An American Investing in Africa

All right. Hello. Let me let everybody in here and get going.

Hi.

A bunch of people are joining and I think we'll get more. We have, I don't know, 10 or 15 people and I'll let more people in, but thanks. Welcome to the American Investing in Africa. And of course, as I posted on Twitter, I have a professional investor in Africa and then me, I wanted to introduce Bunmi and he has been investing in Afro for quite some time. So what I thought we'd do is we'd have a conversation between us for about half an hour and then we can take a some question afterwards. Hi, I like Bumi. If you could just introduce yourself, tell us about your experience in Africa, what you've been doing, some investments potentially that you've made and let's do that to start things off.

Yeah. Thank you, Martin for having me. Really. Pleasure to be here. My name is Bumi Akinyemiju and essentially my background and history has been defined by pretty much two things, maybe three things. First is started coding at 12. So really I'm a tech at heart. I'm a techie at heart. Building is like what I do. Two is entrepreneurship. I just think entrepreneurship is what unlocks the potential of humankind. And then three emerging markets because I think that's where you get like incredible alpha. Right. So I think those three things are the trends that you'll see in kind of what I do. And I can describe myself, my history in sort of three phases. Phase one was in Michigan in the US Essentially while going to school, building three companies in Michigan and learning. Oops, okay. Learning how to build, learning how to scale, learning how to run a business, learning how to make money. And I remember when I made my first $1 million, you had 10 employees in Michigan. And that was like. That was it. That was like. And then the next day was like, oh, okay, all right. What does $10 million look like? So anyway, phase one was learning how to build companies right from scratch. Phase two was building in Africa, moving to Nigeria, starting from scratch, and essentially building multiple companies serially. So about 15 companies over a 10 year period. So that was like the second phase.

What kind of companies were those?

Third phase is realizing what kind of companies were those. Yeah, so they were all technology companies, they were all fintech enabled businesses. And this was between 2010 and 2020. So this was before fintech was like the thing everybody talks about. And this was actually around the time that there was Kinnevic was Jumia was a model for venture building back then. And so really early days in Africa context. This was before VC in Africa, really. So there I learned how to build companies in emerging market. There I learned how to raise capital, raise $16 million in 2014. So that, again, was before VC into this structure. That's not like what everybody else does. Right. It's multiple companies, multiple verticals, but with fintech enablement. So that was phase two, and then phase three of my experience was then saying, you know What? Africa is 54 countries, and I've only built all these companies with all this sweat and headache in one company, how do I scale across a fragmented continent? And I thought doing that with a venture capital asset class was the way to do it. So instead of building organically, let me just go take a equity position in different companies. And so we launched a $6 million fund fund one, launched a $12 million fund fund two, and we were lucky enough to have been one of the first backers of Flutterwave, the largest unicorn in Africa. And then also. Thank you. And also it was important to me that it's not just about investing, but also about exiting. So when they hit, just before they hit a billion dollars in valuation, we also sold all our shares to show essentially coming in and coming out and. Yeah, so that has been my experience over the last last few years. Thank you.

Great. You have a lot of experience. You've been investing in building things in Africa longer than most people I know. That's a good segue into my first question, which is how should people outside Africa think about Africa? You said you built your country's your first things in Nigeria. And a lot of people hear about Nigeria as the biggest economy in Africa. But how is. And you said Africa is not one country, it's 54. How should people think? Are there different regions? I've heard of, like Francophile Africa, and South Africa is very different from the north. And do people. Should people think about it as regions or are there some opportunities that are pan African? Or how should people think about the different parts of the African market?

