TECH STARS

TECH STARS (1006)

Through Snode Technologies, the experienced cybersecurity consultant has developed several cybersecurity tools, receiving international honors and awards. 

Nithen Naidoo (photo) is a South African computer scientist who graduated from the University of Pretoria in 2002. He is the founder and CEO of computer security and networking company Snode Technologies, based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Snode Technologies -founded in 2016- is a cloud-based cybersecurity platform. Its algorithms process dynamic data -audio, video, and text- in real-time to help analysts identify behavioral trends, anomalies, and patterns that were previously impossible to identify with the naked eye.

Snode was created to gain insight into prevailing patterns, not visible to the human eye, allowing our users to identify attacks before they happen,” Nithen Naidoo said in 2021. 

The said startup has more than 80 points of presence worldwide. It offers three services, namely Snode Guard, Snode Guardian, and Snode Panthera.

Snode Guard provides automatic protection against threats such as malware, ransomware, phishing, and disinformation. Snode Guardian provides valuable information about cybersecurity risks or threats that may be prevalent in a said environment to prevent cyberattacks. Meanwhile, Snode Panthera disables attacks and defends vulnerable systems with its real-time automated response system.

Its founder is the winner of the 2019 MEST Africa Challenge. He is also the winner of the SA Innovation Summit 2020,  the national finalist of the 2020 Entrepreneurship World Cup, and a finalist of the 2020 Pitch Live competition organized by Disrupt Africa and Africa Tech Summit. In 2021, he received the AfricArena Emerging Entrepreneur Award. His cybersecurity firm was selected among Slingshot 2020’s top 100 global deep tech startups. It was also a finalist for the AppsAfrica 2020 Innovation Award.

The honors and awards crown a professional career that started in 2003 when he joined Orange Cyberdefense as a penetration tester.  From 2005 to 2007, he was a senior security consultant for Deloitte. In 2007, he joined the financial services firm Investec as a senior security analyst. Then, in 2009, Absa Group hired him as a senior security architect. 

Melchior Koba

Posted On mardi, 13 décembre 2022 12:24 Written by

The serial entrepreneur runs several businesses in the USA and Côte d’Ivoire. With Seekewa, his latest venture, he wants to build a new food system in Africa.  

Fred Zamblé (photo) is an Ivorian entrepreneur. He is also the co-founder and CEO of Seekewa, a startup he launched in 2016 with his brother Serge. With Seekewa, he wants to improve the food supply while at the same time ensuring smallholder farmers have better incomes. Indeed, on its online platform, Seekewa brings together organizations and individuals (known as supporters), and farmers with small projects. The “supporters” can support projects presented by farmers by purchasing redeemable e-vouchers that give them discounts on food products.  

We propose a socio-economic model based on the direct relationship between consumers and farmers. The commitment on the platform is free of charge for the contributors and the farmers. Seekewa addresses both the living conditions of farmers in rural areas and the improvement of the purchasing power of the lower and middle classes through a circular economy,” Fred told Disrupt Africa in 2019.  

Apart from Seekewa, the former MEST Africa Challenge participant also co-founded, in 2014, Digicraft LLC, a Delaware-based company he heads as the CEO. From 2015 to date, he is a photo evangelist for Fotowalk City in Côte d’Ivoire. In 2005, he co-founded the digital agency Neuropixels Inc., where he is serving as the CEO.  A year earlier, he entered the professional world as a UX developer and designer at Atemis Business Cloud, a US software development company. From 2016 to 2014, he was an Adobe West Africa user group manager. 

Melchior Koba

Posted On lundi, 12 décembre 2022 11:03 Written by

After his mechatronics and robotics studies in the UK, he went back to Mali, his home country, to vulgarize the then-little-known mechatronics industry. The company he built for that purpose has been growing by the day since then.  

Abdoulaye Diakité (photo) is a Malian mechatronics, robotics, and automation engineer who graduated from Kingston University in the UK in 2014. He is also the founder and CEO of Diakité Robotics Ltd, a robotics company founded in 2014. 

Through that company, he offers robotics, mechatronics, electromechanical, smart security, and physical security solutions engineering services. He also develops solutions for home automation, metrology and rapid prototyping, and bust sculpting. 

"Diakité Robotics is a mechatronics company created in 2014 to vulgarize mechatronics -which is the synergistic and systemic combination of mechanics, electronics, automation, and real-time computing- in Mali, but also in the entire sub-region," said Abdoulaye Diakité in an interview with maliweb.net in 2020.

During the Covid-19 pandemic,  his company developed Sania Blon, an individual disinfection tunnel that emits a bactericidal and virucidal decontamination product.  The solution helps disinfect passers-by without harming their health, their clothes, and their personal belongings. It was intended for use by the most-frequented companies and institutions like banks, hospitals, industries, and government institutions.

