Whose Your Landlord (WYL), a Nigerian-owned housing startup based in the US recently announced raising $2.1 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Black Operator Ventures, better known as BlackOps Ventures.
Last year December, the venture capitalist firm, BlackOps Ventures pooled $13 million in capital from investors with the intention of investing in Black Founders. This WYL funding round is proof that the fund is living up to its intention.
Why the name “Whose Your Landlord,” and What is it about?
Whose Your Landlord, also known as WYL was founded back in 2015 by Ofo Ezeugwu — a Nigerian based in Buffalo, US — **with a focus on collecting renter notes concerning landlord and building quality. The company has evolved to include a SaaS service for what WYL calls “home providers,” or the folks who own buildings and other rental units.
To simply put, WYL collects renter feedback, which is easy to find and digest on its website. For rental owners with a good number of units, they can pay for the collected information, allowing landlords to track how they are performing with their customers, how many of their current tenants intend to stay, and so forth.
The startup writes on its website that it uses the possessive form of the word ‘who’ because — “We’re giving our community ownership of their living situations by putting housing in their hands.” WYL intend to build the world’s most trusted rental community by bringing transparency, equity, and humanity to the everyday interactions between residents and home providers.
“What we’ve learned about ourselves is we’re selling a process and an approach, not just a platform,” CEO and founder WYL, Ezeugwu said. “We emphasize a feedback-based culture which provides documentation and insights on how you can improve.”
Whose Your Landlord charges building owners $2 per unit, per month for its software, a figure that Ezeugwu said can be discounted for larger contract volumes. The startup has plans to expand its feature set, naturally, allowing it to charge more in time. Before it launched its software product, WYL generated revenue through brand partnerships with companies like Allstate and others that sell to folks who rent.
Investing in Black Founders — WYL $2.1 million funding intent by BlackOps Ventures
The BlackOps Ventures team — James Norman, Heather Hiles, Sean Green, and Ebony Peay Ramirez saw that even though Black founders are raising more capital in the past year, it is just a fraction of fraction compared to what other white founders coming out from a handful of US schools have managed in the recent years. So, the venture capital firm wants to shake up the norm and invest in Black founders as its focus.
Hiles, Norman, and Green
According to Norman, BlackOps is looking to invest in black founders as they are underinvested in, and who are the biggest arbitrage in tech.
With this funding, Whose Your Landlord is looking to expand and increase the quality of its features, by introducing new innovations like using NLPs to find trends in written reviews, to help companies with hundreds of units to better parse incoming feedback which in turn would naturally increase the quality of the service it.
Since running pilots for its SaaS offering last year, WYL has onboarded 7,000 house units and has earlier raised $1.1 million over a roughly seven-year period, the CEO said.
We wait to see how quickly WYL can scale its software incomes with this new funding.
Kenyan Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL) startup LipaLater raised $12 million a few weeks from a consortium of investors to expand into more African markets and dominate the existing market.
From Employee Phone Financing Programme To A Multimillion-Dollar BNPL Startup
Founded in 2018 by Eric Muli, LipaLater started as a programme to help internal employees access mobile phones that’d allow them to be efficient at work. Muli had initially founded Alpha Force Security Ltd, which dispatches security guards to homes and offices in Kenya.
In 2017, Alpha Force started a mobile phone financing programme for their employees—especially their guards—but found out there was no company offering a mobile phone BNPL solution in Kenya; the ones available, like M-Kopa, are primarily into solar power, so they decided to tackle it themselves.
Having helped their employees to get mobile phones, this brought them close to the market and, as a result, they realised that there were hundreds of people outside who needed one but couldn’t afford it. So, after some research, Muli and his team became sure that they could extend this solution to more Kenyans; in 2018, they built a tech-enabled product, LipaLater and launched it to the public.
LipaLater extended its offers into more retail options like electronics, furniture, home appliances, etc., within three years of operation.
Besides the traditional offline method of buyers purchasing items in stores, LipaLater has tapped into the rapidly growing online presence across Africa and built a unique BNPL option API that integrates into e-commerce platforms and enables merchants to sell products directly to consumers pays for them at affordable monthly instalments.
About LipaLater
LipaLater is a BNPL startup that helps retailers sell their products to customers on credit, at the point of sale, with customers paying for their purchases in affordable, monthly instalments. It leverages data analytics to provide consumers with convenient and affordable credit for purchasing items in stores. Its proprietary credit-scoring and machine learning system enable a consumer to sign up and get a credit limit in seconds, without the need for bulky documentation and a lengthy approval process.