Yeah, thanks for that question, Martin. I think really the way people should be thinking about Africa is that it's really different countries. And every country is unique, every country is different, the culture is different. There may be some similarities in some regions. When you think about the northern part of Africa that has a lot of Arab type of ties and roots and connections and religion and language, there might be some clustering in East Africa when you think about Swahili as a language and things like that, but nonetheless, they are different sovereign nations. If you are doing fintech, the regulatory environment is very different. Even neighboring countries, culturally, there's a lot of difference as you try to hire and recruit. I think what that stand says is that Africa is different. Africa is a continent, that it's in the diversity that I think that the opportunity is. So I think if somebody is going to Africa, you need to ask yourself, this product I'm selling, where is it best for me to locate? A lot of times people think about it in terms of the biggest market size. Right. So that could be one way depending on your product biggest market. Another way to look at it is the market that is most sophisticated. How is the enabling infrastructure? Right. And those are two different dimensions. And then the third one could be like, where do I go? Where? Ultimately the types of physical assets that my digital product will enable will be very useful. So if I take the first category, biggest market, if that's the lens through which I'm looking at my product, then I'm going to Nigeria, I'm going to Egypt, I'm going to Kenya, I'm going to South Africa. Right. That's that lens. And I can't go into all those countries at once either. Right. I have to pick and choose. So. So that's one, one framing. I think the other framing is when you say, okay, I'm going into Africa and then maybe my product is more francophone, it supports French and I want to be able to support one single currency. So let me go to francophone West Africa. So then there could be some clustering there, but it doesn't change the fact that you still have to go and pick. Am I going to Senegal? Am I going to Cote d'? Ivoire, Am I going to Cameroon? You gotta pick one. Ultimately, I think if you're going to an environment, your product is something that is very sophisticated buyer, big corporate, very mature, financial inclusion type of space, then you're talking maybe South Africa that is very unique and a lot more sophisticated in terms of the majority of the digital infrastructure and financial inclusion and urban and things like that. Yeah, I think that's how I will guide the thinking in terms of Africa and how to enter the market.

Yeah, you've built a lot in fintech and invested in, in, in Flutterwave. What do you think are the verticals that are really interesting opportunities in 2024 and 2025 here in the United States, people are going crazy about AI in any vertical. But it seems to me like some more of the basic things need to be built in in Africa. And after that, how do you think about B2B versus B2C. I've seen some research reports in Africa that if you're building E commerce, for example, the average cart size is much less than America and your economics are very different. So I wonder if you could talk about some things that you think are particularly going to grow. Well, interesting vertical opportunities for Africa in 2024 and 2025 and then how you think about the B2B versus the B2C opportunity.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I think fintech has been hot, right, obviously for so long now and that's like the thing that's like fintech everything. But I think fintech is like the infrastructure. I think fintech becomes invisible. I think our thesis actually from 10, 15 years ago has been like every company will be. It's just the business model that powers its businesses, especially in Africa. Right. And that's why you'll see that some of the most successful companies on the continent are fintech enabled. Even if it's logistics. Right, sure. Still like a leasing model in there, that's a buying out pay letter model embedded, et cetera, et cetera.

And maybe you could stop for a second on fintech just to drill down a little bit on fintech because I've seen the numbers, maybe you could level set where we are in the fintech maturation in Africa, is it the first two or three innings, are we in the middle? Because I still see the statistics in the number. Even a place like Nigeria that's still a majority cash economy and hasn't transitioned to credit cards and all the modern fintech things we think of in the west, where are you, where do you put. Maybe it's different by country but the Africa stuff you started investing in and building 15 years ago, where are we? 10% done, 20% done. It feels to me like we're still in the early innings even after Flutterwave and some of the bigger fintech enabled banks in terms of potential penetration into the markets.

Yeah, no, that's. This is where what I said earlier about Franklin, because the answer to that question is that it depends, depends on the country, it depends on the city in the country. On one hand, if you're in Lagos, if you're in Abuja, in Nigeria, you might have, you know, 90% penetration of financial inclusion. But when you go to Nasarawa, when you go to Okitupa, when you go to some of those places, you may actually end up having 20, 25% in terms of penetration. So I think it's a bit tricky to answer that in a very Direct way. But I think the reality of it is that I believe that we are, when it comes to fintech, broadly speaking, I think we're somewhere around that 70, 80% in the life cycle. I think it's now not so much about fintech anymore. I think it's about the use cases.

Right.

