There are loads of startups but if I could single out one it would be Paystack — I first told Shola about Microtraction in November 2016, at this point it was just an idea and we didn’t have a name yet - and he gave me a lot of good advice. I knew we were on the right path when he said he would have applied to Microtraction when Paystack was just getting off the ground.
Shola & Ezra are good examples of founders that we want to fund. They are both technical, known each other professionally and socially for years and have worked on projects/startups in the past so learnt from their previous experiences.
Paystack solves a top 3 problem (getting paid) for their target customers (businesses) in a big and fast growing addressable market (Online Payments). At Microtraction we love single use-case lovable products with great design and we think Paystack excels at this.
Another thing I like about Paystack that I hope to emulate is their openness about sharing metrics & teaching the community with their blog. I believe it’s important as an ecosystem to foster the ideology of paying it forward and enabling the ecosystem as a whole.
A MASSIVE mention will also be Hotels.ng due to what they are doing with their internship program, they have had almost 1,600+ people join who are hungry to learn technical skills and it’s definitely something I think about a lot — how do we scalable teach people across Africa to code/design/market despite the infrastructural challenges we face as the folks at Andela say “talent is evenly distributed but opportunity is not”.