Two organizations — Ampion and Plutos Ventures Holding– have teamed up to form a venture capital firm dubbed Ampion Ventures with the aim of supporting African startups innovating for agriculture, finance, and energy.
“The goal of the new project is to build scalable digital business models in selected African countries by providing seed capital and strategic expertise support,” officials announced in a Tuesday statement.
“Plutos Ventures will provide Ampion Ventures with its first seed financing.”
Ampion Ventures is led by Fabian-Carlos Guhl, founder of the non-profit organization Ampion.org.
Guhl has been working for years on the African continent with founders and early-stage startups.
Through his very successful start-up bus, with which he has traveled through more than 16 African countries and coached and supported founders in the development of digital business models, Guhl has been able to build up a large network of founders and start-ups in different African countries.
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Together with Plutos, Ampion is now taking the next logical step to build digital business models in Africa.
“With Ampion it was our mission from the very beginning to initiate technological development in the African continent and thus contribute to the well-being of the African people and the continent’s economic development,” said Guhl.
“Now is the right time to further develop our model and scale selected business models. With Plutos Ventures, we are pleased to have an experienced investor on board who will support us strategically in addition to providing capital”.
On his part, Oliver Riebartsch, the managing director of Plutos Ventures, said: “With Ampion and the start-up bus, Fabian and his team have demonstrated how strong their network is on the African continent and how immensely the will to found start-ups is there.”
He added: “Now, it is a matter of establishing true digital business models to support the development of the African economy.”
Over 80 start-ups supported
Over the past six years, Ampion has supported over 80 start-ups in 16 African countries with the help of partners such as MTN, SAP, Merk, Microsoft and international development cooperation institutions.
One of the many success stories, for example, is the Nigerian fintech start-up, Accounteer, a smart cloud accounting platform that is now one of the leading accounting software systems in Nigeria and recently secured investment from Meltwater, a US investor.
The founder of Accounteer is Golden Emmanuel, an Ampion Alumnus who has turned his vision into reality and now leads one of Nigeria’s most successful tech start-ups.
Applications to Ampion Ventures
Applications to join Ampion Ventures are already underway and you can apply here.
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