The CEO also plans to create the prototype of a submarine that can support the marine brigades operating across the Niger River.  He is also designing an autonomous electric scooter and 3D-printed bionic hand and shin prostheses.

Before launching Diakité Robotics Ltd, from 2008 to late 2012, he worked for Malian firm Voice Communication SA, as a technical support engineer.  In March 2022, he won the Best Young Entrepreneur Brand Award at the first Mali Brand Week. In 2014, he wrote the engineering paper “CAN Bus Based Systems Teaching Using Electronic Rapid Prototyping,” which was presented at the World Conference on Technological and Engineering Education (WCTEE) in Greece. 

Melchior Koba

Posted On vendredi, 09 décembre 2022 13:41 Written by

With formal training in information technology and banking and finance, she helps entrepreneurs fulfill their ambition. Apart from being a business advisor, she also runs a startup incubator. 

Zeinebou Abdeljelil (photo) is a Mauritanian tech entrepreneur and a financial management consultant. She holds two master's degrees, one in banking and financial support services from IFID in Tunisia and the other in business and IT from ISG in Tunisia. She also completed a six-week program on entrepreneurship at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business in the United States.

With a firm belief that innovation and digital technologies have the potential to drive sustainable and inclusive growth in Africa, she co-founded – in 2014- Hadina RIMTIC, the first incubator focused on ICTs in Mauritania. Through her incubator, she organizes pitch competitions (MauriApp Challenge or the entrepreneurship marathon) and, to date she has supported more than 100 projects in the field of digital, livestock feed production, natural compost, and solar energy equipment.

“ There is a need to build the capacity of entrepreneurs in Mauritania, whether it is in the ideation of their projects, in the financial and day-to-day management of their start-ups, or in building their resilience to shocks,” she said earlier this year. 

In 2015, she also co-founded IKLAAA Consulting, an agency aimed at building entrepreneurs’ capacities with strategic counseling and management advice. Apart from her entrepreneurship career, the Mandela Washington Fellowship Alumni has over a decade-long professional and consulting experience. Her professional career started, in 2010, with BAMIS Bank where she was a corporate relations manager.

In 2016, UNDP hired her as a capacity-building consultant for small and medium producers in Mauritania. After three months of working for the UNDP, she joined the anti-inequality non-profit organization, Oxfam Intermón, as a microfinance consultant in her country. In 2017, she officiated as a youth entrepreneurship development consultant for the World Bank Group and a Peace consultant for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). The following year, she worked for Caritas Mauritania as a youth entrepreneurship development consultant.

Melchior Koba

Posted On mercredi, 07 décembre 2022 13:13 Written by

The tech enthusiast has acquired several years of professional software development experience working for African and British firms. With his startup Deimos, he helps companies migrate their data to the cloud. 

Andrew Mori (photo) is a South African tech entrepreneur. In 2018, he co-founded Deimos, a Cape Town-based cloud-native security development and operations startup that he heads as the CEO.  

Deimos was launched to help companies improve the services they offer. With its software engineering, cloud security, and platform modernization services among others, it helps avoid costly decision errors by giving them access to scalable, high-performing, and reliable systems. 

Our company is focused on helping businesses make smart decisions, particularly from the cloud perspective. It’s imperative to note that migrating to the cloud, if done incorrectly, can be a very costly, difficult, and demoralizing experience. So having vast experience before starting Deimos, I can help companies mitigate risks. Deimos is assisting companies looking to modernize their software systems,” its CEO told TechCabal in November 2022, during an episode of the My Life in Tech podcast. The startup, which currently operates in South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya, is Google Cloud’s largest partner in Africa. It is also a certified and experienced Amazon Web Services and Azure solutions architect. 

Its CEO entered the professional world in 2007, working as a junior researcher at South Africa's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). In 2010, he spent seven months as a lecturer at Blake Hall College in the UK. He was later hired as a software engineer by Radical Company (from 2010 to 2011). 

In 2012, he joined InventCommerce where he was successively lead Software Engineer and Technical Assurance Manager. In 2014, Konga Online Shopping appointed him as software engineering manager. In 2015, he became the associate director of engineering for the e-commerce firm before being promoted to the position of director of technology in 2016. 

Melchior Koba

Posted On mardi, 06 décembre 2022 11:44 Written by

After her engineering studies, she worked in the media industry in the MENA region before venturing into the food industry. Her foodtech startup now has the confidence of several investors.  

Egyptian-born Dalia Abou Omar (photo) is the CEO and co-founder of Brotinni, Egypt's first food technology, and butchery solutions company.

