TECH | STARTUPS

10 Nigerian Startups You Should Know (II)

It has been over a year since I published the first part of this two-part article on Medium. Even I cannot explain its root cause. I apologise, dear reader. I will do better going forward 🥹🤲🏾

10 Nigerian Startups You Should Know (I)

This second part of the list was difficult to put together. I had to remove and add names to the list multiple times. Two startups previously on the list are dead. Send a tissue box to your friends working at a startup. It’s tough out there.

Many startups are doing interesting things across the country. Others are just there. I am constantly on the lookout for startups doing interesting stuff, the simple, the jaw-dropping, the bizarre or the heartwarming. Do shoot them my way if you know any🚀

I was surprised at how much attention the first part got and hesitated to publish the second, spiralling into a prolonged delay that made it almost pointless to publish this. Again, I offer my sincere apologies. I am super grateful to everyone who read, clapped, shared and provided feedback on the first part of this article. I hope you’ll find this one as good as the first.

Early in the year, getting cash became quite difficult all over Nigeria but one place seemed unaffected. Parties. Videos of couples getting sprayed cash made the internet, and one sprayer got arrested 😬 So, we are opening this article with a startup that has chosen to dip its hand into one of Nigeria’s most expensive yet booming cultures. Weddings.

Ẹkú Ìnáwó. But Without the Headaches

Two things that get me excited about a startup. Unusual and unpopular. Inawo ticks both boxes. Ìnáwó (e-naa-woh) is a Yoruba word that literally translates to “spending money” (loose translation is “celebration”). It is used to describe every kind of event that makes you spend money tbh. If you think money will be spent at the event, then it qualifies. Expectedly, the money spender is greeted with Ẹkú Ìnáwó. I assure you, there’s no English word for Ẹkú. Just take my word for it.

Source: Inawo via Instagram

Inawo is wading into the murky water of wedding planning and ensuring that the Nigerian wedding culture is not ignored in the increasingly digital world. They serve two players in this market, the about-to-wed and the vendors.

Intending couples can use Inawo to create a custom site for their wedding, create and send digital invites, find vendors, create a wishlist and receive cash gifts. These features are not too easy to appreciate until you see the sites some couples have built. Stunning 😊 For an activity that is draining for couples, it requires some thoughtfulness to wade into that space.

The most prominent player in the Inawo ecosystem is the intending-to-wed. Their Instagram is littered with photos that would have you wanting to get married. Y’all stay safe though. I’m unmoved by all that 🥱

Inawo

However, I find the second player more interesting. Being a vendor aggregator for intending couples while serving as a publicity channel for vendors is a smart move. If they become the vendor marketplace for all kinds of Ìnáwó, they corner a market that is never drying up. Until you have a celebration to host, you will never see how difficult it is to find vendors. Good ones. If you think it’s not too hard, how would you find a live band for a party? 😏

While they have chosen the most lucrative of Ìnáwó, there exists an opportunity to dabble in the others. Birthdays, reunions, anniversaries… Ìnáwó is a big part of Nigerian culture that won’t go away easily. I’m yet to see a competition for the startup. Maybe I’ve not searched well. There are many unexplored areas, including event management software for event planners. The question is, can these ideas translate into money?

After Marriage? Babies!

In the first iteration, there was only one healthcare startup on the list. They didn’t make it to the final list 😅 In my observation, startups in healthcare are the most brilliant. Not as popular as consumer-facing fintech guys but their work is beautiful.

In 2017, Dr Chinny Obinwanne, a medic and advocate of exclusive breastfeeding had trouble breastfeeding her baby. After struggling for months with different options to increase her breastmilk supply, she found her eureka moment.

With Milk Booster, this doctor has converted the outcome of her work into a business opportunity. She developed organic snacks that helped her increase her breastmilk supply and now sells them around the world. Their site claims they have delivered their product to mothers across 30 countries.

The Milk Bank NG — The Milk Booster

If anyone asked me, I’d have never thought breastfeeding was a problem. You likely also assumed it’s a natural process and nobody would need “supplements” to increase their supply. This gives credence to the need for industry knowledge and firsthand experience as validation for ideas that founders put forward. If you know the pain points, coupled with industry experience, you’d have a better view of not only the problem but how to solve it.

