More than 75 start-ups from across the world are set to touch down in Cape Town for the AfricArena Grand Summit, a week-long event series to accelerate their ventures in the race to becoming the continent’s next leading unicorns.
From scheduled networking events to investment readiness programmes, pitches and the hunt for deal flow in order to scale, the Grand Summit is a not-to-be-missed event from Tuesday, 8 November to Thursday, 10 November.
Every year, AfricArena’s Grand Summit brings together some of the most prominent minds to facilitate discussions around building bridges of innovation. Attendees deep dive into pipeline value chains, hear from successful ventures and explore some of the hottest ecosystem trends and emerging markets on the continent.
Ventureburn can confirm that AfricArena has, again, partnered with the tech investment ecosystem to bring speakers from the four corners of Africa to bring a broader perspective to its discussions.
Since its inception as a prime Pan-African ecosystem building accelerator, AfricArena has sourced some of the most prominent seed to series B start-ups from around Africa, Europe and Korea. This year alone, it has hosted four regional events showcasing some promising tech entrepreneurs with the support of the venture capital and EOS tech communities.
Many of them will now attend the Grand Summit for a series of panel discussions, fireside chats and keynote addresses from the ecosystems brightest venture capitalists, limited partners and development finance institutions.
“This further positions AfricArena as the primary ecosystem bridge between Africa and the rest of the world as we look forward to scaling deal-flow on the continent to bigger ticket-sizes and more collaborative value chains within the macro tech environment,” says AfricArena chief executive Christophe Viarnaud.
The Department for International Trade in Africa is supporting AfricArena to bring some of the most sought-after investors and ecosystem builders from Europe, Egypt, Kenya and other African countries to the event.
In a media release, a representative of the UK Department for International Trade says, “The sequence of tailored events at this African summit, hosted in partnership with DIT Africa, provides a meaningful opportunity to leverage the wider United Kingdom government offering across Africa, highlighting our contribution as ecosystem builder, investor and technical service provider, to the African start-up and tech arena.”
Furthermore, FSATLabs and Enrich in Africa will join AfricArena in showcasing ten European start-ups that have the desire to scale into Africa through a soft-landing programme.
Beyond Europe, AfricArena and the Korea-Africa Foundation has also started building the next bridge of innovation between Korea and Africa. It will showcase ten of the most excellent series A start-ups from Korea on the Grand Summit stage in November.
Additionally, FMO, the Dutch Entrepreneurial Development Bank, has partnered with AfricArena to run a corporate open innovation challenge. The FMO sustainable technology challenge will support several agritech, fintech, and energy access businesses focused in Ghana, Morocco, and Tanzania. These ventures will also be showcased at AfricArena’s Grand Summit.
Organisers have also confirmed that the International Trade Centre, the World Trade Organisation and the United Nations will support start-ups from various countries in Africa to be showcased at the grand summit. This is done to promote innovative tech solutions on the continent as well as further deal-flow to other emerging countries.
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