The company also offers an offline solution for merchants and small-scale retailers that have not yet moved online. Since it was launched in 2018, LipaLater has served about 200,000 customers and maintained a 100% year-on-year growth.
Dominating African Market with $12M in pre-Series A Funding
The pre-Series A funding, a mix of equity and debt, was co-led by Cauris Finance, Lateral Frontiers VC (one of LipaLater’s first investors) and GreenHouse Capital, with participation from SOSV IV LLC, Sayani Investments and Axian Financial Services.
The company disclosed that this new fund would improve its BNPL services to its current stream of consumers, dominate in their existing markets—Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda—and expand into new markets such as Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, and Tanzania.
Speaking about the funding, Samakab Hashi, Partner at Lateral Frontier VC, ****said, “Over the last few years, we have watched Eric, and his team put together the building blocks for pan-African expansion, and this round of funding takes LipaLater one step closer to being the dominant BNPL player on the continent.”
“We are excited to be working with our investors as we look to grow and expand to more markets in Africa. In the next 12 months, we are looking to grow and double our presence in the existing markets, even as we open in three to five new markets in Africa,” said LipaLater co-founder and CEO Eric Muli.
“LipaLater is not only changing the consumer credit landscape across Africa, which to date has been largely inaccessible for most, but also catalyzing the future of shopping, e-commerce, and payments,” said Ruby Nimkar, Partner at GreenHouse Capital. “They’ve done this in a true product- and the customer-led way that benefits both merchants and consumers and has proven to be incredibly scalable across multiple markets.”
While LipaLater can be said to be one of the early BNPL companies in the space in Kenya, there are a lot of companies with the capital war chest to contend market share, especially with the expansion to the new regions. There is M-Kopa—which have since expanded into phones and retail products—in Kenya and Uganda. There are also CDCare, PayQart, Carbon, and even M-Kopa in Nigeria, where it is now playing. In South Africa, there are PayJustNow and Payflex—which Australian BNPL Zip recently acquired.
But Eric Muli was sure that they have what it takes to compete and emerge as industry leaders in the new market. One of LipaLater’s cards is its wide array of exclusive merchants and world-renowned brands such as Carrefour, Apple, Tecno, Samsung, to mention a few, a strategy it has used to stay atop the market in East Africa and one it intends to carry along to the new markets.
You’ve probably been told being an entrepreneur gives you the freedom and time to live life as you please. Well, contrary to the belief, starting and scaling a profitable business from ground zero requires sleepless nights, utmost dedication, unwavering faith, and sacrifices than you could imagine.
Relative to established organizations, starting up a scalable business can be daunting to figure out. What task should be done with first? What is the best entry points? How to tell whether a product has a place in the market? How can you hire the best team? And the list goes on.
Entrepreneurship is not for the weak and faint-hearted. It comes with a degree of uncertainties, challenges, and sometimes depression. However, the fulfilment one gets when goals are met, milestones are crossed, and substantial growth is attained can change the story instantly and heal the years of frustration and pain.
As a promising young entrepreneur, which do you think is your best bet to fast-track your entrepreneur journey? Your guess – working for a startup!
Working for a Startup can educate you on the overall uncertainty of a workforce in flux as you’ll have the upper hand learning from other people’s experiences instead of being the lab rat.
To make this article interesting and help you relate better, I will share my personal story in the entrepreneurship journey.
Challenges of Entrepreneurship
Starting a business is associated with many challenges and difficulties. While some see it as just starting a business, it should be understood as the process of providing goods and services to people in exchange for money. An entrepreneur is not only a person who acts but thinks. Being an entrepreneur involves thinking of new ways of solving problems and creating value. It cannot be imagined without innovation and risk-taking.
When I finished my National Diploma in Computer Engineering around 2014, I was enthusiastic and eager to start a company. I was a young chap full of dreams and, at the same time, naïve. I thought all that it ever required was having passion and studying relentlessly. I took a different seminar on entrepreneurship and attended various training. I had always wanted to help businesses in Africa grow through digital marketing. In no time, I registered my first company Webiguys Innovations, with my cousin as a Co-Founder, with who I shared my ideas, but it turned out he had no slight interest in my escapades. Everything then falls on me – planning, executing, reaching out to small businesses in the neighborhood, and all that.
Woman turning an open sign on glass front door of coffee shop. Business owner hanging an open sign at a cafe.
