👋🏾 Meet Emmanuel Ibe, Founder of Startuplist Africa

Startuplist Africa helps founders and investors discover insights into African venture capital. Think of it like a Crunchbase for Africa. We worked with Startuplist Africa to prepare them for their first funding round and worked diligently with their team to get them up and ready.

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What is Startuplist Africa?

Startuplist Africa is a data driven platform that helps you discover and gain insights into African Startups and Ecosystems. We’re building out the go-to platform for information on African startups. With data analysts and teams across Africa, we're well placed to understand our clients and the space we're serving.

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Why was it the right time for you to prepare for your round with Raise?

Well, we met Raise at the early stage. We had just launched our platform and Marvin, the co-founder at Raise was already interacting with our content and he reached out to me on LinkedIn.  I shared the business idea we had for Startuplist Africa and we connected on this. He inquired on whether we were looking to fundraise and when I said yes, he shared the Raise platform with introductions to the team. On discovering the service and platform, I really loved it and so we got to the next point immediately. It was perfect timing and so far, it has been good! We have learned so much about the process, from valuations, to selling equity and building the startup.

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"Raise was able to guide me through the process and build a valuation for Startuplist"

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What were your biggest fundraising questions when you were starting out with your fundraising?

“The whole idea of valuation wasn’t really connecting with me and I didn’t  understand the metrics behind being able to value a company at a certain amount. Raise was able to guide me through the process and helped us build a valuation for the company. And I got to understand that a couple of things that we had done as a company were really important and how valuable we are as a company. Especially given that with valuation you get to understand how much you would like to raise. Raise really helped us with this

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What were your milestones for the fundraising round?

As at the time of our contact with Raise, we had just an MVP and we were running entirely on a Freemium model. We needed to improve our product to accommodate the feedback we had gathered during this process. We also need to supercharge our efforts on some of our key offering like reports which we discovered that a lot of people found valuable.

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What was the outcome of your fundraise on the Raise platform?

We are still in the process of raising funds. And as we continue to fundraise, we are focusing on building our product so that we can also attract more investors. We're actively relying on the Raise platform and team to build out our round and simplify the process.

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How is your fundraising experience with Raise and would you choose to fundraise on the Raise platform again?

My fundraising experience at Raise has been good. Raise was the first platform that made me understand the whole fundraising process and I love the fact that it is an African company serving the African market. What Raise does is awesome and the platform is well thought out, with a hardworking team. We have also been spreading the word to get other founders familiar with the Raise platform for their fundraising process.

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What advice would you give to founders looking to fundraise?

There are a lot of things going on in the ecosystem from what I have seen. There are bad players who approach you, saying that they are looking to help you fundraise but then, they are looking to get information out of you. My advice to other founders would be to watch out for these type of people. They end up doing more harm than good. I would also say, raise what you need at the early stage – this is something we understand better now. Don’t get so diluted at the early stage. Raise also helped us to understand this; during our early stage we were so ambitious and looking to raise so much. But through the process, we came to understand that building a Startup better done in a progressive manner,  raise little so that you are motivated to do more work. So in short; raise little, move progressively , have a timeline and goals you are looking to achieve. When you achieve those goals, get to the next stage. If you want to raise more, go ahead and do another fundraising round.

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Why should a founder consider using the Raise platform for their fundraising?

It’s an African company, for African companies with a solid platform and great service. Raise understands what is happening in Africa and the platform is built to favor African startups in their fundraising.

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