Judy, a Nigerian startup using AI to empower lawyers in Africa has been selected alongside seven other startups to share $700,000 in funding to celebrate The Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) 10th anniversary of investing in African tech startups. This means each startup will get approximately $100,000.
MEST was one of the earliest tech incubators in Africa, having started an entrepreneurial school in Accra, Ghana, in 2008. MEST is part of Meltwater, the global social media monitoring firm that was itself a notable startup.
“It’s been an exhilarating ride scaling MEST in Africa and this year has absolutely reaffirmed my conviction that MEST is truly unique in Africa in both approach and perspective. Our primary pathway to both our incubators and our seed fund uniquely begins pre-idea and pre-team, we equip our Entrepreneurs-In-Training (EITs) with a baseline of skills and industry exposure both most importantly with a cohort of 59 other handpicked individuals driven to create Pan-African, if not global, technology businesses. We also de-risk a year of learning and testing with a full scholarship and rigorous, practical curriculum, MEST Managing Director Aaron Fu.
The six other startups according to by Fu, are:
ShareHouse
Kicking off in Kenya is on a path towards being the Airbnb for warehouses. Their founders are driven by a mission to democratize and bring efficiency to warehouses that have been out of reasonable reach for many SMEs.
Nvoicia
Nvoicia which is launching almost simultaneously in Lagos and Accra will use machine learning to unlock liquidity for SMEs via accessible and consistently assessed invoice discounting.
Truckr
Truckr has a founding team obsessed with ground logistics. They’ve spent the last few months in cross-country trucks, parked trucks, with trucking unions, in the ports, and in warehouses. Now armed with these insights are bringing efficiencies to an industry with so much spare capacity in Africa, utilising robust and affordable software and hardware tailored for the land freight ecosystem in Africa.
Jumeni from Ghana is starting with waste management as a cornerstone sector but has already seen incredibly interest from all forms of businesses requiring remote workforce management.
CodeIn
CodeIn solves a problem everyone in the tech industry in Africa is keenly aware of: efficiently and consistently testing and hiring software developers, by providing an end-to-end testing and hiring platform, CodeIn hopes to unlock work opportunities for freelance software developers in Africa and the world.
Bace
Bace brings cutting-edge facial recognition technology to bear on the problem of identity and KYC in Africa, beginning with financial institutions that have some of the strictest KYC requirements of any industry, the founding team hopes to scale this provide identity verification universally on the continent.
