URBUNX Connected Accelerator

In Africa, we often see these people succeed more easily: foreign founders, people with elite school degrees, local elites with government connections or family assets. However, ordinary entrepreneurs often lack connection, capital, access to resources, knowledge, and technical capacity to be able to succeed. Social mobility stays virtually stagnant. The problem is made worse due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  

We are building a virtual platform that will help affected startups to reset and find the product-market fit in a more efficient and effective way, through a virtual coaching program supported by both global and local mentors who can coach entrepreneurs and track their progress by combining existing tooling and best methodologies from lean startup methodologies. If scaled from Kenya to whole Africa, it would produce more diverse and resilient startups that would contribute to a more competitive and productive business sector and more self-employment and job opportunities for marginalized groups.

In Africa, not everyone can be successful in business if they tried. We often see these people succeed more easily: foreign founders, people with a foreign degree, local elite with government connections, or family assets. However, ordinary entrepreneurs often lack connection, capital, access to resources, knowledge, and the technical capacity to be able to succeed. Social mobility stays virtually stagnant. The problem is made worse due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Taking Kenya in 2019 as an example. The total number of deals is low: only 27 start-ups raised funds equal to or higher than USD $ 50,000. The deal sizes are also small: 40% of startups received VC investment between $50,000-999,000. In 2019, over 81.5% of the funding went to Nigeria and Kenya only, leaving other countries untouched. Due to the hit of COVID-19, globally we are expecting 28 billion USD loss in Venture Capital investment and Africa will be most vulnerable to this loss.

URBUNX is building a virtual platform which is both a knowledge database and a tracking tool that will allow global and local mentors to volunteer their time to coach entrepreneurs using lean methodologies helping them to adjust to post COVID-19 market and new normal, and to reset to find new scalable pathways for their businesses.

Now, African entrepreneurs no longer need to go to a University incubator, or attend a formal acceleration program, or search through their indirect connections, for high-quality coaching experience. With the virtual platform the world-class mentors are just one click away with no cost. 

Especially, our core team members have intensive coaching and acceleration experience in China. With a proven record of building over 300+ successful startups combined. Our solution can offer access to successful and duplicatable business models from China to Africa, localizing business and products to China, strong and comprehensive supply chain, digital transformation and technological advancement, as well as venture capital investment.

In Africa, not everyone can be successful in business if they tried. We often see these people succeed more easily: foreign founders, people with elite school degrees, local elite with government connections or family assets. 

Our target is the ordinary entrepreneurs who often lacks connections, capital, access to resources, knowledge, and the technical capacity to be able to survive and succeed post the COVID-19 pandemic. 

We are engaging them in a pilot base camp program that will be run in Kenya in the months of August and September 2020, where we will work with entrepreneurs to help them grow and scale with support from coaches, VC’s and global partners, such as the UN, World Bank, Xnode and local accelerators such as Decoded. we also creating questionnaire to collect data from startups and ecosystem partners to help map their needs and gaps.

By supporting African entrepreneurs, we help develop innovative and flourishing knowledge economies that can solve complex social problems through entrepreneurship. With better equipped and trained entrepreneurs and increased scalable urban business, we will make our society more innovative, productive, and prosperous. Local economy will be further stimulated by a more active business sector, higher youth employment, and better livelihoods.

Our platform targets underprivileged African business founders as they previously lacked the means and connections to make their product viable and competitive. 

Our pilot will help 15 businesses at the base camp and 50 businesses virtually which is estimated to provide meaningful jobs for 200-300 young people. We expect these businesses will employ more than 1000 young women and man within a year out of our coaching and acceleration. With the expected MIT Solve funding, we are confident to bring this solution to three more countries, tripling the impact to 4000 meaning jobs in total. 

In Africa digital transformation is slower than in other continents because of the lack of infrastructure, however COVID-19 has forced companies to focus more on the use of telecommunications solutions to run their businesses thus most companies have now moved their operations and sales online. Virtual acceleration is no different with most entrepreneurs working online. Moving coaching online allows startups to learn from not only local mentors but also tap into a global network of mentors from which  they can draw knowledge and experience from. In particular, the core team members of URBUNX have intensive experience and network in China, the connection to Chinese mentors and VCs is especially important. From production, to supply chain, logistics, knowledge, technologies, and even market, China plays a critical role in African businesses. 

