Back in 2016, Bill Gates said that if he were a poor person living in a developing country, he’d grow chickens. Chickens can feed your family and chickens can make you a lot of money. Perhaps that hypothetical Poor Bill would figure out how to pay for the chicks, the feed, and the vaccines to grow those chickens. Poor Bill might even be savvy enough to find a buyer for his first 500...
Soaring through 2017 2017 was an incredible year for Fledge. What once was a small outlier accelerator based only in Seattle is now a global network of accelerators and seed funds operating across three continents, on its way toward being a leader in the industry. That wasn’t in the plan written back in 2012, but as we teach the fledglings, all plans are wrong. What we don’t tell them...
Seven fledglings took to the stage on December 14, 2017. Videos of all those talks will be posted on the Fledge YouTube channel.
Meanwhile, this video is a few highlights of that night’s events.
And don’t miss the behind the scenes view of “… everything changes more better” posted last week.
Geossy is helping women and youth in Uganda… by selling fish.
In rural Ghana, women typically can’t own their own land or do their own farming. Instead, they can only help their husbands, who then let their wives pick the shea nuts from the native shea trees and process those into shea butter. You may not have heard of shea butter, but you’ve used it, as it a common ingredient in moisturizers and cosmetics. Shea butter is thus a path for rural...
A doctor in Nigeria decides he could make more impact growing chickens. Not just growing them one by one or 1,000 by 1,000, but by launching a company where middle-class Nigerians can fund Nigerian farmers to raise chickens, sharing in the profits. Meanwhile, a Nigerian nurse decides she could make more impact working with widowed and single women smallholder farmers, helping them automate...
Fledge begins again! 10 intense weeks for seven new fledglings. This time in a brand new city, Barcelona. We’re excited to have a cohort filled mostly with West African companies. For the previous ten sessions we’ve had quite a few East African and Southern African startups, but none in person from Ghana before. We’re even more excited that two of these companies are founded...
Back in March, ImpactAlpha shared the news that Ziweto Enterprise purchased its distributor, Alfa Medics. The rest of the story is quite telling about African startup economics. The story began back in 2016, with the Ziweto founders reaching out to Fledge, seeking introductions to investors for up to $200,000 to buy Alfa Medics. Upon searching the world, we found less than a handful of fund who...
The idea of having a whole family of seed funds rather than one big pool of capital continues to resonate with investors and serve the needs of entrepreneurs. Case in point, the new Sanitation fund, and it’s $20,000 revenue-based loan to JOELEX. The impetus of this fund was rather simple. A small handful of investors saw JOELEX’s pitch on Demo Day (below), talked to Joel, and...
From Beyond Capital: In March, Ben Grozier, our Associate and member of the Beyond Capital Investment Team, met a smallholder farmer working a two acre plot of land in rural Tanzania, who was hoping to sell enough produce this season to feed, clothe, and educate his family. This farmer’s produce cannot easily be brought to market without waste or spoilage, and so he struggles to make a...