At Microtraction, our commitment to staying on the journey with our founders means actively creating beneficial partnerships to help them succeed. One of such programs is the Network Partner Initiative; an elite network of individuals or companies with specialized skill sets that are interested in supporting and providing their services to the next wave of entrepreneurs who are building technology businesses across multiple sectors in Nigeria.
On October 23, 2019, we announced the first, alGROWithm, a Growth-as-a-Service engineering company, focused on developing and implementing bespoke models to help African tech startups and SMEs scale. The alGROWithm team has worked closely with our portfolio companies in areas such as growth modeling, infrastructure setup, growth experiments & hypothesis testing driven by data and analytics, content marketing, and talent sourcing to help support the execution and implementation of growth strategies.
Since then, we have gone on to onboard 14 more Network Partners which continue to deliver value to our portfolio across the board. We are pleased to announce them in this post:
A startup boutique law firm that advises investors as they support businesses and also represents startups and technology-enabled businesses as they build teams and pursue innovative ventures. Acelera Law’s primary goal is to ensure that startups have an ‘accelerated’ and seamless ride from business ideation to actualization and growth devoid of any legal, governance, or compliance pitfalls. The team is especially versed in legal consulting, due diligence, investment readiness, venture capital, company secretarial services, and start-up lawyering.
A Quality-as-a-Service company, Assurdly provides technology companies with fast human-powered QA testing to ensure that all products stand a winning chance in the marketplace. Assurdly is committed to ensuring apps, services and websites work flawlessly every time. Company services include application testing, test automation, performance testing, product management, and engineering management.
Career Buddy connects individuals looking for impactful career moves with startups and high growth organizations seeking to hire leaders, entrepreneurs, and change-makers. Going beyond just matching resumes to requirements, this company scours its social databases, networks, and media to get qualified people who match the right profile.
Career Buddy also helps companies tell their story and position their employer brand in a way that is inspiring, authentic, and provides deep details to potential employees on why they should work for the company.
A bespoke full-service commercial law firm based in Nigeria, Duale, Ovia & Alex-Adedipe (DOA) provides a wide range of expert legal services to a highly diversified client base both local and international operating in various sectors of the economy.
The Firm is especially versed in Admiralty & Shipping, Aviation, Banking and Finance, Company Secretarial, Capital Markets, Energy and Natural Resources, Government Relations, Intellectual Property, Litigation and Dispute Resolution, Telecommunication, Media and Technology, Taxation, Real Estate, and Construction. Its partners have over 25 cumulative years of experience spanning across these diverse areas of law.
eRecruiter Nigeria was born from the need to have a Pan-African recruitment consulting firm that places the client first. Its aim is to be the best recruiter in Africa, in the industries it operates.
This firm also recruits into the Nigerian, Ghanaian, Kenyan, Angolan, and South African Markets, delivering the right candidates, while taking into consideration the role and organizational fit.
eRecruiter Nigeria boasts of a 99% client retention rate.
Flutterwave’s mission is to build a payment infrastructure to connect Africa to the global economy. It does this by building technology, tools, and infrastructure for businesses and banks who want to provide a more seamless and secure payment experience for their customers.
Founded in 2016 by a team of African finance and technology veterans from Standard Bank, PayPal, Google Wallet amongst others, Flutterwave has grown to become one of the fastest-growing payments companies in the world. Since inception Flutterwave has processed ~$2B in payments and 25 million transactions across over 33 African countries where it currently operates. It has attracted significant investment from experienced fintech investors such as Ycombinator Continuity Fund, Greycroft, Greenvisor Capital, Omidyar Network, and Glynn Capital. In 2017, Flutterwave was named Africa’s best fintech company at the Apps Africa Innovation Awards.
Understanding and navigating the regulatory landscape is pivotal to any company’s success and sustainability especially in a country such as Nigeria. For startups especially, it is imperative that founders build out their network early on to enable them to enjoy sandboxes, have the right regulatory information, and properly prepare their companies for scale.
