan financing for students in Nigeria. The financing is in partnership with the financier Sterling Bank and Nigeria’s apex bank, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). It allows Decagon to offer a Pay-After-Learning plan that provides the trainees with laptops, accommodation, internet, meal allowance and a stipend. No upfront payment is expected, says the company.

Decagon says while more than 80,000 people have applied to partake in its program, it has accepted only 440 candidates. That’s a 0.55% acceptance rate. However, Nwobi discloses three figures to show the company is on the right track: the company has recorded a 100% placement rate for its trainees, a 100% loan repayment rate, and a 410% salary increment made by its software engineers after getting placement.

Global tech talent company Andela employed this model before pivoting, and while it didn’t work for them, it seems to be working for Decagon. The reason is likely because Andela used equity financing to carry out these operations, whereas Decagon uses debt. 

Obinna Ukachukwu, the divisional head of Sterling Bank, commenting on the student loan financing, said, “We got involved to support alternative education by providing loans for Nigerian students complemented with financial literacy training. Based on the excellent performance of the current portfolio, it made sense to scale our support to Decagon.”

For its equity financing, Decagon raised money from Kepple Africa and Timon Capital. Some angel investors like Paul Kokoricha, managing partner of the private equity business of ACA, and Tokyo-based UNITED Inc., also took part.

Nwobi says Decagon operates at the intersection of edtech, fintech and the future of work, and the funds will be used to scale its efforts on the three fronts. The company will also be looking to deepen gender inclusion by increasing female participation in its cohorts from 25% (its current stats) to 50% in the next three years.

The CEO adds that the company which he refers to as a “tech talent catalyst” is profitable and growing at 500% per annum. “We see this capital as fuel to accelerate our mission to transform exceptional people, often from under-represented backgrounds, into world-class engineers by connecting them with financing, in-demand skills and their dream jobs.”

“We’re thrilled to work with Decagon to build up the top 0.5% of vetted engineering talent in Africa and help connect them to global tech opportunities. The frequency of engineering leaders from US and European companies in our network ask about sourcing African and Nigerian technical talent has increased at a rapid clip, and we’re excited to lean into that and help Decagon on their mission,” partner at Timon Capital, Chris Muscarella, said in a statement.

Decagon’s raise comes when there is general skepticism about the viability of tech talent accelerators on the continent despite their apparent need.

Before Andela changed its model, it was a clear market leader with over $180 million in its arsenal. Since it’s pivot, funding has relatively stalled for most of these companies. Maybe Decagon’s student loan financing method will be the new trendsetter in a space that desperately needs investment to solve Africa’s talent problem.

More than 40 African startups from a handful of countries have gone through YC over the past decade. Zambia joins that list today, and its entrant, Union54, is a worthy first entry.

Union54 (54 is a nod to the number of African countries) is a fintech company founded by Perseus Mlambo and Alessandra Martini. The startup claims to be Africa’s first card-issuing API and only just launched this year. But to paint the picture, Union54 didn’t come out of thin air; it is a project from the couple’s earlier startup Zazu.

Zazu was launched in 2015 as a challenger bank in Zambia. As with any fintech on the continent, Zazu had to create its own debit cards that users could connect to a wallet. Most times, Zazu would have to wait months for partner banks in the country to issue these cards. Mlambo tells me that at one point they had to wait for 18 months.

All this while the founders began to work with banks around the region to start issuing cards themselves. But the banks were lethargic in their approaches. “We just realized that either the processor or the bank was not necessarily well equipped to be able to answer our questions or to be able to give us the product that we’re looking for,” Mlambo said to TechCrunch in an interview.

The startup decided to go for the bullseye and meet with Mastercard. I mean, why wait for banks when you can bag those who issue these cards in the first place, right? Ultimately, the company got a Mastercard Principle membership, the first fintech from Africa, it claims.

As a principal member, Zazu became authorized to act as an “issuing bank.” In other words, they can provide debit cards and as “acquirers,” which means they can provide transaction processing services.

Along the way, the founders realized that to really advance African fintech, it was imperative to make it easier for any African country’s fintech to issue virtual or physical debit cards. So the team spun out Union54 from Zazu. The platform now has several APIs that make it simple for any fintech to issue programmable debit cards.

“We’ve now used our membership to be able to help other companies, any African fintech who wants to issue their own cards. They can just come to us, plug into our APIs, and move quickly, without needing to spend a long time negotiating,” Mlambo said about providing the service for other African fintechs.

The CEO adds that the company targets fintechs that don’t want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in setup fees to get virtual or physical cards. Union54 claims to issue cards in weeks via an API that does BIN sponsorship, program management and settlement, among other features.

