Venture capital funding in Africa is exploding right now. The amount of funding more than doubled from 2015 to 2016, and yet there is still a real challenge for African startups and small businesses to get funding for their projects. Founders of Ovamba, Marvin Cole and Viola Llewellyn graduates of the Johannesburg Founder Institute, felt this pressure point and sought to alleviate it and empower their entrepreneur peers in Africa. The problem as these two saw it had two parts. One, most banks and lending institutions are ill-equipped to handle the fast-paced demands of African small businesses, and two was that banking procedures made it hard for entrepreneurs with no track records to secure initial funding and get started. This is where Ovamba is born.
The two partners decided the best way to proceed was to build an application. The Ovamba app is a platform that allows small businesses and entrepreneurs access to business-growth support. The platform allows businesses and entrepreneurs to apply for funding right on their phone. Ovamba promises no more than 5 days before a final decision on funding is made. Ovamba also offers real-time risk assessments in Africa based on cultural and traditional knowledge supplied by local teams all over the continent.
By 2014, Ovamba had garnered the interest of the UK-based GLI Finance whose backing helped the company setup operations in Cameroon, which has a thriving economy that is almost entirely composed of small and medium-sized businesses. There was no better place to start Ovamba operations than here. Continued success in Cameroon led to the interest of Japan's Crowdcredit, the leading emerging market investment group in the country, whose backing has now allowed Ovamba to expand operations to multiple geographies.
Most recently, for the startup they partnered with tech giant Microsoft to create a bot that spoke multiple languages in an effort to simplify the funding application intake process. This incredible bot utilized the Microsoft Bot Framework to tap into multiple channels and meet customers on their preferred platforms of conversation.
This technology is going to change the way that business can be done in Africa, a continent where it is estimated that nearly 2,000 languages are spoken. There are over 200 local languages alone in Cameroon. The incredible thing is that this bot does not just stop at text-based interactions. Users can talk to the bot and have it respond back to them in speech. English, French, and Arabic are the three main languages used right now by the bot in speech.
Ovamba is using this bot to connect with and learn more from their customers all over the continent. The company's ultimate goal is to be able to localize their applications and services to the regional dialects of their customer base. Microsoft says they plan to continue to work with Ovamba to make the bot better and more sophisticated when it comes to African dialects.
Ovamba is working on cutting edge technology with one of the largest and most successful tech companies the world has ever seen. The startup has come quite a long way since two friends saw a lack of funding in an emerging market that could be tapped. Ovamba will continue to succeed because there is a ton of interest in small and medium-sized businesses in Africa. Only back in 2011, one out of every five African youths that were surveyed said that they planned to start their own businesses. There is very clearly a drive to create business and Ovamba is a tool that many of them will have to use if they want to grow and survive. Countries like Cameroon are the perfect illustration of how important Ovamba is to the African economy and potentially emerging markets all over the world.
