SINGAPORE October 5 2021 / EMURGO Ptd. Ltd. – EMURGO – the official commercial arm and a founding entity of the Cardano blockchain – previously announced the launch of a new wholly-owned Cardano ecosystem investment vehicle to invest into early startup and growth stage companies focused on building socially impactful solutions powered by Cardano through two separate entities with distinct visions, EMURGO Africa and EMURGO Ventures.
EMURGO Africa will fulfill a grand vision to position Cardano as the standard tech infrastructure platform for Africa’s emerging industrial innovation, which will bring financial empowerment opportunities to the continent.
Venture capital investments in African startups is expected to total between $2.25 billion to $2.8 billion in 2021, indicating a large potential for high-growth startups in the local market.
Already there have been notable African companies such as Jumia, a leading e-commerce platform, and several other world-class unicorns such as fintech platforms Flutterwave.
In terms of the global blockchain market, the industry is projected to exponentially increase more than 120x from $3.67 billion in 2020 to $449.6 billion by 2028. Africa alone is expected to possess a 30% market share and grow from a $1.1 billion market in 2020 to a $134.9 billion market by 2028.
The overall mission of EMURGO Africa is three-fold.
1) First, to establish a sustainable growth model for African startups that balances commercial viability and social impact.
2) Second, to build financial infrastructure on Cardano to promote innovation and bridge African traditional finance with blockchain-based decentralized finance (DeFi).
3) Third, to connect various African and Asian industries to mutually share business resources.
To achieve this mission, EMURGO Africa will launch with a $100 million allocation for a dedicated investment and incubation program.
EMURGO Africa will target pre-seed and early-stage blockchain startups with a market capitalization of 20M or less, and focus on rapidly growing startup communities in Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Egypt, before expanding across Africa.
EMURGO Africa will invest not only in blockchain industry growth sectors such as DeFi and NFTs, but also innovative technologies such as AI, the metaverse, fintech, edutech, agritech, and healthtech.
To mark EMURGO Africa’s official launch and first portfolio investment, it has forged a strategic partnership with Adanian Labs – a successful pan-African venture studio and incubator currently provides services all over Africa with focuses on building impact driven tech start-ups across key sectors.
Adanian Labs has been a successful incubator for more than 15 African startups through its innovative African-specific incubation program and contributed significantly to African industrial innovation such as planning smart cities using blockchain in partnership with the Ugandan city of Entebbe and educating engineers in partnership with the municipality of Kenya’s capital city Nairobi.
EMURGO Africa has also announced a strategic partnership with Everest Ventures Group (EVG) – a leading Asian blockchain venture studio backed by a consortium of prominent families and companies including the Rothschild family (Europe), Hanwha Group (Korea), Sun Hung Kai (Hong Kong), etc. – to jointly launch Adaverse, a Cardano-focused acceleration program in Africa.
Via its parent company EMURGO, EMURGO Africa provides four unique value propositions for its portfolio companies and strategic partners:
1) Blockchain education content and resources
EMURGO’s education unit has partnered with more than 20 universities globally and successfully produced 2,500 blockchain-proficient students thus far.
2) Tailored blockchain solutions development
Provide startups with the support and technical expertise necessary to build solutions on Cardano. EMURGO Trace – an enterprise traceability solution – is in live production with more than five coffee companies across the globe.
3) Growth support
Leverage EMURGO’s incubation expertise and experience with dLab, a blockchain acceleration program with SOSV, to provide startups with the resources necessary for funding, global marketing, and product building.
4) Accessibility to Cardano and industry partners
Provide direct access to the Cardano ecosystem via Yoroi Wallet, an official light wallet of Cardano with 700K downloads; Astarter, EMURGO’s Cardano DeFi ecosystem project; and a global network of industry partners.
“Through EMURGO Africa, we are especially dedicated to delivering financial and educational empowerment opportunities on the continent by providing the capital and strategic partnerships necessary for local startups to scale rapidly and bring new solutions to Cardano. Our partnership with Adanian Labs and Everest Ventures provides us with a great framework to launch in Africa,” said EMURGO CEO Ken Kodama.
“As the startup that builds startups, we apply lean start-up principles in processes, learning, iteration, scaling and innovating solutions. This partnership with EMURGO will allow us to forge more efficient collaborations that will enable us to build quicker, scale faster. and optimize capitalization, creating a win-win benefit to all our partners in the sharing nature of our growing ecosystem” said Adanian Labs CEO John Kamara.
“Africa has the biggest potential to adopt cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies. I believe Adaverse can add much value to blockchain founders and the token ecosystem in Africa with the resources and support from EMURGO and Cardano,” said Adaverse Partner Jerome Wong.
Those interested in applying for funding can submit an application at https://emurgoafrica.vc/
About EMURGO
EMURGO is the official commercial arm of Cardano and provides socially impactful solutions to solve some of the most intricate problems of organizations. As a founding entity of the Cardano protocol, EMURGO is able to leverage its abilities for large-scale blockchain development and rapid solutions deployment to benefit its global clients.
EMURGO has offices in Singapore, India, and Indonesia, and a roster of global clients & partners. To connect and learn more, visit https://dev.emurgo.io.
For further information from EMURGO
Renato Zamagna
Chief Marketing Officer
renato@dev.emurgo.io
+65 6978 5823