Being able to do this gives Union54 bragging rights as Africa’s first card-issuing API. Fintechs have rarely looked at this opportunity; most are focused on other segments from payment gateways to wallets. It’s an interesting point to note because somehow, all the big players in these segments end up trying to create virtual and physical cards for their customers and face complications doing so. That’s the void Union54 wants to fill, and although it’s currently in beta, the company boasts of an impressive unnamed clientele signed up on its wait list and currently using the platform.

“The fascinating thing about these companies is that they are not B or C players. They are in the top 5% of African fintech. And for me, I always tell people, we’re now in the golden generation of African fintech. So it’s really the perfect time for a card-issuing product to be able to work with all of these guys considered leaders in their space. It means we really do have something that people want to use every day,” the CEO added.

On the company’s site, there are eight use cases for its API: ledger-based, acquirers/gateways, buy now, pay later, credit union, delivery companies, digital banking, credit card management and corporate cards.

Fintechs using Union54 are also allowed to design the cards and set the currency in which they want the cards to be charged, and set an extensive catalog of who will use them, what they will be used for, when they will be used and how they will be used.

Union54 charges fintechs on a pay-as-you-go basis for every API call. If a fintech company wants to create a physical card, they are charged a flat fee between $7-9 and an undisclosed flat fee when a transaction is made.

Mlambo says getting into the summer batch of YC 2021 has allowed the company to sign up its first set of customers, as most of them have come from YC’s network. He calls YC a program that has been “worth it from day one.”

“I am really excited and proud that Union54 has become the first Zambian fintech to get accepted into Y Combinator. And the second in Southern Africa. As you will know, when global investors look at Africa, they often do so from a West African perspective and our getting into Y Combinator validates a small part of our broader hypothesis: it is possible to service Africa from friendly jurisdictions such as Zambia.”

Micromobility startup Voi has raised $45 million, funds it says will be used to research and develop technology that will improve safety, keep users from riding on sidewalks and ensure scooters are properly parked.

The funding comes a month after Voi launched a pilot in Northhampton, U.K. with Irish startup Luna to test how computer vision technology might be used to solve parking and sidewalk riding issues. The R&D spending will include “pioneering the use of computer vision software to prevent pavement riding,” according to a statement released by the company.

“We are leading the way in that technology — we want to embrace that technology, like Luna, to make available next year on our fleet for the masses,” a spokesperson for Voi told TechCrunch, who also noted the company is open to outfitting its e-bikes with computer vision technology.

The Voi spokesperson told TechCrunch the company is happy with the progress it has made to date and is exploring its own proprietary technology, which could include acquiring Luna. No decisions or acquisitions have been made so far, but Voi is also investing in its next-generation scooter. It’s possible that the next vehicle comes with computer vision built in, rather than retrofitted to the stem.

Voi, which already has scooters in 70 cities across the U.K. and Europe, is aiming to expand. And technology that solves parking, safety and sidewalk clutter is viewed by Voi as key to winning city partnerships and maintaining the ones it already has.

Voi is also using the funds to work on the sidewalk parking problem by adding physical parking racks. On Wednesday, Voi installed 100 parking racks in Stockholm in agreement with the city. Voi already has over 300 physical parking racks in the U.K.

Voi uses a swappable battery system that’s popular with other operators like Lime and Spin, which means the racks are just there for keeping scooters out of the public right of way. Voi says having physical racks will help “create a sustainable service for cities and the people living in them.”

This latest round brings Voi’s total funding to $205 million. The round was led by The Raine Group, and existing investors like VNV Global participated alongside new investors. The company did not specify who those new investors are.

 

While Amsterdam garners the lion’s share of attention in the Netherlands tech ecosystem, the not-so-far-away region around Utrecht has its fair share of tech startups and investors, as is evidenced by our latest survey of locals, below.

Area ecosystem wranglers such as StartupUtrecht, UtrechtInc, Holland Startup, Utrecht Community and others bring startups, scaleups, corporates, angels, VCs, local government, banks and universities together to build the local startup ecosystem. They also benefit from the formidable Netherlands tech advocate initiative StartupDelta and The Netherlands Enterprise Agency, which promote the Netherlands more widely.

Utrecht is the fourth-largest city in the Netherlands, with 350,000 inhabitants. Its offices and co-working spaces include Dotslash Utrecht, De Stadstuin, MindSpace and Tribes; as well as accelerator programs like Startupbootcamp and Techleap.