Funding the business was another challenge as I thought my rich uncles would support me to actualise my dreams. That didn’t happen, and sales were stagnant as it occurred to me that people primarily do not buy ideas but the result, which there was nothing to show as at then.
Soon reality hit hard, and I realised I had to get a job and learn the entrepreneurial skills, attitude, doggedness and mindset for a mighty come back.
Many entrepreneurs are like my naïve self then, only optimistic and turn blind eyes to the possible challenges that could come up in building their startups. They mostly think they have it all figured out, and it should go according to plan until otherwise.
In 2019, the failure rate of startups was around 90%. The research concludes 21.5% of startups fail in the first year, 30% in the second year, 50% in the fifth year, and 70% in their 10th year.
In an interview conducted with several business owners, reasons for failure includes running out of funds, being in the wrong market, ineffective marketing, a lack of research, bad partnerships, and not being an expert in the industry.
When further researched, the primary reason was lack of product-market-fit due to lack of experience creating a sellable product.
While I have worked for 3 Startups in the past five years since I quit my startup, aside from working freelance jobs, I have been exposed to the various challenges and exponential future possibilities that is fast-tracking my entrepreneur journey. I have had a good, bad, ugly, and incredible experience working for these startups. So, it is an excellent breeding ground for the skills, knowledge, and mindset needed to start an entrepreneurship journey.
Below are the benefits of working for a startup and how it can fast-track your entrepreneur journey.
5 Reasons You Should Work for a Startup
1. Become Better At Managing Uncertainty and Challenges
While working with one of the leading cryptocurrency companies in Africa–Patricia, at the period when the company was doing amazingly tremendous and being the first to introduce Bitcoin Debit card in Africa and making 10,100,000 unique transactions across all her products and services, there came the CBN circular to banks prohibiting banks and other financial institutions from servicing crypto exchanges. The circular implies that the company could no longer receive and payout to customers with Naira.
Amid this nightmare, Patricia remained undisturbed and took proactive steps. Its headquarter was flown to Estonia and introduced Peer-to-Peer trading to keep the business afloat, solving this challenge for the entire African crypto community.
As shown below, Patricia’s CEO, Fejiro Hanu, gave a mind-blowing statement on hismedium page regarding the memo.
2. Working Closely and Learning From Your Company’s Leaders
In my first Startup job with a Digital Marketing agency, I had a super awesome experience learning firsthand from the CEO Gbenga Ogunbowale, who happens to be a Mandela Washington fellow, YALI alumni, and having a dozen awards and recognition to his name. His ability to plan and manage people while investing time in training the team is superb. For an entry-level into a Marketing role with no prior experience, I learned faster under his leadership. I was promoted to Chief Marketing Officer in less than six months due to his consistent training and passion for building people. Likewise, in my second startup job, I had the opportunity to work closely with both the Managing and Executive Director. Even though the experience turned out ugly, the company went bankrupt and owed some months’ salary; I learned the possible outcome of lousy leadership and overhauling staff from their mistake.
3. Think Like an Owner
While working for a Startup, you are expected to become emotionally invested. You are meant to contribute your ideas, effort, and talent beyond your given role and be recognized for your input to the business’s success.
You have the upper hand to practically think like a boss and take initiatives like it is your own.
4. Exercise Your Leadership Capabilities
Some Startups have no clear hierarchies or paths in place and are working towards developing processes and structures that will aid advancement. They need exemplary managers to create and effectively run departments such as marketing, product, sales, and relations during this stage.
You can easily win the spotlight by going the extra mile to create some of the processes that would be invaluable to the organization’s growth and earn yourself a position at one of the high tables, which will get you more deeply involved in the development of the company.
For instance, at my second startup job with a Real Estate firm, I went outside my job responsibilities as a Digital marketer to develop the company’s profile and immensely contribute to articulating a more precise and concise vision and mission. For that, I was appointed as the Vice-chairman of the management team.
5. You’ll be instilled with the value of hard work and self-sustainability
Maybe more important than any other benefit of working at a startup is the realization that hard work, creative thinking, and tenacity are worth a whole lot. Once you’ve created something of your own sweat, something tangible and whole, something you can touch, feel, or use, you really begin to appreciate personal ownership. You’ll more than ever be confident in what you can do, the business you can build, and what the future holds for you as an entrepreneur.
Working for a startup vs big corporate company
When it comes to a duel between working for a startup and corporate, you probably should first understand the basics of each type of workplace and primary intent. Think about it: A startup may provide more flexible hours now, but will it give you the ability to move up into a senior management position in the future? A corporate job may be the perfect place to get structured on-the-job training, but will it give you the creative thinking skills you need to open your own business in a few years?