The core technology we have is integrating existing tools and platforms together in one workflow.

Entrepreneurs can do cross cultural communication without the language barrier and make sure they can collaborate globally. 

Using worker bots you can use automated workflows in insight management and analytics on startup progresses. 

Using video conferencing technologies, interactive collaborative whiteboards would make it easier to brainstorm ideas and solutions.

Smart project management operations and scheduling tools can help to work with the mentors in the accelerator network to be in constant communication and make them more engaged.

We have cooperated with few organizations to run hackathons , virtual incubators using the same technology framework 

Example https://blockcovid.org/

Our platform targets underprivileged African business founders as they previously lacked the means and connections to make their product viable and competitive.

In the process we are targeting 50% female and 50% male founders and will gave priority to businesses trying to solve critical urban challenges and the need of marginalized urban communities.

Africa has the youngest demographics, and 60% of African youth are under 25 years. Our solution, at the pilot stage, helps 15 businesses at the base camp and 50 businesses virtually which is estimated to provide meaningful jobs for 200-300 young people. We expect these businesses will employ more than 1000 within a year of our coaching and acceleration. With the expected MIT Solve funding, we are confident to bring this solution to three more countries, tripling the impact to 4000 meaning jobs in total. 

In the next year, with available funding we are expanding to Nigeria, Tanzania, and Ghana. In the next 5 years, we aim to grow URBUNX into the largest cross-border virtual startup accelerator in the world. Our target is to gather 30 hired coaches and over 500 volunteer coaches, covering 15 countries in Africa, helping more than 750 businesses which employ more than 15,000 young female and male Africans. Our goal is to help these businesses to raise $3 billion venture capital investment, and facilitate the exits and exponential growth. Our website has a target to be visited 15 million times under this goal, which can generate ads income for this initiative. Our goal is to strengthen cross-cultural dialogues through the same business language, to promote globalization and partnerships across continents.

Our key barrier at this stage is funding. As at this stage we are very fortunate to have UN-Habitat and the World Bank backing us up with seed funding for the pilot. However, private investment is hesitant to invest us at a pliot stage. Our goal is to get development agency funding first to build a solid digital platform. The following business model we planned could flow easily to success at that stage. 

Our team has strong technical background on building software and hardware, soliciting partnerships, access to market information through local partners and World Bank internal research. UN-Habitat could provide legal assistant and government connection. Our team is multi cultural and multilingual. These are all critical assets to our success.

We are actively applying for development funding and foundation grants. 

URBUNX is not officially registered but aiming to register a foundation entity soon. The project originated from Nairobi in 2019 when UN-Habitat initiated this call to boost urban entrepreneurship. It was both an internal UN-Habitat pilot project,and an entrepreneurial engagement started by 4 core founders. Since the beginning, we have been working in a combination and entrepreneurial and entrepreneurial fashion. Later on we acquired seed funding from the World Bank and the UN to run a basecamp in Nairobi. Affected and motivated by the impact of COVID-19, we decided to move the acceleration online to adapt to the new normal

By far we on part-time fashion. 

6 core members: 1series entrepreneur and business owner of three companies, Forbes 30u30; 2) Project lead of innovation initiatives of UN-Habitat 3) Director of Intel, China 4) Cheif Commercial Officer of Xnode Accelerator; 5) Investment professional of IFC, WBG 6) Chief Operating Officer Decoded Africa

UN-Habitat has provided a part-time admin staff. Our legal, design, and communication needs could be satisfied by UN-Habitat team. Our finance is facilitated by Xnode through an agreement with the World Bank. We are hiring 3 full time interns through Decoded to meet the PR and logistics needs. 

Core team members include: 

1) Biman Liyanage: serial entrepreneur, business owners of three profitable companies, Forbes 30u30; Sri Lankan national, based in Beijing, China

2) Lei Guo: Project lead of innovation initiatives of UN-Habitat, Alibaba Global Dreamers Fellow-Product track, Chinese national, based in Nairobi, Kenya

3) Kapil Kane: Director of Intel, China; former Apple product manager, Indian National, based in Shanghai, China

4) Luuk Eliens, Chief Commercial Officer of Xnode Accelerator, with experience acceleration over 300 businesses, Dutch national, based in Shanghai, China

5) Investment professional of IFC, World Bank G; former Goldman Sacks investment professional, Chinese national, based in HK China

6) Max Musau, Chief Operating Officer Decoded Africa, Kenya national, based in Nairobi, Kenya

The core partnerships are: UN-Habitat,International Finance Corporation, World Bank Group (IFC), Xnode, Decoded.

