South Africa’s first equity crowdfunding platform Uprise Africa has launched. Uprise is an innovative platform that facilitates access to alternative funding solutions for South African entrepreneurs and links everyday South Africans to early-stage investment opportunities.
The platform was launched in 2017 by Tabasum A Qadir, better known as ‘Tabz,’ who strongly believes that Uprise Africa can drive positive change within the SME landscape through addressing the access to funding and the changing of ownership models.
Uprise Africa comes to the rescue of entrepreneurs during tight economic times especially when these entrepreneurs are faced with a funding gap between their startup ‘seed fund’ and their “go-to-market” capital. The platform believes crowdfunding is a great way to fill that gap by scaling what works to the next level and this system also enables entrepreneurs to test, learn and grow their business models rapidly during the early stages of their development.
Uprise Africa is the equity crowdfunding platform for South Africa. The innovative platform connects entrepreneurs with investors to raise the funding they need while facilitating the investment process.
Speaking in an interview with Innovation Village on what motivated the creation of Uprise Africa, Founder, Tabz said, “I experienced the lack of alternative funding solutions within the South African SME landscape in my last venture. My personal experience and research on the role that equity crowdfunding has played in other parts of the world was the motivation behind launching the platform. I have a passion for entrepreneurship in Africa and Uprise Africa will play a big role in enabling SME growth in South Africa and in the future rest of the continent.”
The startup aims to disrupt the capital raising market in South Africa by taking advantage of social networks to make raising capital inclusive and accessible. In implementing an effective marketing strategy together with online campaigns, SMEs have a high potential of raising the capital they need and engaging with the right stakeholders to take their business to the next level.
While speaking on how potential entrepreneurs can engage the platform, the founder said, “Equity crowdfunding is a new way to invest in SMEs. Multiple investors contribute to innovative business pitches in exchange for equity shares in the company. Raising capital alongside multiple sources reduces investment risk. Businesses gain validation and build brand awareness through the capital-raising process.
“To apply to raise funding on Uprise Africa, entrepreneurs are required to complete an initial online application after creating a user profile on the platform. The initial application asks for a business plan, investor pitch deck and strength of a business and should take an entrepreneur about 2 – 4 hours to complete.
“Once entrepreneurs have completed their initial application, Yue-Diligence, our investment analyst, compiles a report to be reviewed by our investment committee. This committee assesses the business on the strength of the idea, profitability, generated revenue and customer traction. If the review committee successfully selects the business, they move through to the equity crowdfunding onboarding process.”
Interestingly, Uprise Africa has 250 investors registered on the platform, and 197 investors have received share certificates. This number should increase substantially over the next couple of months.
Speaking on challenges currently being faced by the startup, Tabz said, “crowdfunding was untested in South Africa. The biggest challenge has been educating stakeholders on equity crowdfunding. Getting SMEs and investors to engage with the funding/investment solution. Education is a continuous focus of our platform. We are always looking at ways to collaborate to ensure SMEs receive all the support they need.”
On achievements, the founder said, “The Drifter campaign, which was able to raise R3, 889,000 on our platform, enabled us to test several of the assumptions we made during the conceptualization of Uprise. Africa.
“Over the past 6 months, we focused on improving our offering to ensure that we can scale and that our offering is sustainability. The investment from Nexxus Ventures has been instrumental during this process and has also enabled us to proceed with the hiring of new staff and training. As a result, we have not launched any additional campaigns since Drifter. This was a conscious decision on our part to wait. We have some exciting deals in our pipeline that we will start launching in the next few weeks.
“As we have said from the beginning, we are building a company and a category that will create a viable alternative funding solution for South Africa startups. So, we are ensuring that we do this the right way.”
Going forward in 2019, Uprise Africa will look to launch deals on a regular basis with the aim of proving that equity crowdfunding is viable and enabling growth within the SME landscape of South Africa.