By August 2022, the company took a step further by launching an actual breast milk bank; giving mothers access to pasteurised human milk. It works just like a blood bank. This means that lactating mothers can donate milk and premature babies can have a lifeline. Will they donate? 😶

Source: ChannelsTV Website

The next startup takes the baby care thing a notch hire and as a retired data scientist, they had to be on this list.

Cries as a Vital Sign

I am not a fan of babies. Spending a short time with them or watching their videos online can be sweet but anything longer than that is plenty of work. The crying can be quite annoying too. If it’s short, yeah, that’s cute. But once it gets so loud and long, jeez 🤕

The simple explanation most of us would have if a baby is crying is hunger or discomfort. Or in another world where babies are believed to see ghosts and sense bad people, well...🥴 Would you believe it if you were told that the cry could be used to detect a leading cause of death in babies?

Source: Ubenwa via Twitter

Ubenwa is redefining how a baby’s cry is viewed and how much we can do with it. By leveraging machine learning (AI 🌚), they are building software solutions for parents and medical professionals to early detect possible health problems by analyzing the cries of the baby. Their Baby Cry Tracker app allows you to translate what the cry could mean and monitor possible patterns in the frequency of cries. Their solution is primarily built to tackle birth asphyxia, a leading cause of neonatal death. However, their solution can (and will) do more, evidenced by their clinical development pipeline.

“Our first set of products is an app and an API that allows parents and physicians to use Ubenwa via their smartphones or video devices like baby monitors. With these, they can connect with our technology to carry out early screening for neurological problems” — Charles Onu (Cofounder and AI Lead at Ubenwa)

via TechCabal

While four of its seven listed clinical partners are Nigerian teaching hospitals and two of its cofounders are Nigerian, Ubenwa is based in Montreal. Top Crunchbase listings where Ubenwa appears, have “Canadian” in the description. If you recall, I did make an argument for the criteria for labelling a startup as “Nigerian” in the first article. Does Ubenwa qualify as Nigerian?

Clinical development pipeline via Ubenwa’s website

With grants won and $2.5 million in funding from investors, Ubenwa is on its way to making cry-based diagnosis a thing. Lest I forget, they’re hiring in Nigeria. Shoot your shot here.

AI for African Doctors

This is the last healthcare startup on the list. I promise 🤲🏾

In my first year as an undergraduate, I was a regular visitor at the health centre. The doctors took a lot of time with patients because everything was manual. For tech folks who have attempted to play in that industry, you’d know that healthcare is very resistant to technology. On one hand, there’s a mismatch between what the industry professionals need and what outsiders think they need. On another hand is the fear of job losses. As a knowledge-based industry, anything that can replace a section of practitioners will inevitably come for others.

However, technology always creates new problems while solving existing ones. Manual documentation of patients’ information during diagnosis means that physical files have to be maintained. This is an impediment to the development of hospital management systems for records management et al. However, such software already exists. Doctors in hospitals where they exist can view patient records on a computer and have to enter diagnosis information into a computer.

Intron Intron - Login

Intron Health started with record management like most health-tech companies. However, it was clear that the technology created new problems. Typing takes time. Unless you’re Mavis Beacon, I doubt you can type faster than you write.

“It was a busy hospital and they were all excited. They had electricity; we had installed a wireless network for them. Everything was great, [But] the day we launched, the doctor spent 40 minutes just to type the notes for the first patient that came.” — Dr Tobi Olatunji (Cofounder at Intron Health)

via TechCabal

Intron Health’s current iteration is what happens when founders stay innovating. Today, they are eliminating the need for doctors to write notes on paper or type into a computer. The existing problem and the technology-created problem. From paper to keyboard to microphones 🚀

Speech-to-text systems are not new. Alexa and Siri do that already. Their existence means Intron needed only to integrate existing ones into their system. However, the real problem presents itself, most systems cannot handle African accents. I am so surprised 🙂

Today, Intron’s system is said to identify over 200+ African accents. After collecting millions of audio data from 13 countries, the rest they say is history. At 92%, they have a pretty good speech-to-text accuracy, allowing doctors to take notes with very little effort. Problem solved. Literally.