So I think it's about the use cases that you build on it. I think fintech essentially is a risk zero. If you're processing payments then essentially you're on your way to zero. If you're not there yet there's probably, I'm going to guess there's probably 400 fintechs in Nigeria. I don't have the number. Yeah. So it's highly competitive and the way you differentiate is going to be what you build on it. Which I think then leads to what are the sectors I'm excited about? What are the sectors that I think is the future? And I think really it comes down to like energy, climate. Right. So the idea of renewable energy in a fintech enabled way I think is extremely exciting. I think that it solves a real problem. Energy is a problem, climate is a challenge. And making sure that in the most remote places people have the energy to charge their phones, the energy to do their turn on their lamps, to watch TV and radio, there's massive opportunities there. I think logistics is a very interesting space and I think again wants you to put a spin of climate around logistics where you're doing it in the most efficient way. Logistics had a very critical direct impact on food. And of course you're talking about Africa right now. You're talking about food security against the context of the, the global geopolitical, Russia, Ukraine, etc, etc, inflation, global inflation, currency challenges and things like that. Then ultimately you need to feed your people. If you need to feed your people, you need to move goods. If you need to move goods then essentially how do you make sure that you democratize access to those vehicles? How do you make sure that drivers can get paid? How do you make sure that you can connect the person who wants to send goods to the person who is receiving the goods and reduce the friction around that? I think Both from a B2B B2C standpoint, if you now move to urban mobility, okay, urbanization is one of the biggest megatrends in terms of Africa. Right. Once you start talking about demographics of Africa, the usefulness when you start talking about mobile phones, then you start talking about urbanization, which means these people have to move around and they have to move around in a way that is Climate friendly. I think that's the second area that has huge opportunities. I think trade is a big area as well. Digitally enabled trade. So this may not be E commerce like Amazon, like Shopify, but then what does that look like? What does trade look like in the context of Africa? What does that look like in terms of within the continent trading, people trading with each other?

Mm, yeah. Are you talking trade inside the continent or trade outside the continent or both?

Yeah, both. I think the friction is still a lot. The transparency and visibility in the value chain of how goods move, the actual ability to move money. Right. In terms of trade between buyers and suppliers. Buyer in, in Africa, supply in China. Right? Yeah, yeah. Still too much friction. What does that mean in terms of innovation in stablecoin in a new type of E commerce platforms, wholesale type E commerce platforms? I think there's a lot of opportunity as well.

Here's an interesting sort of side thing on fintech or that trade and the local commerce. I was in Singapore a couple months ago and I've never been a crypto investor and I think the crypt. The use case for crypto in the United States is not very strong given the fact we have a great currency stable. It's super easy buy and sell things in US dollars. But people were telling me that in Southeast Asia, some of these countries with outstable currencies, and I just saw a chart the other day from Africa where Zimbabwe has what, 170% inflation and there were 10 countries that had 25, 30% inflation. In an environment like that where you have a lot in stable local currencies, maybe the use case for a stablecoin or something is a lot greater. Have you made any investments in crypto or how do you think crypto fits into the fintech future of Africa?

I think Africa has the biggest use cases for, for crypto and blockchain, like you said, either in terms of blockchain for the governance and transparency and some of those things, that's the best place to implement technologies like that or crypto in the context of not the speculation, that's for America. That's for mature market. That's for where people have excess money and, and they just want to speculate. But in terms of where it actually affects lives. Right. Stablecoin is incredible. And stablecoin technology actually in powering trade is because, you know, you move USDC USDT from one continent to the other, it's instant, right?

Yeah, exactly. That's, that's what somebody opened my eyes to, which I hadn't quite realized is that if you're in Vietnam for example, and you wanted to trade in dollars, you can't get dollars, I mean US real US dollars at your bank, but you can get USDC on a stablecoin and do that transaction on the block without any government approval or bank approval. So you can get access to US dollars in these countries where it's really hard to through the traditional finance system.