Through her startup, founded in 2020, she launched a platform that enables users to order fresh, hand-cut, and ready-to-cook meat and poultry products that can be delivered by its drivers.  The startup recently opened its first warehouse to better serve its clients in Cairo. It is also working on the production of sealed bags to extend its fresh meats’ shelf life to 45 days.

In early November 2022, it raised US$600,000 during a funding round led by Innlife. “We are thrilled to receive our very first round of funding, which will enable us to scale our operations, invest heavily in marketing to increase awareness as well as expand the size of our fleet to keep up with customer expectations around speed and accuracy,” Ms. Dalia commented. 

The entrepreneur graduated from the Misr University for Science and Technology, in 2000, with a bachelor's degree in engineering.

 A well-known radio and TV presenter, she entered the professional world, in 2004, working as a TV Presenter for Dubai TV. Between 2008 and 2014, she was also a radio presenter for the Egyptian radio station Nugoom FM. Concurrently (between 2009 and 2013), she was also a TV presenter for Al Hayat TV Network. She held the same position for On TV between 2014 and 2015. In 2012, She joined Filmhouse media as general manager before being appointed as director of production and marketing by Dubai-based Tanweer Group, in 2016. In 2019, the smart ad network Adzily hired her as director of marketing and public relations. 

Melchior Koba

Posted On lundi, 05 décembre 2022 13:29 Written by

She is a business analyst, consultant, and project management expert with over ten years of experience working with startups in Nigeria, and Africa in general. 

Nigerian-born Damilola Teidi-Ayoola (photo) is, since September 2022, Ventures Platform’s head of platform and networks. In that position, she leads a team focused on providing post-investment support.   

When she was appointed to that position, she declared she was “excited to join the team and build out different elements of the platform and networks practice.” 

The goal is to build scalable support initiatives and harness the value of our collective networks to provide catalytic value to our founders,” she added. 

Ventures Platform is one of Africa's leading seed funders, investing from pre-seed to Series A rounds.   It has already invested in more than 60 companies in the healthcare, financial services, insurance, agriculture, education, big data, and internet infrastructure industries. It also invests in talented accelerators and digital infrastructures.  

Ms. Damilola worked at Co-Creation Hub (CcHub) as an Incubation Manager from 2018 to 2019 and as Director of Startup Coaching from 2019 to 2022.

With a Bsc in Information Technology from the Eastern Mediterranean University, she started her professional career, in 2011, working as a software developer for application service provider Socketworks. In 2013, she joined the tech company Kinetik Solutions Ltd as a market analyst. 

After a three-month internship at the University of Southampton's Program Management Office (iSolutions) in 2014, she joined the CcHub team for the first time where she was a business analyst for pre-incubation companies. From 2015 to 2017, she was the CEO of the Nigerian online ride-sharing platform GoMyWay Africa.

Melchior Koba

Posted On vendredi, 02 décembre 2022 12:14 Written by

He is a tech enthusiast and life& business strategist. He has developed digital solutions in almost every sector (education, agriculture, communication, etc) to positively impact his continent and the world at large. 

Geophrey Tenganamba (photo) is a Tanzanian entrepreneur. He is also one of the co-founders and global managing director of UjuziNet Africa, a software editor. 

The software editor, established in 2020, has published several solutions in a wide range of sectors. The solutions include AdBox, a digital marketing and customer relationship management platform. This platform, founded in 2021, enables SMBs, entrepreneurs, ad agencies, and influencers to communicate, market, sell and support their online audiences. It allows users to schedule posts across social networks and automate responses to comments left by customers.

UjuziNet Africa also published Mazao Hub, an agricultural platform designed to manage farmers, and agricultural activities and control complex agricultural operations. Its digital products also include UjuZinet e-learning – which provides access to quality education online and offline-  and EMA ERP, a smart business platform that simplifies and automates business processes. All of the solutions it developed boast users in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Congo, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.

Our focus is Africa, and we all know that Africa is filled with SMEs. SMEs in Africa and beyond are the fastest-growing segments in the cloud-based ERP platform space. They are all looking for solutions which are affordable, customizable, flexible, easy to use, that have close support and fit their business environment,” Geophrey Tenganamba explains.

Concurrently with his mission as the global managing director of UjuziNet Africa, the latter is, since 2019, the director of operations of the software development company AkiliCodes Africa Limited. In 2016, he founded Fursa 101 Africa, a commodity, trading, and logistics platform built for farmers. 

The same year, he co-founded Global Corporate Performance Limited, a business consulting and branding firm. He is also the founder of several firms including Perfect Path Innovators (2011), The African Comfort Tours (2012), and Treasure House Real Estate (2013).

Melchior Koba

Posted On jeudi, 01 décembre 2022 12:30 Written by

He is an investment advisor with over 20 years of experience. As one of the initiators and organizers of a prestigious African fintech-focused summit, he has received several awards celebrating his impactful contributions.  

