TECH STARS (682)
The former restaurant owner started a ride-hailing business in his native country to provide users with a safe and convenient transportation service. Thanks to the solution, he was recently selected for a Google program that will allow him to reach new horizons.
Habtamu Tadesse (photo) is an Ethiopian tech entrepreneur who founded Zaytech, a startup behind the ride-hailing solution ZayRide, in 2016. With his ride-hailing solution, available as a mobile app -for Android and iOS devices, he connects users to taxi drivers. Apart from the mobile app, the solution is also accessible through a call center, that allows users to request delivery or ambulance dispatch services.
With ZayRide, Habtamu Tadesse is contributing his experience to solve a crucial insecurity challenge. Indeed, the tech entrepreneur, who was once an Uber driver in the U.S., is well aware of how insecure it could be waiting for public transport services in his native country. So, he decided to adapt his Uber experience to local realities.
“We are trying to address the existing unsafe, expensive, and inconvenient means of transportation by rolling out an innovative taxi-hailing application designed to work on Africa’s slow Internet,” he told Tech In Africa in 2018.
Less than two years after inception, Zayride already had 30,000 users, earning ZayTech several accolades including the title of the startup with the biggest market impact potential by Traction Camp Nairobi in 2017. ZayTech has also been selected to participate in the 2022 cohort of the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund. That selection entitles it to US$50,000 to 100,000 in funding and a 6-month training program to support its development.
Before launching ZayTech, Habtamu Tadesse was the owner of Basha Restaurant and Bar, a Boston-based restaurant he co-founded with his brother. They sold the restaurant in 2015 to fund the mobility project ZayRide.
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With more than 20 years of managerial experience in the information technology sector, he has worked for national and international firms. Since 2021, he is overseeing the destinies of Algeria’s startup accelerator.
Sid Ali Zerrouki (photo) is an Algerian information security engineer. He is also the managing director of Algeria Venture, the first state-owned startup accelerator in Algeria. In that capacity, his missions include identifying and supporting local high-potential innovators whose success would make Algeria a tech hub and transform its economy.
During an interview with French TV channel Euronews, he explained that Algeria Venture’s goal is to give tech innovators the required resources to hit markets with quality solutions as well as attract local and international investors that would help them develop their businesses. In line with that goal, in April 2022, in Algier, the state accelerator launched the first cohort of Boost Competencies Entrepreneurship Program (BCEP), an accelerator program implemented in partnership with Google for Startups Accelerator Middle East and North Africa. The program boosted the capacities of the 14 startups, from seven Algerian wilayas (regions), that participated in that first cohort.
Sid Ali holds an information security engineering degree from the University of Constantine 1. He also has a master's degree in business administration from Paris Dauphine University and an executive MBA in international business and commerce from the Sorbonne Business School.
Before his appointment as the managing director of Algeria Venture (in 2021), he was a senator of the World Business Angels Investment Forum, from September 2020 to April 2021. His professional career started in 1998 when he became the IT project manager of Sonatrach, the state-owned oil company in Algeria. In 2001, he joined oil drilling equipment provider Schlumberger as an SDP Driller (assistant driller).
From 2002 to 2009, Sid Ali Zerrouki was OTA Algeria’s network rollout manager. He was later assigned to head the rollout and deployment department at VEON, in Burundi. In 2012, he became a consultant for Kenayn TIM consulting and then joined Huawei Algeria, in 2013, as the senior director of services.
After a stint at Millicom in Tanzania from 2014 to 2016, he joined Cybercom Group as a senior audit program manager. In December 2016, Sid Ali Zerrouki was recruited as Director of Operations for the Algerian company Confidential. The following year, Revotech appointed him as managing director before his appointment to lead Rail Telecom Spa from 2018 to 2021.
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Very much committed to fairness and gender issues, she leveraged her decades-long experience to develop a network that would advance her goals.
Tokunboh Ishmael (photo) is the co-founder and Managing Director of Alitheia Capital, an impact investment firm founded in 2007. In line with her ambition to invest “in equity, fairness, and inclusion to create wealth and transform lives,” Alitheia Capital’s support for African tech innovators has been growing over the years.