The partners we have already reached out with positive and affirmative feedback are: Hult Prize Foundation, Africave,Chicago Booth Angel Networks, Netpreneurs Prize, Netpreneurs Prize,Gearbox, AngelHack, Gates and Melinda Foundation,Teja Ventures, China Alliance of Social Value Investment (CASVI),Collective Responsibility, UpCountry Africa Fund Assets, EcoPost Ltd, Nairobi Garage,AngelHack Google AI for Social Good

URBUNX is not officially registered as any type of organization. We are aiming to register a foundation entity soon. The project originated from Nairobi in 2019 when UN-Habitat Urban Economy and Finance Branch and Innovation Section initiated this call to boost urban entrepreneurship during UN-Habitat Assembly. It was both an internal UN-Habitat pilot project, as well as an entrepreneurial engagement started by 4 core founders. Since the beginning, URBUNX team has been working in a combination and intrapreneurial and entrepreneurial fashion. 

Later on we acquired seed funding from the World Bank Youth to Youth Community Fund and UN-Habitat to run a 2-day basecamp in Nairobi, Kenya. Affected and motivated by the impact of COVID-19, the team decided to move the acceleration online to adapt to the new normal. 

Eventually, we are looking to establish a Public-Private Joint Fund to invest equity in African urban startups. 

Our business model is a combination of non-for-profit initiatives with investment potential at later stage. 

We strictly stick to the lean startup methodologies. From pilot to scale stage, we rely on non-for-profit funding including development grant and foundation donations. We have received seed funding of $31,000 from the World Bank and UN-Habitat to test the pilot. In addition, with USAID, we are negotiating a muti-year million dollar investment agreement which was delayed by COVID-19 situation. 

In 2 years, we are aiming to establish a Public-Private fund which invest in equity of African startups. A management fee will go to the operation cost of URBUNX. 

The profitable part of our business is similar to a physical incubator. We have two types of income models:

1. Having a monthly rate for business support and coaching, which startups would pay as a monthly subscription to have access to the tools and coaching. 

2. Investing and receiving a stake in the business in exchange for the for the support services we will provide.

Our business model is a combination of non-for-profit initiatives with investment potential at later stage. 

We strictly stick to the lean startup methodologies. From pilot to scale stage, we rely on non-for-profit funding including development grant and foundation donations. We have received seed funding of $31,000 from the World Bank and UN-Habitat to test the pilot. In addition, with USAID, we are negotiating a muti-year million dollar investment agreement which was delayed by COVID-19 situation. 

In 2 years, we are aiming to establish a Public-Private fund which invest in equity of African startups. A management fee will go to the operation cost of URBUNX. 

We are applying because we believe in MIT Solve’s values in co-creation towards social good and tackling challenges today that will help us prepare for the future. 

Our goal and purpose is to support entrepreneurs in Africa with access to information and business tools to weather the economic storm that has been brought by COVID-19 and to find new pathways through new networks to scale and thrive in a changing world.

We want to reach out to others for more funding opportunities to support this initiative.

Business model and funding: 

We want to use a combination of not for profit and for profit model. We will kick off with the not for profit model where we receive funding but in 1-2 years once we will gain operations and investor confidence we will move to the for profit investment.

Talent recruitment:

We are creating a pool of global experts in specific areas and through MIT we can attract and collect the best in the world to help support local businesses.

Board members or advisors:

Advisors through and within the MIT network to help us grow the initiative and increase value of the brand

Marketing, media and exposure:

Putting ourselves among MIT selected projects will increase our visibility and with the support of the United Nations and World Bank the MIT partnership will really bring attention and create credibility for the ultimate acceptability and success of the project

Alex Pentland, etc.

Female entrepreneurs are under represented, and the women entrepreneurs in technology startups are even  less.Most of the VC funding is not going to women proportionally in Africa. Our solution insists a 50/50 access to both female and male founders.This does allow equal representation of men and women through the entrepreneurial journey

We qualify because we are a team of qualified experts and driven entrepreneurs who have put together the best resources brought together some of the worlds biggest and best partners to tackle the economic challenges that entrepreneurship in Africa is facing