Yele Bademosi’s Microtraction seeks to provide early stage seed capital to technical entrepreneurs

Ex-Starta General Manager, Yele Bademosi, has announced the launch of Microtraction, an investment platform that provides seed capital to technical entrepreneurs at the very earliest stages of their venture.

Microtraction will invest $65,000 in two stages. The first investment is $15,000 for 7.5% equity stake, followed by an additional $50,000 convertible note at a $1mn valuation cap in companies that show significant progress after our initial investment.

According to Yele in his blog post, “There’s a lack of early financial support and mentorship for young African entrepreneurs who have innovative ideas about how to solve some of the Africa’s largest problems. Microtraction is built to solve this problem, on one hand we have a sizeable number of startups in Nigeria and Africa that possess high growth and innovative potentials but often fall short of the investment prerequisite of VC funding, due to the reduced instances of Angels funding & mentors for these startups, this creates a “Pre-Seed Funding Gap” and this is where Microtraction comes in.”

He adds that Microtraction aims to to bridge these gap and make it easier for African founders to build successful startups by:

• identifying the best early-stage, growth-driven technology businesses in billion dollar markets via an open application
• working closely with the startups, providing pre-seed funding, professional and advisory services to them
• assisting in getting startups to a point where they are substantially impressive enough to raise an institutional round of funding from VCs or join world-class accelerators like Y Combinator, 500 Startups or TechStars
• helping startups raise venture financing from seed-stage investors

Application for funding is open. Please check the website to learn more before applying for funding.