In 2015, she created Alitheia IDF, a US$100 million investment fund that finances SMEs led by gender-diverse teams, furthering her commitment to fairness and gender issues.
“Always drawn to uncharted waters, I was an early pioneer of impact investing, a visionary who saw the potential of Fintechs in Africa, and forged a path for injecting gender consciousness into the investment process,” her Linkedin about section reads.
Tokunboh Ishmael is an accomplished private equity manager. Her professional career started in 1988 when she joined Amerada Hess as a business analyst. She later assumed the same position at Citibank and BSG Consulting after that. From 1997 to 2000, she worked as an investment banker for Morgan Stanley before taking office as Sussex Place Ventures’ investment principal. In 2003, she left Sussex Place Ventures to join Aureos Capital, as a partner, in Nigeria. Two years later, the investment professional became the managing director of Avante Capital.
Upon leaving Avante Capital in 2007, she co-founded Alitheia Capital, which she now leads as the Managing director. Concurrently to her duties with her investment firm, from 2008 to 2011, she was the chairperson of the African Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (AVCA), a not-for-profit entity that “promotes, develops, and stimulates private equity and venture capital in Africa.”
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For the Togolese entrepreneur, in Togo, residents can create sustainable solutions to meet their own needs. To help them do so, he created an enabling framework that earned the trust of many entrepreneurs and birthed interesting projects.
Sénamé Koffi Agbodjinou (photo) is the founder of le WoeLab, Togo’s first fablab. The fab lab, created in 2012, hosts, trains, and accelerates the startups’ high-value-added projects. For the founder, WoeLab -a section of the Hub City (a smart city adapted to African realities) launched by his NGO Africaine d'Architecture- is a framework that enables everyone to “invest to realize their creative potentials.”
Kofi Agbodjinou’s approach to developing entrepreneurs’ potential has seduced numerous innovative project leaders. Urbanattic, Woebots, SysWoe, and Scope are some of the startups incubated by WoeLab.
One of the major projects incubated by the fablab is possibly W.Afate 3D Printer, the first African 3D printer made from electronic waste.
Thanks to his various ventures, Sénamé Koffi Agbodjinou acquired international credibility with many organizations commissioning him to organize tech events like the Nasa International Space Apps Challenge, the FabJam, the Arduino Day, the Global Data Fest, the Hack4Dev, the Open Source Circular Economy Days, etc.
Apart from those tech events, Koffi Agbodjinou, through WoeLab, also leads the Open Street Map Togo, JerryClan-Togo, ArchiCamp, BlogCamp Togo, and BootWoeCamp communities.
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After her studies in the United States, the young woman has occupied various positions in financial companies and renowned institutions. Nowadays, as a partner in a venture capital firm investing in tech startups, she plays many roles in the African tech ecosystem.
Andreata Muforo (photo) is, since 2013, a partner at Nairobi-based venture capital firm TLCom Capital LLP. Her work within TLCom includes assessing investment sustainability and managing the venture capital firm’s ESG (environmental, social, and governance) approach. She is also the executive director of TIDE Foundation, a TLCom-sponsored non-profit “focused on improving the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Sub Saharan Africa.”
Miss Muforo, who hails from Zimbabwe, is also a member of the board of several African startups, including B2B platform Twiga Foods and auto-tech startup Autochek. She is also a mentor for Endeavor network, a non-profit organization that helps grow ventures and supports entrepreneurs.
The strong advocate for gender equality in the African tech ecosystem started her professional career, in 2003, as an analyst for Citigroup. In 2004, she joined NERA Economic Consulting. Some five years later, she became AfDB Tunisia’s private sector investment officer. Barely months after joining the AfDB, she got employed as a Transaction Manager at Horizon Africa Capital Ltd, a mergers and acquisitions advisory firm based in Nairobi, Kenya.