And because of that, because of that, Martin, I essentially have been investing pretty aggressively. I think I have probably four or five crypto exchanges, blockchain companies. We invested in Busha. Busha is doing really well. They're profitable already. They're growing yellow cards, yellow card as well. They just raised a big round just recently. And then we are also looking at a lot of blockchain companies that are applying that to real estate. So there's a company that's doing that we invested in. So I'm quite bullish on the opportunity that this provides.

Yeah. And I think that's, you know, taking advantage of or recognizing some of the unique opportunities in your market as opposed to necessarily what I might see in America. So you mentioned, you know, some of the applications, supply chain and mobility. Did you have any other particular categories that you were excited about?

Yes. So mobility, energy. I think healthcare and education are also kind of sectors that are foundational to the growth of the continent. And I think the way education will look when you start to inject AI and fintech in there, it's going to look very different in the future. So I'm very curious about what the future of learning is because the biggest market for learning is in the world is going to be in Africa. Right. And it's a case where this big population, we're talking about Africa by 2050. Like the only way that potential gets unlocked is education. So what does innovation look like in there? And of course health care is also very important in terms of how you actually digitize that value chain. How do you make payments? The friction better. But the final one I'll just say is I think there's an incredible opportunity around agtech. And I think as you think about agriculture, innovation, food security is very important. And I think finding climate smart ways to deliver agriculture and farming in more efficient ways I think is a lot of opportunity that is just waiting for capital and for founders to unlock on the continent.

Sure. And it's probably also not some of the crazy things we're talking about in America. Vertical farming inside buildings. You don't need super high tech expensive farms, you need you, you, you can Take little steps and make big changes. Just small little irrigation things. Or to your point, fintech, how to, you know, doing a futures contract and being able to prepay farmers and helping their cash flows and some basic things like that can go a long way.

Yeah, it's the little things. It's the mapping system that's able to monitor soil or monitor harvest levels. It's little things like your drone technology that applies the fertilizer and the pesticides in a smarter way. It's the phone app that allows the farmer to know what the current price of crops are. It's the cooperative that allows the group savings and lending across a group of farmers and allows them to borrow against their future yields because the data is all central there. So it's not the fancy stuff. But I think the beauty is that the scale, if you get this right and you get on ground and you make sure that your solution is solving a problem that is real, I think you get rewarded. Africa is hard, but I would say Africa is rewarding and I've experienced it. I've started companies. I think that in the number of years that I started our venture studio and creating these 15 companies, I don't think there are many places in the world where I could go from 0 to 1 in such a short period of time and have incredible impact as well as incredible commercial benefits at the same time.

That's amazing and thank you for that. I know you were early. One other interesting potential trend you mentioned, everything that would be basically improving the lives of people in Africa. One trend I've seen starting to happen in slightly more mature companies like places like India is that there's a whole category of companies building in India but basically selling to the world software solutions, selling to it in the U.S. i invested in a company in Sri Lanka which is doing some sales software for the top of the funnel lead nurturing. And they're operating in Sri Lanka, which is a very low cost place to operate. They're selling to America at the higher prices. Do you see any pockets in Africa that have particularly dense sort of technology developments that might end up being like what happened in India and in Bangalore or something like that, where you've got a density and a lower cost of living, incredibly smart people. But maybe that could be selling software solutions to the world because most of the unicorns so far that were there were serving the local market. But things like FreshBooks came out of India. It was a cheaper accounting system, but they built it leveraging the lower cost labor but basically selling to the US Market. Do you see that on the horizon for somewhere in Africa? And if so, where would you hope that comes out or you expect that to come out of?

Yeah, no, I think you're. I think you're right on to something there, Martin. I think it's something that's coming. I don't think it's there now. Or you can see the trends. I believe that some of the kind of training of the AI models from OpenAI, I think some of the training models for even the machine learning and things that Facebook and Google have been using for years, some of that work was happening in Africa. Right.

Okay.

