How Pariti is leveraging data to help African founders get funding.

TL:DR: Apply to join the Pariti Founder Fellowship. A data-driven program to help you become investment-ready. Application closes on the 1st of April, 2022 and the fellowship starts on the 25th of April, 2022. Click the link to apply.

A good number of early-stage African founders have had to give up large equity stakes, to unlock financial resources from investors.  Most resources in the market are either too expensive, restricted, not actionable, or untrustworthy. With most companies not being able to raise ANY capital at all, there is a large top-of-funnel problem of investor-ready companies in Africa. At Pariti, our goal is to bridge this gap by helping founders in a community and data-driven way. Our aim is to not only educate and equip them but also to start a give-first mentality loop where founders will then give back in a way that benefits the entire ecosystem.

In 2020, we designed a pitch review system that assesses the investment readiness of a startup based on its pitch deck, website, and founder information. This assessment broke the company down into hundreds of factors and generated scores (e.g. Team score, Product score, Traction score, etc…). After generating these scores for over 1,000 early-stage African startups and tracking their fundraising events over the past two years, we discovered a strong correlation between company scores and their likelihood to raise funding.

Armed with that data we designed the Founder Fellowship to support committed, growth-oriented founders, improve their fundraising likelihoods by providing personalized guidance.

The fellowship runs for 6 weeks. Imagine it as a startup boot camp that helps you achieve years of growth in a short period of time. The focus of the fellowship is guidance to help you secure funding.

We have a team of advisors who will be paired with each founder, and subject matter experts across various fields who would help the founders fill in their knowledge gaps.

The advisors will help with assessing each startup and drawing a progress map of things they would need to cover in the program. We understand that every startup's needs and challenges are unique, so everyone's map would be personalized to their needs. If a founder is struggling with financial modeling, his/her advisor could recommend that they schedule a session with the Pariti financial model expert to help them refine this. If it’s legal help they need, they’ll be guided on that too. At the end of the fellowship, they will be admitted to pitch on our demo day to selected investors who are curated just for them.

We hope that through the fellowship, founders are able to rapidly grow their startups, join our community of gritty entrepreneurs, and ultimately secure funding to take their business to the next level while shaping the future of Africa.

‍Who should apply

‍Gritty entrepreneurs in Africa who are going to continue to build their startups and find ways to secure funding regardless of what’s thrown their way. They also believe in a positive-sum game, so they support other founders on their journey. They’ve made progress in growing their business and are seeking to raise a pre-seed or seed round of an average ticket size of $500k to take their business to the next level.

Application closes on the 1st of April, 2022. And the fellowship starts on the 25th of April, 2022. Click the link to apply.

If you’d like to learn more about the fellowship structure and see answers to the frequently asked questions we get, read more here.

‍