Purple Elephant Ventures (PEV), the Kenyan tourism-focused venture studio, has closed a $1 million pre-seed to build the next generation of startups that use technology to modernize the tourism sector. The venture studio plans to use the funding to build at least three startups annually.
Participation in Purple Elephant Ventures’s pre-seed round came from Klister Credit Corp, a Canadian investment firm and early backer of Shopify; Fede Pirzio-Biroli, founder of Playfair Capital; Ian McCaig, former CEO of lastminute.com and M-Kopa board member; Anthony Rock, president of Rock Impact Capital; The Untours Foundation; Rich Hoops, executive director at Impact Capital; Jim Villanueava, managing director of Global Partnerships Social Venture Fund; and Helena Riese Harstad, co-founder and chair of the Optimizer Foundation.
Founded by Ben Peterson, Jan Van der de Willebois, and Mikul Shah, the venture studio asserts that the majority of its startups are scalable, tech-first answers that accelerate essential efforts to strengthen Africa’s tourist sector’s resilience and sustainability in the face of climate change.
Purple Elephant Ventures’s mission is to lead Africa’s tourism industry toward a greener future. Tourism, Africa’s third-largest industry and employer of tens of millions across the continent suffered tremendously during the COVID pandemic and is highly vulnerable to the effects of the changing climate.
To date, Purple Elephant Ventures has launched two startups. The first is Nomad Africa, a content-to-commerce business that informs Africa’s domestic tourism market about sustainable and local travel experiences. The other is Elephant Bookings, a SaaS business that helps African hospitality providers become more efficient by getting online.
Ben Peterson, CEO of Purple Elephant Ventures, said, “We’re sitting on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to modernise a major continental industry while driving real climate-action victories. Tourism is a significant driver of Africa’s economy, but sadly, there have been only a small handful of startups that have tried to modernise the largely offline industry. We decided that the industry could benefit from dozens of startups, each addressing different major challenges—so we built Purple Elephant Ventures.”