Notable startups from the region include Distimo (acquired by AppAnnie), unicorn GitLab, MoneyMonk and StuComm. Plus there are newer ones such as SnappCar, Blendle, Merus, Nibblr, United Wardrobe, Näpp, Lalaland, 2DAYSMOOD and Remind2Change.

Our survey respondents think the ecosystem is strong in sustainable energy, medtech, food tech, life sciences, marketplaces, deep tech, gaming and media. However, they seem to think it’s weaker in design, hardware, fintech, robotics and agritech.

Notable startups named by our respondents include Channable, Pepscope, Goin’ Connect, Fundsup, Tover, Faqta, Sensorfact, SODAQ, Picnic, Neurolytics, De Clique, Solease, BikeFlip, Packaly, DiManEx, Trunkrs, DialogueTrainer, EatMyRide, CART-Tech, Prolira, among many, many others. It just goes to show the region has a strong and growing ecosystem.

The investment scene is described variously as focusing on software, clean tech, life sciences, biotech, organoids, 3D bioprinting, AI and VR/AR. One says: “In Amsterdam it’s ok. Utrecht is a bit lagging.” Another said, “The investor scene focuses on early-stage, scalable tech in healthcare, sustainability and education. [There are] many local informal investors and nationally operating VCs.”

With the shift to remote working, many respondents think people will “preferably move out of the city center toward the villages nearby” as there is “a lot of nature/space around.” That said, Utrecht is “a growing hub” and many will “stay in the city. But fewer people will move in, and remote working is there to stay.” It’s also easy to work remotely in the Netherlands given its proximity to other big European cities, so it may attract new digital nomads, “thanks to the central position of Utrecht in the middle of the country and the attractiveness of the ecosystem.”

We surveyed:

Jorg Kop, investment manager, ROM Utrecht RegionStefan Braam, incubation lead, UtrechtIncIrene Van de Poll, investment manager, ROM Utrecht RegionArthur Tolsma, CEO and co-founder, CodeanPaul Mignot, founder and CEO, WiththegridMarcel Merkx, founder and CEO, CargoSnapJasper Voorendonk, marketer/founder, AgnostiPayMenno Vergeer, co-founder and CEO, RedgraspRoelof Reineman, entrepreneurLuuk Post, partner, De ContentkalenderLeon Brunenberg, managing partner, Arches CapitalErik Stam, co-founder, Stichting Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Observatory

Jorg Kop, investment manager, ROM Utrecht Region

What industry sectors is your tech ecosystem strong in? What are you most excited by? What is it weak in?
Digital, gaming, e-health, edtech, sustainability.

Which are the most interesting startups in your city?
Channable, Pandora Intelligence, Sensorfact, SnappCar, Faqta, StuComm, DiManEx, Prolira, CART-Tech.

What are the tech investors like? What is the investment scene like in your city? What’s their focus?
Many local informal investors and national operating VCs.

With the shift to remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic, will people stay in your city, move out, or will others move in?
Others will be moving in, thanks to the central position of Utrecht in the middle of the country and the attractiveness of the ecosystem.

Who are the key startup people in your city (e.g., investors, founders, lawyers, designers, etc.)? 
Sjoerd Mol (Benvalor), Erik Stam (Utrecht University), Robbert-Jan Hanse (Holland Startup), Heerd Jan Hoogeveen (Startup Utrecht), Jorg Kop (UtrechtInc and ROM), Edgard Creemers (ROM).

Where do you see your city’s tech scene in five years’ time?
Part of the greater Amsterdam region from an international brand perspective, closely working together with all other key startup regions in NL.

Stefan Braam, incubation lead, UtrechtInc

What industry sectors is your tech ecosystem strong in? What are you most excited by? What is it weak in?
Strong: AI, health, sustainability and learning. Weak: robotics, engineering, ag.

Which are the most interesting startups in your city?
Solease, SnappCar, BikeFlip, Packaly, Sensorfact, DiManEx, Näpp, Trunkrs, StuComm, Faqta, DialogueTrainer, EatMyRide, CART-Tech, Prolira, MRIguidance, Redgrasp, SyncVR, DigiDok, Learned.io, 2DAYSMOOD, Hooray and Goin’ Connect, Fundsup.

What are the tech investors like? What is the investment scene like in your city? What’s their focus?
Focus on health tech.

With the shift to remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic, will people stay in your city, move out, or will others move in?
Stay: a lot of nature/space around.

Who are the key startup people in your city (e.g., investors, founders, lawyers, designers, etc.)? 
Jorg Kop, Stefan Braam

Where do you see your city’s tech scene in five years’ time?
Utrecht, as the Dutch vibrant hub for early-stage, highly scalable tech startups.