To fast-track your entrepreneur journey, you want to work in an environment that would make you a creative thinker and equip you with the skills needed to open your own business.
You might do the same set of tasks for several years at a big corporation until someone above you retires or gets a promotion. While at a startup, your role and responsibilities will frequently evolve, even multiple times a year. Within six months, you might be doing something significantly different from the position you were hired to do. That means your skill set will have to grow at an equally fast clip.
The type of work you perform will change based on the organization’s current challenges. Whether launching a new product, working with an extensive client for the first time, redesigning the website, or trying a new marketing campaign, startups are always experimenting. If you’re committed to learning and adding value, your priorities will shift with every trial and error.
At a big, established company, most roles are highly specialised, and when a new problem occurs, it will be addressed by the person or team with that specific set of skills. If you try to solve a problem not related to your department, you’re likely to step on some toes.
At a startup—especially a very small one—nearly every problem is an opportunity for you to step in and add value. One of the great things about the rapid pace of startup life is that you’ll have the chance to learn various transferable skills needed to build your business ground up than you’ll do in a big corporation.
Conclusion
Working for a startup will teach you to live with stress and pressure and hustle or develop creative solutions. It teaches you to become bold, take risks, set your direction, and move fast along. It is your training ground to make you self-reliant, persistent, resilient, quick, agile, and execution-driven.
So, before you start your own business, it is the most effective conduit to work for a startup and see it as a fertile ground for your transition into entrepreneurship.
African-founded artificial intelligence (AI) startup – InstaDeep has closed a $100 million Series B funding round to advance its high-performance AI tech, hire more elite talent and accelerate the launch of disruptive AI products across multiple industries – including biotech, logistics, transportation and electronics manufacturing while also expanding its global presence into the United States.
About InstaDeep
InstaDeep was founded in 2014 by Karim Beguir and Zohra Slim and is today an EMEA leader in decision-making AI products for the Enterprise. With expertise in both machine intelligence research and concrete business deployments, the company provide a competitive advantage to its customers, including helping companies to improve the crucial parts of their operations by harnessing AI technologies such as Reinforcement Learning, a type of machine learning that helps design effective optimization strategies for an array of challenges, from therapeutics development to railway operations and more. InstaDeep is on a mission to accelerate the transition to an AI-first world that benefits everyone.
The company headquarter was moved from Tunis in North Africa to London and had offices in Paris, Tunis, Lagos, Dubai and Cape Town to aid its global expansion. CB Insights recently selected the company as one of the 100 most promising AI startups globally for the second year running.
History and Impacts of AI
As you may care to know, artificial intelligence (AI) is a wide-ranging branch of computer science concerned with building smart machines capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. The fundamental goal of AI is to get machines to simulate human intelligence.
The phrase artificial intelligence (AI) was first coined at the “Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence” by John McCarthy in 1956 and is widely considered to be the birth of artificial intelligence as we know it today. But the journey to understand if machines can truly think began much before that. In the 1940s, in the book “The Organization of Behavior”, – Donald Hebb proposes the theory that neural pathways are created from experiences and that connections between neurons become stronger the more frequently they’re used. Hebbian learning continues to be an important model in AI today.
There’s no denying that artificial intelligence has dominated the technological landscape. The science fiction of yesterday quickly becomes a reality. AI has already altered the way we think and interact with each other every day that we almost do not realize it. From the invention of voice search, chatbots, gaming and digital assistants to robots, automated homes, self-driving cars, virtual assistance etc., AI is making life and work easier for humanity and helping businesses serve their customers better.
Accenture researched the impact of AI in 12 developed countries. The study revealed that it could double economic growth rates by 2035. AI will enable people to use their time efficiently, which will increase their productivity by 40%. This is especially true for global IT economics.
Statista study on artificial intelligence in 2017 shows that – 84% of business organizations will adopt AI because it gives them a competitive advantage over their rivals.
A recent survey carried out by CNBC also reported that 81% of executives worldwide say AI will play a prominent and critical role in how their businesses operate this year.
Companies are phasing from the first generation of AI, which deals with pattern, text and image recognition, to decision-making AI, which helps them make timely decisions in complex spaces.
Apparently, we are shifting towards an AI-powered world, if not already.
