Dropifi, the Ghanaian tech startup has become the first entirely African company to join the Silicon Valley-based 500 Start Up program.
Dropifi is a smart customer service widget that helps users better analyse, visualize, and respond to to incoming messages and also tells when sent emails are opened.
David Osei, Effah Mensah and Kamil Nabong founded the startup in November 2011 after joining the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) program in Accra, Ghana in August of the same year.
Dropifi won the Global Startup Open Competition and was named the World’s best startup in 2012 by Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
At the Global Entrepreneurship Congress in Rio De Janeiro, the founders pitched to David McClure of 500 Startups and was eventually picked.
According to David Osei, Co-Founder and CEO of Dropifi, “Being the first African startup to join a leading U.S. accelerator validates our idea and serves as a springboard for us to take giant leaps into helping businesses better interact with customers.” Osei added, “We also see it as an inspiration for young African entrepreneurs and a signpost that, Africa is geared up to be the next economic frontier.”
Dropifi is in San Francisco for 4 months, 3 months at 500 Start Ups headquarters in Mountain View and 1 month taking part in the program’s Demo Days and final investor meetings.Since launching on WordPress and Shopify late in 2012 there have been over 8,000 downloads on WordPress and over 900 Shopify stores are using the Dropifi widget to collect and analyze their incoming messages and leads.
500 startups was founded in 2007 as a seed accelerator and investment fund by former Mint.com executive, Dave McClure.
“Most web sites have a contact for which is dumb, just sending an email. Dropifi is a smart contact form which extracts the right data. Very much aimed at small business,” TechCrunch said.
