Appfrica Labs Joins KUV Capital

After two months of planning, I’m pleased to officially announce that Appfrica Labs, the Y-Combinator inspired incubation arm of this company, has been funded! Kuv Capital, a venture capital firm specializing in emerging market investments is now our partner as we move forward in funding and mentoring East Africa’s rising thinkers, entrepreneurs and software developers.

Appfrica Labs Joins the Kuv Capital Team

Two months ago, venture capitalist Hervé Cuviliez came to Kampala with a goal. Kuv had successfully taken an incubator from nothing to being completely profitable in just three years in Beirut, Lebanon and was excited to hear about all the rapid development occurring in Africa…particularly East Africa. His company was interested in expanding, potentially doing something similar here in Uganda. This resulted in his traveling to Kampala, to see the inner workings of the organization I had been previously bootstrapping. Long story short, he was impressed enough by what he saw to essentially make a commitment on the spot.

What is Appfrica Labs?

As mentioned, Appfrica Labs is a for-profit incubator and software development firm currently based out of Kampala, Uganda. The mission is to offer opportunities and work experience for East African software entrepreneurs so that they can then use their talents to bolster the growing local markets by creating their own products and companies. We pick up where local colleges like Makerere University leave off by offering hand-on experience in Java, C++, C#, Ruby on Rails, Django and Python, PHP, Perl, Kannel and various other programming languages that often can’t be taught in-depth in classes due to budget restraints. These skills are highly valued around the world and skilled professionals in this region will make East Africa a more attractive place to develop software, not only locally but also for international companies. Appfrica Labs will also provide oversight and guidance to the projects that are launched out of the incubator.

Fighting the Urge to Important Talent

There are a number of groups who operate in Africa by developing technologies abroad or contracting abroad to get jobs done. There’s a good reason for this, the amount of time and money lost to training local staff and crossing cultural divides (like concepts of time and accountability) is huge. I’ve talked to the Directors of a number of programs on the ground here and they often say the same things, “If we could hire locally we would.” And even though it costs more to contract experts from developed countries, it saves time which is probably proportionate to the amount of cash it saves. These companies aren’t in the business of training so it makes complete sense that they would avoid it wherever possible.

When it comes to software development in East Africa hopefully this will become less of an issue. As our team becomes more experienced we intend to serve this niche market.

The Two Appfricas

It’s important to understand that although there is one umbrella company, Appfrica Labs is a separate entity from Appfrica Media (this blog and other publishing interests). Fortunately, Kuv Capital has also recognized this and will optionally help seed this arm of Appfrica as well. Appfrica Media is an ambitious idea to publish new media and printed content for the African market. This includes things like this blog, Fricafact.com, Muxtionary.com and more properties coming later this year. It exists to advance and support the literary and journalistic markets of this part of the world. A huge part of this is making things like quality technology news accessible to as many people here as possible. As such, Appfrica.net will soon begin publishing in a number of other Bantu languages, Afrikaans and Arabic.

An Office and Local Hires

Funding has allowed me to move this assembly of software and web enthusiasts out of my home to an actual office space here in Kampala (click here to see the space before we moved in). And fortunately, it’s allowed me to hire programmers full time. This is an important aspect to consider for anyone thinking of launching an incubator in a developing country. People here don’t have a whole lot of options which means when there’s a chance to make money, they’ll take it. This often means leaving a good, non-paying opportunity, for a short-term, paying opportunity. To combat this, Appfrica is providing full time jobs for our incubatees to hopefully provide ‘the safety net’ that will allow them to experiment and brainstorm. This includes offering plenty of free time and access to quality equipment…servers, desktop computers, laptops, internet connectivity and the most important resource of all…like-minded peers.

East African Venture Capital Firm

In the coming months and years, Appfrica Labs will be investing in the ideas and business plans of our local talent. There’s already some great ideas brewing in the laboratory and I can’t wait to see them blossom. Unlike many efforts in this part of the world, Appfrica Labs is not an MFI, it’s not focused on agriculture or health, it’s not an NGO; our focus is 100% on software, technology and entrepreneurs.

An Absence of Incubators

A while back, Erik Hersman wrote “There is a Problem with Seed Capital in Africa“, touching on the fact that foreign firms aren’t any more interested in investing in Africa than Africans are. Ultimately it should be African businessmen who are fostering this movement, but they aren’t. It’s often a place where wealth is guarded or abused, but all too often, not reinvested in it’s own. That’s how you end up with billionaire politicians in literally some of the poorest nations on the planet.

When it comes to VCs in America and Europe, “Investors don’t invest in businesses, they invest in people,” is a mantra commonly heard from Investors and MBAs alike. What then, does that say about Africa which is really lacking any sort of major VC community? Does it mean there’s a lack of faith (or trust) in people here? Definitely. But until there are more success stories, until there are more Ushahidis, Afrigators and Synthasites, until people take a leap of faith and don’t get burned, that mentality will remain. It’s up to Africa, and only Africa to change it.

On that note, I’d like to thank Kuv Capital for taking that leap with me and supporting entrepreneurs in forgotten markets around the world.