Melchior Koba
From taking the risk of leaving a successful career at Coca-Cola for entrepreneurship to founding two successful fintech startups and selling one in an acclaimed deal, Hilda Moraa knows what it takes and how to achieve it. Some 12 years ago, after a few years of professional career, she decided to venture into entrepreneurship. Her two ventures were successful and she wants to help other Africans succeed by removing the main challenge that usually limits their efficiency: funding.
Kenyan entrepreneur Hilda Moraa is the founder of Pezesha, a fintech founded in 2016 to facilitate access to financial support for African SMEs. According to Moraa, financial aid helps SMEs improve their efficiency. That is why she launched her fintech, which connects fund seekers with investors (banks and financial institutions notably) through a digital financial marketplace.
“By resolving the issue of small and medium enterprises securing working capital and gaining a credit score, I believe we can equip business owners with assets so they can compete and trade on a national scale,” she told Google in Africa in March 2022.
In 2021, she was among the fifty recipients of Google’s Black Founders Fund Africa. Two years earlier, she was among the participants of the Obama Foundation’s Leaders program. This enhanced the leadership and innovation skills she acquired in the course of her professional and entrepreneurship career. Indeed, ten years earlier, in 2011, she founded WezaTele, a startup that uses data analytics to help last-mile businesses grow and scale their businesses. She remained the CEO of WezaTele till its acquisition by financial services group AFB (now Jumo World) in 2015.
The same year, she published her book, A Kenyan Startup Journey, sharing the key lessons she learned as the founder and CEO of WezaTele. In 2016, in recognition of her actions in favor of entrepreneurship, she was selected on The Guardian’s list of Africa’s top 10 pioneers, and Business Daily’s top 40 women that celebrate women who thrive in the tech sector. She also made it to Quartz Africa’s list of the top 30 African innovators. In 2019, she also received the DFS Lab’s Female Focused Fintech Prize.
The tech entrepreneur started her professional career in 2008 when she joined the IT company Techbiz as an IT intern in asset management and ERP implementation. The same year, she became coordinator of the Strathmore University computer lab. Then, in 2009, she was recruited, as a database analyst and innovation implementer, by Coca-Cola Kenya.
In 2011, Hilda Moraa became an innovation strategist and senior ICT researcher at iHub Nairobi. From 2017 to 2021, she was a board member of Station F, a startup campus based in Paris. Concurrently, in 2020, she served on Kenya's Covid-19 ICT and Innovations Advisory Committee established by the Ministry of ICT, Innovation, and Youth.
In June 2022, she was appointed a member of the Board of Directors of the Konza Technopolis Development Authority, whose mission is the development of a sustainable smart city and innovation ecosystem in Kenya.
Melchior Koba
Few years ago, the trained nurse entered the healtech sector with a solution that helps blood banks recruit donors. She later pivoted to focus on helping institutions and their likes find the right participants for their clinical trials in Africa. Her choices proved judicious as the startup has already won her several awards, testifying of the positive impacts she is having on the continent.
Melissa Bime (photo) is a Cameroonian nurse, tech entrepreneur, and co-founder of Infiuss Health, a “Unified Solution for Outsourced Clinical Research in Africa.”
Her startup was founded, in 2016, as an online blood bank aimed at reducing mortality induced by blood shortage. After a successful blood donation campaign, the startup partnered with several health centers in Cameroon and even earned several awards, including the 2018 Cartier Women's Initiative Awards (worth US$100,000) and the USAID Inclusive Access to Health Award.
In 2020, Melissa turned her startup into a clinical trial management company for hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, etc., in Africa.
“We are building highly study-specific and very flexible solutions that allow sponsors to find the right participants, sites, and primary investigators so that they can run fully remote, or hybrid, clinical research studies," Infiuss informs on its website.
“If you are a company working on a medical trial and trying to figure out how to diversify the participant cohorts, we are providing a cheaper alternative than recruiting in the United States,” Melissa explained in 2021.
In October 2021, she won the 43North Competition entitling her to a US$500,000 prize. In January 2022, she relocated her business to Buffalo, New York.