Menno Vergeer, co-founder and CEO, Redgrasp

What industry sectors is your tech ecosystem strong in? What are you most excited by? What is it weak in?
Strong in life sciences.

Which are the most interesting startups in your city?
Channable, Redgrasp, Trunkrs.

With the shift to remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic, will people stay in your city, move out, or will others move in?
People will preferably move out of the city center toward the villages nearby (all within a range of 10-20 km).

Where do you see your city’s tech scene in five years’ time?
It will grow at a rate similar to the global tech scene.

Roelof Reineman, entrepreneur

What industry sectors is your tech ecosystem strong in? What are you most excited by? What is it weak in?
Strong: IT, digital, sustainable energy, medical, food. Weaker: design, hardware, fintech.

Which are the most interesting startups in your city?
KokeRoo.

What are the tech investors like? What is the investment scene like in your city? What’s their focus?
A focus on building a better world and a profit, not just the profit.

With the shift to remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic, will people stay in your city, move out, or will others move in?
Stay. Tt is a lush, green city with plenty of room to live and breathe.

Who are the key startup people in your city (e.g., investors, founders, lawyers, designers, etc.)? 
Utrecht Inc (Jasper Voorendonk). Dotslash (Jelle Drijver). StartupUtrecht (Heerd Jan Hoogeveen).

Where do you see your city’s tech scene in five years’ time?
Thriving and still growing.

Luuk Post, partner, De Contentkalender

What industry sectors is your tech ecosystem strong in? What are you most excited by? What is it weak in?

We’re strong in public affairs. We’re weak in the for-profit sector.

Which are the most interesting startups in your city?
Moveshelf.

With the shift to remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic, will people stay in your city, move out, or will others move in?
The city of Utrecht is ever-expanding; people will always move in.

Leon Brunenberg, managing partner, Arches Capital

What industry sectors is your tech ecosystem strong in? What are you most excited by? What is it weak in?
SAAS, software, B2B.

What are the tech investors like? What is the investment scene like in your city? What’s their focus?
In Amsterdam it’s ok. Utrecht is a bit lagging.

With the shift to remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic, will people stay in your city, move out, or will others move in?
Stay.

Where do you see your city’s tech scene in five years’ time?
In Holland, second after Amsterdam.

Erik Stam, co-founder, Stichting Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Observatory

What industry sectors is your tech ecosystem strong in? What are you most excited by? What is it weak in?
Strong: health, edtech, IT.

Which are the most interesting startups in your city?
Channable, Tover, De Clique, Bittiq, Neurolytics.

What are the tech investors like? What is the investment scene like in your city? What’s their focus?
IT, health, edtech, travel.

With the shift to remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic, will people stay in your city, move out, or will others move in?
Stay.

Who are the key startup people in your city (e.g., investors, founders, lawyers, designers, etc.)? 
Jorg Kop, Heerd Jan Hoogeveen, Robbert Jan Hanse.

Where do you see your city’s tech scene in five years’ time?
Expanding.

Educators in Europe are revamping education tech to take a huge stride forward in the post-pandemic marketplace.Read More

Last summer, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Best Buy committed to “do better” when it came to supporting communities of color. As part of the retail giant’s self-proclaimed mission to better address underrepresentation and technology inequities, the company announced today that it is investing up to $10 million in Brown Venture Group.

Minnesota-based Brown Venture Group is a three-year-old venture capital firm that has pledged to exclusively back Black, Latino and Indigenous technology startups in “emerging technologies.” Black and Latin communities were the recipients of just 2.6% of total funding in 2020, according to Crunchbase data. 

Brown Venture Group is in the process of fundraising for its targeted inaugural $50 million fund, 75% of which has been committed, according to its principals. This means that Minneapolis-based Best Buy’s pledge to invest “up to $10 million” could represent as much as 20% of the total capital raised, making it a lead LP in the fund.

Brown Venture Group co-founder and managing partner Dr. Paul Campbell said that in the early days of forming the firm, he and co-founder Dr. Chris Brooks were told by “multiple people locally” that they should leave the Twin Cities metro area because “all the capital was on the coasts.”

“We just made a firm decision in the very early stages to stay put in the Twin Cities and that we wanted this to be a Twin City story,” Campbell told TechCrunch. “So when we thought about our Twin Cities ecosystem and who we wanted to be leading partners with, Best Buy was at the top of the list. So we are just more than excited to have Best Buy as a lead LP in our fund.” 

For its part, Best Buy — which notched $47 billion in revenue last year — said the move is aimed at helping “break down the systemic barriers often faced by Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) entrepreneurs — including lack of access to funding — and empowering the next generation within the tech industry.”