You know, again, taking advantage of the, you know, the arbitrage of cost of living. Right. It becomes very, very obvious. But I think we're probably still about five years out to where that becomes like a trend. But I think the people that go into Africa today and begin building that talent, connecting those universities, I think there's an opportunity to essentially take advantage of. Of that opportunity. I think if you think about even one of the other unicorns, Andela. So Andela started literally in Nigeria. I started in Africa and started training talent. He started building talent. And that talent was all serving US Markets, European markets. Right. And even though now they're fully. A fully global company headquartered in New York, but they didn't start in New York, I see. Started there. And I think that's where the opportunity is going to be in the future.

And you think four or five years from now you might see more of those.

Believe so.

So one, you're obviously very optimistic and going all in on different opportunities in Africa. And people have said Africa's the future many times before, and we have seen like in the, the Arab Spring and stuff like that, and we've seen some political issues across Africa. What do you think could go wrong or what are the major risks, macro risks for Africa? We mentioned already that many countries have very high inflation. There are some conflicts going on. There are conflicts other places, Israel and things like that. But what do you think in the next sort of four or five years are the major sort of macro risks that could derail what is going on already in Africa?

Yeah, no, I think that there are a few risks that could play out, and I think obviously there's one which is like just political tensions. We're seeing, you know, some of that playing out in that middle belt of the francophone West Africa. Right. It's still very much change today, but then if that spreads, there could be some challenges and slow down in, in that innovation. I think the chances of that happening is quite low because I think that region is just generally fighting the stronghold that like France has on those countries. And as those get unlocked, you should see that getting results. But I think that's number one, I think number two is the currency. Inflation and those type of things is also a risk in development because ultimately if these countries have heavily devalued currency, it means that price of food is very expensive. It means that they need to look internal and really have to build, they have to build the industries, they have to build their food security, etc. And I think so currency presents a significant risk. Now the big one of the big ways to mitigate that risk is innovation.

Right.

Because ultimately what Africa has is the solid minerals more than anywhere else in the world. So imagine a case where you have stablecoin that's backed by natural resources. Right. All of a sudden you don't have currency challenges anymore. So I think innovation also holds the biggest opportunity. In fact, we have, speaking about the first risk about political and things like that, we, we have one of our startups called Okudo that we invested in out of the Middle east and Oman actually conducted the first like election based on their digital KYC platform that they have. Interesting, right? Yeah. So an election being conducted and everybody's at home. Imagine what that does to governance in terms of innovation. So I think that's the. Those are two of the big risks in the continent. But I think that there's a lot more that could go right than things that could go wrong. Just because you have the talent and the talents and the people and the youthfulness that is leapfrogging technology with mobile, that is getting financially included. Right. If you have that ingredient, if that's where that future 30 years from now is, that's where the consumer market is going to be, then all you gotta do is to just make sure that they're well educated. Right? You make sure that they're well educated. Everything else will solve itself.

Yeah, absolutely. Okay. I love what you're. The different sectors you're thinking about. I just do B2B software investing. If there is software opportunities in those different sectors. I've looked at a couple in the supply chain already. I invested in a company in India which is doing a full house directory for all the small sub 30,000 square foot warehouses in India. They have 3 million square feet and then they have a centralized booking system for brands to book in multiple cities, even partial warehouses. But it's replacing basically the local broker who only shows you the warehouses of their friends and charges a huge commission fee. It would seem to me like that kind of software and central directory type thing could work in Africa as well. But those are the kind of things I'm looking for in Africa are software things that reduce friction and provide increased transparency and things. I've made one investment so far. I think we mentioned when we talked before in Africa and it was in fintech. Maybe I'm a little late in FinTech, but it's Tembo plus out of Tanzania which is doing an API first, kind of a Plaid type middleware connecting banks and to do multiple kinds of transactions in multiple countries. And to your point, we Africa needs to build more infrastructure like that, even in Fintech, because the reason we have in America a very rich fintech app ecosystem for consumers is because you have a company like Plaid that maintains that middleware connectivity between the banks so that the developers don't have to write all that code. And it seemed to me like Tembo plus was that the infrastructure part of fintech was an interesting place to invest in. But if you see Anything interesting in B2B software, obviously I want to invest with you. I probably would not be an investor in drones for air for crops unless there was some software management side of it. I actually saw some really interesting software for moving dirt and it had to do with drones. And they now have an upgrade to some of these dirt moving like bulldozer machines in America that are connected to a drone. So you send the drone up over the piece of land that you're trying to level to make a foundation or something like that, and it looks at all the earth that has to move and sends the coordinates back down to the bulldozer and then the bulldozer drives on robot and moves the dirt perfectly based on the survey that was done by the drone. And I was like, that's amazing. The guy who operating it, he's sitting in his pickup truck drinking coffee.