The Golborne Road Advisory (GRA) team has over a decade of experience managing government relations on behalf of local and international companies operating in Nigeria and has also advised clients on cross-border transactions. Before his role as Lead Advisor at GRA, Kayode was the Director, Government and Regulatory Affairs at Gokada and an early employee of the Lagos State Employment Trust Fund (LSETF). Company services include stakeholder mapping and management, strategic communication, opposition research, partnerships, policy formation, grassroots engagement and surveys.
Mosina is a strategy and brand experience design company building brands and experiences through innovation driven by design. It thrives on solving transformational challenges at the intersection of physical and digital, because people experience brands everywhere — and at any time.
Its incredible multidisciplinary team is spread across Lagos and New York City and has worked with partners such as Kuda Bank and Eat Drink Festival on their largest and most successful food festival to date. Company services also include advertising, graphics and identity, strategy and consulting, digital and innovation.
Raise simplifies the fundraising process for founders and their investors. Giving the ability to build and launch a private deal room to your investors, this company removes the need for messy spreadsheets and searching for random excel sheet templates online. It helps companies in fundraising mode create intuitive dashboards where investors can calculate company ownership and possible returns on investment.
Raise also caters to the due diligence process, making it the one place to manage a fundraise, from end to end.
Smile Identity is a digital identity platform for developers that combines government ID validation with face recognition to provide the most robust digital KYC solution in Africa. With Smile Identity, you can validate over 250+ million identity records across Africa (including Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa), from National IDs and Passports to Driver’s Licenses and dates of birth. Smile Identity also has address verification, bank account verification, and Tax and business confirmation services.
Smile ID also offers biometric authentication and deduplication using face recognition. The platform offers our portfolio companies the ability to scale rapidly as they already process over 200,000 KYC checks each month across 5 African countries with an average response time of seven seconds. Human intervention, if required, takes no more than a minute.
The Longe Practice shares a similar ethos with Microtraction in supporting African tech entrepreneurs. Singularly focused on startups, it also offers traditional and non-traditional payment methods that suit client business models.
TLP will be working closely with the startups in our portfolio in multiple areas including Corporate Governance, Intellectual Property, Agreements, Strategic Partner Transactions, Joint Ventures, Company Secretarial, Due Diligence, and Mergers & Acquisitions.
The Nest Innovation Technology Park is a community that fosters innovation for technology startups, helping them to thrive by encouraging experimentation, research, and adoption of new and emerging technologies for cutting-edge product development and entrepreneurship.
The team’s focus is on the adoption of emerging technologies to create data-driven solutions that are innovative, futuristic, sustainable, and commercially viable within the economy.
The Nest also provides a 50-seater capacity state-of-the-art training facility, a co-workspace, an Incubation Hub, and Business Lounge.
A Lagos-based PR & Communications strategist, Victoria is helping Africa’s visionary entrepreneurs tell their stories to the world. An untraditional publicist by background, she leverages her previous work as a commodity analyst and financial journalist to bring unique experience and insights to help her clients meet their communications objectives.
With a focus on building visibility for businesses, she delivers strategic PR and builds strong thought leadership profiles for her clients. Her clientele have appeared in leading global publications including the FT, Bloomberg, Reuters, CNN, Quartz, The Africa Report, CNBC Africa, Next Billion, and Project Syndicate.
Victoria also writes about African tech PR, branding, and communications in her newsletter, All Killer/No Filter.
An investment readiness and post-investment company, 148 Ventures helps tech and non-tech founders create a great lasting impression with external investors. At its core, it evaluates startup readiness for external investment, pre-empting investor needs, and helping them gain and retain investor interest.
Services include investment readiness assessments, recruitment services, financial models and company valuations, product testing, pitch decks, investment memos, etc.
With help from its partners, the company is also able to provide related technical services at more affordable rates. Nigerian undergraduate founders also get a 25% discount off.
We are always looking to partner with individuals and companies to further make the startup journey easier for our portfolio companies. If you would like to be part of this network, please reach out via open@microtraction.com.
At Microtraction, our long term mission is to accelerate Africa’s transition to a sustainable and developed economy. We do this by investing in entrepreneurs who leverage technology, capital, and innovation to try and solve some of the largest problems on the continent. If you are working on solving one of these problems, we should talk!
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