Two South African start-ups, Preeva and Pineapple, are among the 11 African start-ups that raised over $12 million (R171 million) collectively, through Google's Launchpad Accelerator Africa Class 2 programme.
The finalists from six Sub-Saharan Africa countries have graduated from the initiative's second class, which began in August in Lagos, Nigeria.
Preeva, an online platform that connects students with educators, and Pineapple, an insurance company that lets users insure individual items using its mobile app, each received $10 000 (R143 000) in equity-free funding, as well as access to 48 mentors and expert advisors. The start-ups say the funding will be used to further develop their business.
The three-month programme aims to support start-ups to build, further develop and scale their products, while matching them with the best of Google: its people, network and advanced technologies.
"The networking opportunities and tools offered by the Google Launchpad Accelerator have been invaluable in helping us with concepts for data-driven decision-making," says Qhama Sinandile, GM and co-founder of Preeva.
"After learning the objectives and key results framework, we have implemented it across the company and we are changing our business model to focus primarily on business-to-business instead of business-to-consumer. We have also introduced a change in our pricing, and we have seen immediate gains."
Targeting educational institutions that support students through bursary funds and foundations, Preeva says its biggest differentiator is the internal tutor sourcing, assessing and training system, which ensures tutors are fully equipped to have the highest level of impact on students.
The online platform says it is now strengthening its relationships with schools and universities to ensure its tutoring is in line with curricular courses.
"We are working to host more affordable workshops for every major test and exam in every major school and university around the country, aimed at providing free tutoring for students, who could not previously afford it," notes Sinandile.
Launchpad Accelerator Africa participants together raised over $12 million in equity-free funding from Google, and collectively, the 33 founders created 253 jobs before and during the programme, according to Google.
Over the next three years, the technology conglomerate will provide African start-ups with over $3 million in equity-free support, working space and access to expert advisers from Google, Silicon Valley and Africa through the initiative.
Matthew Elan Smith, co-founder of Pineapple, says his team has been able to learn the best of what Google offers in terms of project and goal management, to help the business scale.
"Through Google's Launchpad Accelerator, the Pineapple team have learnt to improve our technology architecture and marketing efforts. When we started, our sales strategy was a manual process, with many loopholes. We have now implemented advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) systems on the marketing front, which among many things, helps run more efficient Google Ads. We have gone from 1 700 to 6 100 members on the platform since joining Launchpad."
The Johannesburg-based insurtech start-up allows a mobile user to snap an image of any item they want to insure, and uses AI to recognise the image and place it in an appropriate category to determine its pricing bracket.
The app provides transparency by showing users exactly how premiums are used, with all unused premiums returned to the consumer.
"The most valuable input from the accelerator was learning how to better manage our development cycles, improve our architecture into a micro-services-based system, and make our infrastructure more agile. We will still be in contact with the experts to get advice on further development support," notes Smith.
The start-up is creating a decentralised peer-to-peer platform to allow users to connect with friends, family and trusted acquaintances on the app and get them covered, to remove the high risk and conflict of interest in insurance.
Launchpad Accelerator Africa, according to Google, will run until 2020, with two intakes of 10 to 12 start-ups per year.
"The growth of entrepreneurship in Africa is critical to the survival of our continent. We're currently, as a region, creating about three million jobs per year, while more than 11 million job-seekers are entering the market," says Fola Olatunji-David, head of start-up success and services, Launchpad Africa.
"Google believes that empowering entrepreneurs and start-ups is essential to drive employment growth, and enable both economic and social development on the continent."
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