And.

I had no idea that they had that level of automation and something pretty basic like moving dirt these days. Anyway, I would love to take some questions and told people that they could. There's a few in the. In the chat here that I could just read you. And then I think some other people might want to raise their hands if you want to. Oh, here's Matthew. Let's see. How do I. Okay, let's. Matthew McCarty has a question, so let's see what he has. I don't know how to unmute him here. Yep, there you go. Hey, Matthew.

Hi, Martin. How are you?

Good. Good to see you.

Hi Bunmi, how are you? Great. So it's actually two questions. I'll just ask them both very quickly. One for Bunmi, one for. For you, Martin. Bunmi, in relation to the maturation of the market in Africa in general, and again, I know it's the countries vary, but in general, how much of a challenge do you think digital literacy is? Digital literacy, especially for consumers, how much of a challenge is that? Where is that at now and what needs to be done to overcome it? I know of all the developers of some developing countries where, for example, smartphone penetration is extremely high and there is decent Internet access, but usage is pretty low because digital literacy is extremely low. And Martin, the question I want to ask you is I've advised a number of African startups in recent years and many see the US as the founders I've dealt with see the US as and it is actually the global hub of vc. But I think that sometimes the perception of how to go about raising the money from an American VC is not quite right. And a number of them rush in from their Delaware company and expect that they're going to raise money from American VCs. So the question I wanted to ask you is should African VC founders try to raise money directly from U.S. investors? And, and if so, under what circumstances would you do that? And are there any tips that you have for African founders who is it.

Even a good idea?

And are there any tips?

Thanks, Matthew. I'll answer that after Boomi says.

Yeah, so to answer that question, I think digital literacy is still a challenge. Again, as I said before, you have to kind of dimension that by country, by what products, by it's a major city and smaller city. But I'll probably put digital literacy, broadly speaking, somewhere around like 40%. So still have a lot of ways to go. So what that means is that you have to be patient with your product. And that's why I'm very similar to Martin, right. I invest in B2B companies, right. I like those kind of middlewares, you know, that digital KYC that floods type of company. Those are the areas that we've been investing in. And then we go into different verticals as fintech enabled, where there's B2B or B2B2C because of that digital literacy challenge. That's still there. But when you make these investments, you're investing on the future, you're betting on a trajectory, you know that there's going to be more and more young people, young people, they are born literally with their phone in their hands now. Right. It's getting more affordable, getting more accessible. 5G everywhere. So that's the best. So it's a long term bet. And I think that digital literacy gap is going to keep getting closed out.

Okay, thanks. So my answer to that, the one investment that I made in Tanzania, the founder was following me on Twitter and he reached out to me directly and the first thing I said is we need to get a local VC in there to help me diligence this, to understand the local regulations and things like that. So we brought in two local VCs. What I would recommend is if you're building something, there are four. There are, I can think of probably 10American VCs who have a specific mandate where they want to invest in Africa. It's me, it's people like Hustle Fund, it's people like Everywhere Ventures, but they almost all invest alongside a local VC like Boomi, who knows a little bit more about the market, the regulatory structure. Some of the customers can help with customer acquisition and stuff like that. So I think if you're pitching only American VCs, you're going to have a really hard time. But you need that combination and you need to have a reason to have the American VC on there. Is it because they you are building something that could potentially want to sell into America or might want to get big enough that you could raise from an American VC fund later at a higher valuation? Then you might want an American pre seed VC like me to help make those introductions. I haven't yet done this for because Tembo plus is building just for Africa. But when I invested in India, one of the companies they wanted to raise from an American VC in their Series A, the CEO came to America. I got him 12 introductions to US VCs. He ended up getting three term sheets, but he had a global product. He knew he wanted to attract American investors in a later round after he built his product. And that's why he added specifically an American VC early in addition to the local VCs. So I think if you're in Africa, the best thing for you to do is to get a local VC like Bumdi interested in your company and then think about what you would want from an to have an American VC. I think pitching American VCs directly without a local lead is a very hard thing to do. So thank you for that. Matthew. Let's go to Zeppa Zephamatech.