Melchior Koba
Human resources are one of the key components for the success of every firm, organization, or institution. However, identifying the best professionals sometimes takes a huge amount of time. With his deep-leaning tool, Mouhidine Seiv shortens the curve.
Mouhidine Seiv (photo) is a Mauritanian entrepreneur and data scientist. In 2016, he founded HrFlow.ai (formerly known as Riminder.net.) to leverage artificial intelligence to help firms hire better human resources for improved efficiency.
HrFlow.ai allows "recruiters to identify three times more talent while interviewing four times fewer candidates by analyzing millions of resumes worldwide. We have developed deep learning algorithms to evaluate and classify every part of a candidate's profile: experience, projects, and education. This technique allows us to achieve unparalleled relevance," Mouhidine Seiv told French magazine Décideurs in 2017.
Beyond its recruitment assistance services, HrFlow.ai also assists companies and vendors in their General Data Protection Regulation, privacy regulations, algorithmic consent constraints, and fairness requirements compliance procedures.
From 2016 to date, through HrFlow.ai, Mouhidine Seiv has helped more than a hundred firms automate their human resources data management. The tech entrepreneur is a former visiting assistant professor of deep learning at CentraleSupélec, the graduate engineering school of Paris-Saclay University. In 2017, Leade.rs ranked him among the eight under-30 emerging entrepreneurs to watch in France. Some years later, he also made it to Forbes’ “30 under 30” list.
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In 2014, she decided to relocate to Morocco and contribute to the development of her native country. The choice has proven judicious since the healthtech solution she introduced won her national and international awards.
Zineb Drissi Kaitouni (photo) is a Moroccan entrepreneur and trained financial analyst. In 2014, she co-founded healthtech DabaDoc with Driss Drissi Kaitouni to facilitate access to healthcare and improve the management of medical appointments. Her startup has close to eight million users in several African countries. They use DabaDoc platforms to set appointments with over 10,000 health professionals specialized in more than 100 medical specialties.
DabaDoc was “initially developed to help health professionals manage their agenda and digitize patient pathways. It now helps digitalize patients’ records and offers a reliable and secure video consultation platform to doctors who have adopted this cutting-edge tool,” Zineb told Moroccan media La Nouvelle Tribune in March 2022.
The tech entrepreneur started her professional career, in 2003, as an analyst for Goldman Sachs. In 2012, she co-founded Ruby’s in London, before relocating to Morocco, in 2014, to contribute to the development of her native country.
She chose the health sector when she found out how challenging it was for the population to access healthcare because of factors like unavailable assistants, and poor appointment management leading to crowded offices. She decided to address those challenges with technology.
Her choice proved to be a good bet because, thanks to DabaDoc, Zineb has received several national and international awards. She for instance won the first prize in the Global Innovation for Science and Technology in 2014. She also won third prize in the SeedStars World competition the same year.
In 2015, Aspen-Blackstone selected DabaDoc as one of the top 10 startups in the MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) region. Four years later, Zineb was nominated as a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum and even won the Endeavor Entrepreneur award.
In April 2021, Orange Middle East and Africa entered DabaDoc’s capital. The operator also introduced its payment services to make DabaDoc’s services more accessible and add new services. Thanks to that partnership, the startup launched its services in Côte d’Ivoire, in June 2022.
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The appointment is the culmination of an extensive experience in the digital sector and several fellowships.
On August 16, 2022, Nigerian social entrepreneur Gbenga Sesan (photo) was selected among the ten members of the inaugural leadership panel to steer the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) up to 2023.
Reacting to his selection among the inaugural team, Gbenga “welcomed the appointment saying he was honored and looking forward to serving the world alongside the high-level leaders and also influence digital policy globally,” informs a release by Paradigm Initiative - which the Nigerian entrepreneur serves as an executive director.
