Pariti Venture: The Journey So Far

Capital markets in the 20th century have been dominated by traditional thinking and organizations. Creating biased and anti-meritocratic systems. We're now in a pivotal time with frontier markets and technology to leapfrog legacy thinking. A unique opportunity to redesign capital markets to serve their community rather than extract from them.

Our mission at Pariti Ventures has been to facilitate connections and investments between startups and investors. We’ve done this through different initiatives and below is a walk down memory lane and the changes to our focus as a company today.

Our journey so far…

🛠️ Pitch Review Tool

Pariti started doing pitch reviews at the beginning of 2020, to provide African startups with free insights into what investors look for in their pitch materials. We recognized a significant challenge faced by startup founders in Africa - the lack of objective and actionable feedback to assist with their fundraising efforts. To address this, we introduced the Pitch Review tool, offering founders in Africa qualitative and quantitative analysis of their startup’s pitch materials, including pitch decks and financial models. The goals were clear: to provide African startups with free insights into what investors look for in their pitch materials and to gauge investment readiness efficiently. Through a hybrid analyst/ML process, our intelligence team scored individual attributes of startups. The analysis involved assessing over 100 factors across various aspects of the company, such as the team, market, solution, product, economics, financial modeling, and storytelling. This comprehensive evaluation resulted in a quantitative score for the startup, along with detailed qualitative feedback. Furthermore, we introduced the Pariti Funding Score (PFS), a benchmark comparing startups' scores to over 1.2K previously reviewed African startups. The Pitch Review tool empowered startups with valuable insights, actionable feedback, and an understanding of their fundraising potential, contributing to their growth and success.

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💼 Founder Fellowship

In 2022, we recognized that more and more entrepreneurs in underserved markets often lacked the opportunities and resources necessary to become venture back-able. To bridge this gap, we launched the Founder Fellowship program. Our goals were ambitious: to generate venture back-able supply, launch our first cohort of companies and equip them with the necessary tools and resources to understand their investment readiness gaps and close their their fundraise more efficiently. The Founder Fellowship program empowered entrepreneurs by providing mentorship, educational resources, and networking opportunities. Through this initiative, we contributed to building a community of venture back-able startups, fostering growth and innovation in Africa.

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🎙️ Demo Day

Recognizing the challenge faced by founders who lacked a network of the right investors to pitch to and investors who struggled to find high-quality deal flow, we introduced a Demo Day as part of the fellowship program. The goal was simple yet impactful - to connect quality companies to investors. We aimed to create a seamless but enjoyable experience for founders and investors to participate in our Demo Day, ensuring quality participants on both sides. By hosting a live Demo Day event focused on investors actively investing in the African ecosystem, we facilitated connections and showcased promising startups to potential investors. Demo Day enabled founders to gain exposure to active investors and understand investor interests, while investors benefited from a pipeline of quality companies.

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🎈 Grove

Taking all the learnings from the previous initiatives and data from our users, we recognized the innate challenges faced by founders in getting in the room with investors and closing their fundraises. Many founders lacked the necessary resources, network, and understanding of investors' needs to make their companies attractive and viable investment opportunities. To address this, we developed Grove, a venture deals marketplace where we connect vetted startups to investors. Through Grove, founders had the opportunity to tell their startup story, increase visibility for the businesses and get connected to the right investors in order to close their fundraise faster and effortlessly. While investors were able to seamlessly connect with promising companies in Africa as soon as they started fundraising. Our intelligence team and algorithms through our predictive fundraising engine, filtered out 60% of deal that were not investor-ready thus providing investors with high quality deal flow. This access to investors was a significant advantage for founders, opening doors that were previously difficult to reach. Grove played a crucial role in helping founders establish connections with investors they otherwise wouldn’t have and raise capital, ultimately contributing to the growth and success of African startups.

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Our focus now…

Our Talent business is currently growing at an exponential rate and demanding more and more our time, attention and resources. Therefore, we have strategically chosen to temporarily pause our activities within Ventures and dedicate our resources to building out our Talent business and scaling its operations in the coming months to its full potential. The impact we’ve witnessed so far in providing startups and jobseekers with an efficient way to hire is tremendous and we have the potential to do even more. We truly believe Pariti Ventures will be the epicenter for capital allocation in Africa and we look forward to welcoming back new and previous users in the coming months.

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🚨 In the meantime, we have something exciting in store for you in the coming days, stay tuned for a special report from us!

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