Hello.

Hi everyone.

Hello.

All right.

My name is Doing Adeshida, right. I'm the founder of Z Palma So Z Palma was formed out of the thoughts of Generation Z's Papas and Mamas. So we picked out the tones, three tones from Gen Z's Papas and Mamas. We're building an ecosystem, Right. That would pay users for walking. Literally. We're trying to solve poverty. We feel like there's a lot of poverty in Africa generally. And from seeing solutions that have worked in west like Sweatcoin and Stepn, we're using that solution as a foundation, but we're adding some additional features. So my question actually goes to Mr. Bumi. So our app enables code trekking, co studying and co gaming and we're building out of Federal University of Technology. Accurate. We would be rewarding users with our own cryptocurrency called Zipper Coin. The intention behind it is to build like a universal basic income like thing into the zipper coin. Mr. Bumi, would this be something that you think would scale across Africa, not just Nigeria? And would this be something that you might be interested in looking at further?

Yeah, thank you, Donye, for that. I think resolving employability and monetization for everyone is like an important problem to solve somehow. Definitely. I agree with that. And, and trying this on a university campus, that's how Facebook started, seems to be something that makes sense if you can make it work. And really then that would be interesting. I would say the thing you should be looking for is virality. If you can truly get through virality even in just one university, then maybe you think you might be onto something there. I think so. It's really thinking about that. That piece. For me, I don't do anything consumer oriented. It's all kind of B2B so it's not something that we will look at. But, but I think what you're trying to do is, is, is quite interesting and I hope you find virality and then I think you're going to be onto something and then I think you can scale across the continent.

Oh, okay.

Sorry to say. So we have something B2B in the model as well. I have a real estate background, so there's a real estate component within the ecosystem, something we've called Zipper Stops. So we found out like from on campus that students walk a lot and they have nowhere to just sit and just charge their phones and have a drink under the hot sun. So something called Zipper Stops. Right. Which would be rest stops, community hubs where they can charge their phones, drink water, get ZipRoma merchandise, buy data for their phones using Zipper Coins and then on our app as well. So while you're trekking, you'd be able to see zipper stops near you. So literally, like integrating zipper stops into existing businesses. Like, we already have 10 partnerships for those B2B's because all the businesses are excited when they hear that. Okay. Their businesses will be featured on our app and users from the application will be able to see what they have to offer. That's that B2B model that might interest you. Our ecosystem is pretty, pretty like comprehensive. I'm just giving you a little bit of the ice off the top like this.

All right.

Thank you for that and good luck with what you're building. Let's get to the next questionnaire. Andre.

Hey, Martin, Sorry. Actually I was listening in for pure curiosity, but I did have a question for. It was a boomi. Did it pronounce correctly?

Yes.

This is interesting to your point. Nigeria has a huge tech hub. Microsoft has offices there. I was actually at some point might have ended up going there as a tech dev lead a while back. So it was funny. But you mentioned something and I just wanted to get your take on it. You mentioned that Africa is using web3 for houses. Is that what you said?

Yeah, I was talking about like how you have REITs, right? Real estate investment trusts. The idea of tokenizing these houses and fractionalizing it and making it such that people can buy little portions or invest in portions of homes. I believe strongly in that tokenization of real world assets and the fact that in Africa the use cases around that could be very exponential. Right. People are investing in stock market and things like that today and people are fractionalizing that. That's what Robin Hood did. I think the ability to do that on real world assets could be very interesting in. In Africa, like in real estate.

Interesting. Can you. I guess I'll. I'll send you maybe an email later. Just curious about that.