Zekarias Amsalu (photo) is an Ethiopian investor, ACCA Chartered Accountant, and an active figure in the African fintech sector. He is also one of the co-founders and co-organizers of the Africa Fintech Summit, “a vibrant community of fintech entrepreneurs, investors, regulators, and everyone in between working together to solve the largest financial issues.”

The summit, launched in 2018, is held twice a year (once in Washington, D.C., and once in a selected African country).

The Africa Fintech Summit is an event that gathers leaders, investors, regulators, think tanks, business leaders, banks, government agencies, and other architects of the ecosystem to foster collaboration, raise capital, and explore strategies to expand the reach of financial service delivery in Africa. Each April, one AFTS is held on the sidelines of the World Bank's Spring Meetings in Washington, D.C., while another is held in a selected African country,” Zekarias told Digital Africa, in April 2022, while explaining the concept.

The co-founder is also the founder and CEO of IBEX Frontier LLC, an investment consultancy firm focused on emerging markets and preferably in Ethiopia. He was also an investor for the 2019 Cohort of the NextGen Africa program. A few years earlier, in 2002, he founded Future Proof Accountancy, an accountancy firm providing its services to Ethiopian businesses and entrepreneurs.

The experienced investor kickstarted his professional career in 1997 when he joined the Addis-Ababa-based  Dashen Bank S.C as the head office accountant. In 1998,  he was hired by Shell as Treasurer and East Africa Hub Credit Manager. From 2003 to 2006, he was the financial accountant of Prudential Financial, in London, UK. He then worked for Westminster Electrical as a financial manager between 2006 and 2017. At the same time, Zekarias Amsalu was a management accountant for Godrej Consumer Products Ltd from 2007 to 2008. From 2016 to 2017, he also worked for Asoko Insight where he was the Operations Manager in Ethiopia.

Currently, he is the advisory board member of the VC firm Afrinet Capital. His impactful contributions have earned him several awards. In 2018, he was named one of the top 100 Most Influential Persons of African Descent (MIPAD) Under 40 in the Business/Entrepreneurship category. Forbes also showcased him as an investment connector and, he also won the Outstanding Trade Avocate Award at the Africa Trade and Investment Summit.

Melchior Koba

Posted On mercredi, 30 novembre 2022 11:10 Written by

After his finance courses, he worked for investment companies in France and Africa. He later chose to dynamise the African education sector with an edtech that has already earned investors’ confidence.

Hamza Faiz (photo) is a Moroccan finance expert and entrepreneur. In 2020, he co-founded Smartprof, a marketplace whose mission is to find the right tutor for every student.  

The startup based in Casablanca, Morocco, connects school-aged students with qualified teachers for individual or group tutoring. It aims to become the leading one-stop tutoring platform in North and West Africa, which represent a multi-billion-dollar market when combined.

"We launched Smartprof after noticing that the private educational system was failing in Morocco. We were convinced that every student needs some kind of private assistance to overcome the challenges faced in schools. The private tutoring market is very fragmented; finding a tutor is a nightmare. Additionally, there’s no visibility on pricing, so there was a real need for a tech product that creates a great tutoring experience," Hamza Faiz explained in September 2022.

Earlier in November 2022, his startup had raised pre-seed funding of US$110,000 from Plug and Play, UM6P Ventures, and several angel investors. The funds were provided to help Smartprof expand further in Morocco and West Africa and hire additional developers to improve the quality of the platform.

In July 2022, the startup had already raised US$50,000 for its participation in the third cohort of the Mohamed VI Polytechnic University's Startgate and the Plug and Play Morocco startup competition. Hamza Faiz, the co-founder, and CEO who made it possible is a Sciences Po graduate. He is also a graduate of the University of Warwick, UK.

In 2012, he was an engineering assistant at Georgetown University’s ISIS Center. The following year, he spent two months working as the director’s assistant at the Moroccan National Human Development Initiative. From 2013 to 2014, he was the Manager, market searcher, and strategic adviser of Cœur de Couleur, a defunct wholesaler of hygienic and decorative items. After a summer internship at Casablanca Stock Exchange, he was hired by Canal + as a financial controller in 2015.

The following year, he joined Societe Generale Corporate and Investment Banking for an internship as a Mergers and acquisitions and equity capital markets analyst.  In 2017, he also interned as an investment associate at AFIG FUNDS in Dakar. Then, in 2018, he joined BNP Paribas as an M&A analyst before being hired by food delivery company Deliveroo as an operations strategy associate in May 2019. In October 2019, the food delivery company appointed him core performance manager, a position he held until October 2021.  

Melchior Koba

Posted On mardi, 29 novembre 2022 14:07 Written by
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