InstaDeep Funding
In May 2019, InstaDeep had raised US$7 million in Series A funding to power the development of its scalable product platform aimed at empowering enterprises with decision-making using AI and now closing a $100 million in Series B financing led by Alpha Intelligence Capital and CDIB. Other investors in the round include BioNTech, Chimera Abu Dhabi, Deutsche Bahn’s DB Digital Ventures, Google, G42 and Synergie.
There seems to be no limitation to the real-world problems InstaDeep is looking to further solve for enterprises with its decision-making AI systems having closed this Series B funding.
“This funding round is a tremendous vote of confidence from our partners BioNTech, Google and Deutsche Bahn after working closely with us on innovative, high-impact AI initiatives,” said Karim Beguir, co-founder and CEO of InstaDeep. “And we are very excited to get the support of Alpha Intelligence Capital, Chimera, Synergie and G42 as we see wide-ranging opportunities to deploy our AI products to tackle complex real-world problems.”
With the new funding, the African-founded AI company plans to accelerate the launch of disruptive AI products across biotech, logistics, transportation and electronics manufacturing. Advancing its computing infrastructure, expanding into the U.S. and hiring more talent is also in its use of funds strategy.
InstaDeep Collaborations in Accelerating Disruptive AI
InstaDeep formed a multi-year strategic collaboration with BioNTech to launch two years ago. The mandate was to deploy the latest advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in developing novel immunotherapies.
One of its notable global achievements came in late November 2021 when it created an early warning system (EWS) for detecting high-risk SARS-CoV-2 variants. Per a report by FT, this EWS identified more than 90% of World Health Organization (WHO) designated variants on average two months ahead of time and detected Omicron three days before it was classified as a variant of concern by the WHO.
InstaDeep also collaborates with Google’s AI research divisions to create an early detection system for desert locust outbreaks in Africa; it has worked on AI initiatives and has published joint research with DeepMind and Google Research.
One common theme with these collaborations is that all three organizations are investors in InstaDeep’s new financing round.
“With them being our partners and customers, they’ve been able to see firsthand what InstaDeep platform and the team can achieve,” said Karim Beguir, CEO InstaDeep. “So we see it as a significant milestone and also sort of a vote of confidence in our capabilities and products that they are investing having worked very closely with us on difficult problems for years.”
The company is also working on a moonshot product to automate railway scheduling with Deutsche Bahn, the largest rail operator and infrastructure owner in Europe.
“InstaDeep has demonstrated unique capabilities in solving very complex railway problems using groundbreaking AI-first technologies. The team’s skills and thought leadership in this space have paved the way for the adoption of cutting-edge AI technologies in the railway domain. We are happy to join the investment round and enable a stronger partnership with Deutsche Bahn to jointly harness the potential of applying AI,” said Boris Kuehn, managing director, DB Digital Ventures.
InstaDeep – Changing the Status Quo in Africa
It is mind-blowing to see how InstaDeep has established itself as a global company using AI to solve complex problems and collaborating with DeepMind and Google in its eight years journey. What is more surprising is Beguir mentioning that they started the company with just two laptops, $2,000 and a lot of enthusiasm, and today, InstaDeep currently has over 170 employees. More than 130 are in AI research, engineering, ML and DevOps departments. At the same time, half of the team is based in its African offices: South Africa, Nigeria and Tunisia, with headquarters in London.
When InstaDeep launched, Africa wasn’t in the picture detailing AI’s contribution to global economic growth. And while that picture hasn’t changed so much, InstaDeep is one of the few African companies, including South Africa’s Aerobotics and hearX Group, trying to change that status quo and give Africa a say in shaping the future of AI.
“We’ve managed to build a culture of high standards and prove that the talents in Africa are capable of being competitive, working and collaborating with the very best,” said Beguir. “That’s the story we’ve been able to nurture. And today, we’re proud to have a team which is now over multiple countries in Europe, Middle East and Africa, but has some very passionate African AI researchers, engineers making a tangible contribution.”
If Beguir and the InstaDeep team has taught us anything, location doesn’t pose a barrier in making a global impact, and no resources may be too little to start with. This is even more true for African founders operating in the tech ecosystem.
“It is possible to create a globally competitive company with strong African roots, but also well integrated into the world working on genuine deep-tech innovation, and doing things that haven’t been done before,” says Karim Beguir, InstaDeep CEO.
In 2019, the failure rate of startups was around 90%. The research concludes 21.5% of startups fail in the first year, 30% in the second year, 50% in the fifth year, and 70% in their 10th year.