The company added: “The partnership with Brown Venture Group will work toward making the technology startup landscape more inclusive and creating a stronger community of diverse suppliers.”

In conjunction with announcing Best Buy’s commitment to the fund, the company and venture firm said they would jointly launch an entrepreneurship program at Best Buy Teen Tech Centers to help develop young entrepreneurs through education, mentorship, networking and funding access.

Brown Venture Group — whose name was chosen to represent an “inclusive” skin color of the groups it represents — has so far invested in five companies, including clean energy startup Ecolution kwh.

Ten million dollars seems like a drop in the bucket for a company that generated sales of $47 billion last year. Best Buy said this initiative is just one of several that it has underway to support BIPOC businesses, including plans to provide $44 million to expand college prep and career opportunities for BIPOC students and a pledge to spend at least $1.2 billion with BIPOC and diverse businesses by 2025. The company has also said that by 2025 it will fill one out of three new non-hourly corporate positions with BIPOC employees and hire 1,000 new employees to its technology team, with 30% of them being diverse, specifically Black, Latinx, Indigenous and women.

“We’re committed to taking meaningful action to address the challenges faced by BIPOC entrepreneurs,” Best Buy CEO Corie Barry said in a written statement. “Through partnerships like this, we believe we can begin to do this by helping to build a stronger, more vibrant community of diverse innovators in the tech industry, some of whom we hope will become partners of Best Buy in the future.”

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Ward van Gasteren embraces the “growth hacker” term, despite the fact that some in the profession prefer the term “growth marketing” or simply “growth.” What’s the difference to him? The hacking part should be a distinct effort on top of ongoing marketing, he says.

“Growth hacking is great to kickstart growth, test new opportunities and see what tactics work,” he tells us. “Marketeers should be there to continue where the growth hackers left off: build out those strategies, maintain customer engagement and keep tactics fresh and relevant.”

Based in The Netherlands, he has developed his own growth hacking courses, Grow With Ward, and worked with large companies like TikTok, Pepsi and Cisco, and startups like Cyclemasters, Somnox and Zigzag. In the conversation below, van Gasteren shares the importance of building internal processes around growth for the long term, the state of growth today and his own development.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You’re a certified growth hacker — how do you think this sets you apart from others? How has this certification changed the way you approach working with clients?

I was part of the first-ever class from Growth Tribe (when they still offered multimonth traineeships), which was an amazing experience. The difference that a certification shows is that you know that a certified growth hacker has knowledge of the beginning-to-end process of growth hacking, and that this person is supposed to look at more than just a single experiment to hack their growth.

There are a lot of cowboy growth hackers who simply repeat the same tactics, instead of trying to work from a repeatable process, where you identify problems through data, have a non-biased prioritization process for ideas and will focus on long-term learnings over direct impact. A proper certificate shows that you know what it takes.

When do you think clients should invest in the beginner growth hacking course you offer on your website rather than investing in working with you directly?

I created the course to make growth hacking available to a larger audience. I noticed that almost all other growth hacking courses fell into one of two buckets: (1) cheap (

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Many VCs tout their mentorship and hands-on approach to founders, especially those who run early-stage startups. But in the recent era of lightning-fast rounds closing at sky-high valuations, the cap tables of early-stage startups are becoming increasingly crowded.

This isn’t to say that the value VCs bring has diminished. If anything, it’s quite the opposite — this new dynamic is forcing founders to be extremely selective about exactly who is sitting around their mentorship table. It’s simply not possible to have numerous deep and meaningful relationships to extract maximum value at the early stage from seasoned investors.

Founders should definitely pursue big rounds at sky-high valuations, but it’s important that they recognize how important it is to manage who they allow into their mentorship circles. Initially, founders should make sure their first layer consists of the real “doers” — usually angels and early venture investors who founders meet with weekly (or more frequently) to help solve some of the most granular problems.

Everything from hiring to operational hurdles all the way to deeper, more personal challenges like balancing family life with a rapidly growing startup.

This circle is where the real mentorship happens, where founders can be open and vulnerable. For obvious reasons, this circle has to be small, and usually consist of two to six people at most. Anything more simply becomes unwieldy and leaves founders spending more time managing these relationships than actually building their company.

The second layer should consist of the “quarterly crowd” of investors. These aren’t necessarily people who are uninterested or unwilling to participate in the nitty gritty of running the company, but this circle tends to consist of VCs who make dozens of investments per year. They, like their founders, aren’t capable of managing 50 relationships on a weekly basis, so their touch points on company issues tend to move slower or less frequently.

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