The Nigerian social entrepreneur was selected following “an open call for nominations,” we learn. This experience will add to the skills he acquired working, between 2008 and 2012, as a member of the UN Committee of e-Leaders for ICT and Youth. During his time as a member of that committee, he “Worked with selected young experts from various regions of the world to discuss youth input in the global ICT space” while still assuming his normal duties as the executive director of Paradigm Initiative.
In Nigeria, Gbenga served as a member of two presidential committees. They are namely the Presidential committees on Harmonization of Information Technology, Telecommunications and Broadcasting Sectors (2006) and Roadmap for the Achievement of Accelerated Universal Broadband Infrastructure and Services Provision (2013).
From 2020 to 2021, he has been a non-resident scholar at Standford University’s Digital Civil Society Lab. He also received several fellowships including the Cyber Stewards Fellow, Crans Montana Forum Fellow, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellow.
All those fellowships and nominations are the culmination of an extensive experience in the IT sector. He started his professional journey in 2001 with the Nigerian branch of Junior Achievement Worldwide, a global network dedicated to empowering students in financial literacy, work readiness, entrepreneurship, and digital literacy. During his time with Junior Achievement Nigeria, he led the Lagos Digital Village, a joint project with several partners including Microsoft and the Lagos Business School. In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, he advised the World Health Organization on data privacy. He is currently advising the World Economic Forum on its Trust Operationalization Project to develop a rights-based data policy for businesses.
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The young entrepreneur wants to contribute to financial inclusion and economic development in his country. His digital payment solution already boasts more than 70,000 users.
Jules Kader Kaboré (photo) is a Burkinabe programmer and co-founder of Sank Business, a money transfer company launched in January 2021.
His company developed Sank Pay, a mobile payment app enabling users to make fee-free deposits. Users can also secure loans and make withdrawals with fees amounting to about 1% of transactions.
“At Sank Business, our goal is to lift Burkina Faso into the ranks of African countries that have fully-digitalized economies, by 2025,” Jules said in December 2021.
Through Sank Business, the latter issues payment cards that have no expiration date and are renewable at will. Its cards enable people with no internet access to carry out cashless financial transactions.
Jules Kader Kaboré launched Sank Business after a few years in the U.S. tech industry. In 2016, he worked as an intern web developer for Ignition 72, a Maryland-based internet marketing agency. From September to December 2018, he became a math tutor at Laney College in California.
A few months after his stint at Laney College, along with some Burkinabe students based in the USA, he developed Coucou-Africa, a solution that allows users to buy or sell goods in Africa and even get the latest information about the continent.
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He has some fifteen years of professional experience in several sectors, including the digital sector. By contributing his international expertise, he wants to support his country’s tech ecosystem.
Harinjaka Ratozamanana (photo) is a Malagasy consultant and co-founder of Hackoragna Cooperative Company, a digital cooperation platform. His platform, founded in 2020, gathers startups and VSMEs, which develop innovative tech solutions, in a bid to promote local tech talents.
According to the Hackoragna Cooperative Company’s website, the platform adopts a cooperative approach to help its members better develop their entrepreneurial projects by following a fair and ethical process. By doing so, the members help Madagascar achieve positive transformation and improve its industrial sector. “Let’s co-create a digital economy that works for the common good and our mutual benefit,” Harinjaka invites.
The latter has an extensive professional career. From 2007 to 2009, he was an observer for French media France 24 and an author for the international bloggers’ community Global Voices. In 2008, he started working as a web developer for Fanamby, an environmental non-profit organization. In 2009, he was a web and new media consultant reporting on the Gabonese election for several foreign media. Two years later, he became the senior communications officer of the humanitarian organization Akbaraly Foundation.
He later joined the tour operators’ association GOTO Madagascar as a web consultant. In 2012, he made his first entry into the tech entrepreneurship world by co-founding Habaka, a tech innovation space that he led till 2016.
In 2015, his international IT expertise was requested by the Malagasy government, which appointed him as technical advisor of the Ministry of Digital Transformation. The following year, he became a parliamentary assistant and Director General of Private Sector Development at the Ministry of Commerce the year after.
