Cactus Capital, the investment arm of Cactus Advisors, announced that it has invested undisclosed amounts into two new African ventures – Flutterwave and E-Factor.
The announcement was made by Cactus Advisors’ founder and CEO, Zach George at the Allan Gray Orbis E2 Accelerator program at Standard Bank Future Labs in Cape Town. He said that the company was excited to be investing in pioneering fintech companies that had graduated from leading accelerator programs worldwide.
Founded by Iyin Aboyeji after he left Andela, Flutterwave is a San Francisco-based team of African entrepreneurs, financial services technologists & mobile payment experts that provides end-to-end payments technology and infrastructure which enables payment service providers, global merchants, licensed money transfer operators and pan-African banks to process payments to and from Africa with one API integration.
E-Factor is a South African-based Fintech company that has created a digital factoring platform where companies can sell their receivable invoices through an auction to investors with the highest bid. By investing in these invoices, investors obtain new short-term investment instruments with low-risk returns.
“As Cactus Advisors, simply investing into high growth, high impact tech-enabled ventures on the continent is not good enough, unless we critically have the right enabling environment on the continent for tech startups to access markets, channel partners and customers. Corporate Africa with its powerful consortium of financial services firms, retailers, telecommunication firms, insurance companies and media houses – all of whom are yet to seriously tap into the innovation pipeline that tech startups offer – provides the ideal platform for commercializing proof-of-concept agreements with startups that serves as a perfect risk mitigation shield to investors looking for returns in the African venture capital sector”, said Zach George, Cactus Advisors’ founder – a former top-tier Wall Street investment banker and alumnus of Stanford University Graduate School, who moved to South Africa in 2010.
After 3 years of running the Africa operations of U-Start, a global investment advisory firm for prominent venture capital and private family offices, Zach founded Cactus Advisors to pioneer corporate venture capital driven accelerator programs on the African continent in partnership with Philip Kiracofe, an American venture capitalist and partner at Horizen Ventures Africa.
Following on the successes of the Barclays Tech Lab Africa Accelerator where 10 fin-tech and health-tech ventures raised a collective total of $10million along with 7 engagements and Proof of Concept projects with Barclays – Zach and Philip were offered to jointly run Startupbootcamp in Africa. Startupbootcamp is a global network of industry focused startup accelerators that scales and grows startups globally by giving them direct access to an international network of the most relevant partners, content, investors and mentors in their sector. Startupbootcamp started in 2010 and now operates 15 accelerator programs in 11 locations around the world including Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Eindhoven, Istanbul, London, Rome, Singapore, Miami, Mumbai and New York. Startupbootcamp Africa aims to enable local tech startups to grow and scale quickly, gain exposure on a global scale, and to support startup development in Africa, building on the successes it has had over the last 5 years:
- 34 programs worldwide
- 345+ startups accelerated
- 72% funding success rate