I close the list with a startup dear to my heart 🥺

Reduce, Reuse, Wecycle-rs

From the Independence Bridge connecting Onikan and Ahmadu Bello Way, you can see a large cluster of floating garbage on the water. It’s mostly plastics. In parts of Lagos where manhole covers have been borrowed or gutters are open, there is always a large amount of trash inside.

Calabar - Why so clean?

You cannot take an interstate trip and not see refuse heaps set ablaze on one corner of the road. I won’t go over who is to blame among citizens and govt but Calabar going from being hailed as one of the cleanest cities in Africa to another filth-ridden city is proof of the widespread nature of poor waste disposal around the country. Calabar’s case clearly answers the question of who is to blame.

The decaying underbelly of Calabar, Nigeria's 'cleanest city'

In simple words, Wecyclers collects recyclable waste and pays you for it. Operating both a drop-off and pick-up model, subscribers can have their bikes or vans, pick up the waste from them if they live around their collection routes or take their waste to the nearest Wecyclers Recycling Exchange (WREX) Location.

In both cases, subscribers have their waste weighed and points allocated to them. These points can be redeemed after a minimum of 3 (WREX) or 4 (pickup) months. By creating a reward system around recycling, Wecyclers takes attention away from who should handle waste and incentivises waste collection among individuals in its primary location, Lagos.

Two striking moves the company has made are its business-facing service and Franchise program. Its Commercial Pick-Up Program charges an annual subscription fee to corporates, while it provides collection of recyclable waste and training of company cleaning staff on how to separate recyclables and non-recyclables to ensure efficient storage of the former before collection. Companies that are concerned about the environment would find this useful.

Wecyclers Is Saving the Environment, one trash at a time. Photo: KFB US

Franchise is one business model that has not gotten significant traction in Nigeria, notwithstanding its benefits. Dr. Adeiza’s article below explains its prospects better than I ever would. While its franchise program is still nascent, I strongly believe in its potential as a solution to a widespread social problem and an income source, particularly for women in rural areas.

Growing the Nigerian Franchise Industry: Lessons from Global Franchise Giants

Collecting recyclable waste addresses three issues; first, it tackles indiscriminate waste disposal. Second, it reduces the challenge of landfill management. Where recyclable waste does not get to landfills, the size of waste that ends at landfills declines and the cost of sorting trash at landfills diminishes. Third, it ensures a steady supply of materials for industries that rely on recyclables.

Creating an income for mostly rural communities while eliminating the social problem of waste management is a masterstroke. Making life easier is a selling point. Making money for people? It’s a bigger selling point. Wecyclers validates this. If you’re considering launching your startup, I can assure you, if you help people make money, and you do it right, you will thrive.

Closing Thoughts

Those who know me fairly well wouldn’t have been surprised to see Stears on the list (the first part). I’m a big fan!

I am heavily biased in favour of startups whose work is more than “an app” doing something that already works. It's why I favour those in healthcare. They keep pushing the boundaries in an industry I regard as very treacherous. On the days the excessive mediocrity in Nigeria hits you, I hope the work these guys are doing cheers you up 🙏🏾

The problems in Nigeria are enormous and the work is really hard. There are 36 states in Nigeria, and it’ll take many years before a startup like Wecyclers can reach everywhere even with franchising. But we need more like them in other places, doing the hard work of ridding our towns of plastics and providing income for people.

There is plenty of room for more startups. There are sectors with a lot of informal activity that can be significantly improved by technology and innovative business models. As the number of startups and investors remains on the rise, we can tentatively say that it only gets better from here.

But every rose comes with its share of thorns. We must be ready to see some errors, challenges and failures. The same energy used to sing the praises of the positives must be used to assess and critique the negatives if we are to reduce their prevalence. The last two years have been a show of thorns. I don’t think it's stopping soon😶

I finally got this out of the drafts!

If this was worth your time, let me know.

Thank you, dear reader 🙏🏾

For Jomiloju ✨