In July 2018, Harinjaka Ratozamanana was reassigned to the Ministry of Digital Transformation but, this time around, he was chief of staff and then secretary general. In September 2021, he became the associate edtech advisor for IAMTHECODE Foundation, an organization that aims to train one million women and girls in computer coding by 2030.
Melchior Koba
After eight years of professional experience in the tech sector, he made the big jump into the entrepreneurship world. His choice seems to have been the best given his successful ventures.
Jean-Louis Mbaka (photo) is a Congolese IT engineer. In 2017, he co-founded Kinshasa Digital, a digital marketing and web development agency offering digital solutions to boost companies’ activities.
Kinshasa Digital is not the only digital venture created by the tech entrepreneur. For instance, the same year when he co-founded his digital marketing agency, he also launched Youdee, a real estate listing website. Two years later, he launched Kinshasa Digital Academy, which offers digital training.
With Kinshasa Digital Academy, he wants to pass on digital skills (web and mobile development in particular) to as many people as possible to boost professional integration. The training program spans over 12 months, including nine months at the academy and three months of internships.
The initiative attracted some well-known companies like Vodacom. In April 2022, the telecom company signed a partnership with Kinshasa Digital Academy to build a research and innovation lab, dubbed Vodacom Digital Lab, in DR Congo.
“In line with our aim, which is to develop local and robust content and applications, “Vodacom Digital Lab” will provide a platform to allow Kinshasa Digital Academy’s learners and developers around the city of Kinshasa to have a better understanding of some sectors as well as enable them to develop and test their solutions,” Jean-Louis Mbaka said when signing the deal with Vodacom. On July 8, 2022, the two partners presented a digital platform to follow-up and monitor Covid-19 patients. The platform was the result of the partnership between Vodacom and Kinshasa Digital Academy.
With his decade-long professional experience in the digital sector, Jean-Louis Mbaka believes that digital technologies can solve many problems. He started his professional career, in 2009, as technical support for the engineering firm Entreprise Générale Malta Forrest (EGMF). After a brief stint with tech company Schlumberger, he was recruited by logistics firm EGAL SA in 2014. He embarked on his entrepreneurship journey in 2017 while still working for EGAL SA.
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The systems engineer considers the digital sector a goldmine of opportunities for the Chadian youth. Instead of using words to convince the youth of that reality, he chose to take action and led the way. To succeed in his bid, he even took courses to ensure he can offer effective support.
Hamid Khayar Defallah (photo) is the founder and CEO of incubator Chad Innovation. The software engineer created Chad Innovation in 2018 to help young people improve their living conditions. The incubator organizes training sessions, debates, and forums to let participants present their ideas, pick up project ideas and get support for the implementation of their various projects.
Although Chad Innovation was created in 2018, it started breeding in its founder’s mind in 2014 when he made an appalling realization as a teacher at the University of N’Djamena. Indeed, it dawned on him that after graduation, it was difficult for most students to get jobs. So, he started reflecting on how such laborforce can be absorbed. “That is how I got the idea to create an innovation space where ideas can be discussed to detect the most innovative,” Hamid explains.
He started maturing the idea in 2016 after he completed an entrepreneurship training program at the University of Texas. Two years later, the incubator was officially launched. However, it is not the first venture launched by Hamid. In 2013, the latter co-founded the IT service firm Africatech World of Technology, after years of polishing his skills in the digital sector considered a goldmine of opportunities for the youth.
After an internship at the Agency for Aerial Navigation Safety in Africa and Madagascar (ASECNA), he joined the now-defunct public broadcasting corporation ONRTV in 2012 as a technical support engineer.
He left ONRTV in 2015 and joined the Chadian research and development center CNRD as a research assistant and IT manager. While still officiating at the CNRD, he completed a two-month internship at the Global Entrepreneurship Network, learning how to build a startup ecosystem. When he left the CNRD in 2017, he was recruited as an IT manager for Radisson Blu Hotel N'Djamena.
Since December 2020, the tech entrepreneur is the director general of the Chadian digital transition agency.
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