Okay, no problem.

Thanks for that, Andre.

Thank you, Martin. Sorry to hijack a bit, but thank you.

No problem, no problem. There's one other question in the chat here. Bumi Maximus Seneca asked, should Africa build one currency system like Gaddafi had suggested? What do you think of like an EU euro, a single currency type system? It didn't seem to work out too well for the Europeans.

I think Africa should. I think it doesn't have to be across Africa. It could be a basket. So it could be a regional basket. Could be Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya deciding to create a currency. East Africa saying they want to create a currency. I think it's important to start small than to try and do something pan Africa. I think it's important to look at just one small use case. But yeah, I think something should be done. But there's a lot of people that would not want it to be successful, I can tell you that.

Yeah, definitely.

Definitely.

Okay, well, I think we're getting to the end of it here. I don't. I'm getting a little feedback here for some reason, but is there anything else you want to summarize? Maybe you're actually in America now, in Michigan. Maybe you want to talk a little bit about your accelerator you're thinking about putting in America and how that relates to your African American. African investments.

Yeah, absolutely. I live in Houston, but I was born in Michigan, so I'm visiting Michigan right now. I think that there's a big opportunity to create essentially what a venture studio in America. I think that there's a lot of innovators that are building in America, but they're just building for America. I think anybody building America should really be thinking about building for the world. Right? And that means building for Africa, that means building for Southeast Asia, that means building with those use cases. And I think that we can help. I think that we can be that co founder for companies that are trying to build for a global market. And we think doing that through a venture studio makes sense. And then we'll pair that up with a fund as well. So. So the way we're seeing it is our Fund three is actually a US fund that's backing companies and organizations that want to go global paired with our venture studio. And again, maybe that's because I like to get my hands dirty. I like to be hands on and just not a passive investor. So we're looking forward to doing that.

That sounds exciting. I think we've got one more question before we go. Maximus had a question about agtech. I'm unmuting you now.

Can you hear me? Can you see me?

We can hear you. Let me see if I can't see you, but go ahead and ask your question.

All right. So my name is Maximus Seneca, originally from Ghana. I live in Maryland right now. And I found an opportunity in the pet care industry that would build a dog only receptacle for most neighborhoods to accumulate dog waste, which is 12.6 million tons in the USA and do soil conversion to be redistributed into the reforestation project around the world. But in order to achieve that goal, it has to be a unit economics. So I'm starting with something called Scooper leash, which converts a dog leash into both leash and a scooper. That Encourages people to scoop and then the trash can will be sold to this, the sanitation department and dog parks, which breaks down the dog waste and eliminate the odor. The question here is that being an African in the United States, I'm telling you it's very difficult to raise funds. We had enough connection with Sweden for 10 million, but we failed the deal because of a due diligence in the second round. The question here is that would you be interested in looking at us to build this ecosystem that leads us into building cheap fertilizer for the reforestation of the Gobi Desert, the Saudi Arabian desert and everywhere else around the world because we will be very cheap to supply these things to them. But to achieve it, it has to start from the unit economics that I'm building.

Yeah, interesting. Unfortunately, I'm not an expert in that space at all, but I think what you described sounds very interesting. I think keep looking for opportunities to present what you're doing and I think you'll probably find an investor that understands that space well and is able to help and support.

Thank you.

I would agree too. That's not my wheelhouse, but it seems like something very useful to build. I for a while was a climate tech investor about 10 years ago and I did a lot of things on biodigesting and those kind of renewable energy technologies. They just turned out to be a little too capital intensive to be venture style returns though they were potentially as project finance. But. Okay, I think we've run up to our time, but thank you so much for sparing an hour of your time and your busy schedule. Unmi. We appreciate your insight into Africa. I look forward to maybe working with you on some B2B software deals there. I'd love to invest more. I have done one investment this year. I'm going to do seven more this year and $250,000 or so and I'd like to do one or two more in Africa. So let's stay in touch and thank you for your time and thank you everybody for attending.

Absolutely. Thank. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Okay, thank everyone.