Koa, A Kenyan Fintech, Is One Of Five Finalists Set To Pitch For A $100,000 Prize At Startup Battlefield 2021
Koa, a Kenyan fintech, is one of five finalists set to pitch for a $100,000 prize at Startup Battlefield 2021
Koa, a Kenyan startup, is one of only five startups from around the world to qualify for the finals of the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt 2021, which will take place in San Francisco. The fintech startup is Africa's sole representative in the finals, which will be held in the United States.
Adventr, an American interactive video company, and Cellino, a Cambridge-based startup that combines artificial intelligence and machine learning to democratize access to cell therapies, are among the companies that have joined forces with the startup.
Other startups competing in the finals include Nth Cycle, an American recycling startup that uses an electro-extraction system to recycle waste into valuable minerals such as nickel, cobalt, and manganese, and Tatum, a blockchain company based in the Czech Republic that uses distributed ledger technology.
In the preliminary round of TechCrunch's Startup Battlefield, a group of 20 companies from around the world pitched their products and services. The startups emerged victorious from the pack.
Koa is assisting Africans in making better financial decisions
The only company from Africa to be included in the lineup is Koa, a fintech startup based in Nairobi, Kenya. The startup, which was founded in 2020 by Alexis Roman, Bubunyo Nyavor, and Delila Kidanu, is assisting Kenyans in making better financial decisions by providing them with a wider range of digital services.
East African countries such as Kenya and Uganda are well-known for their reliance on mobile money services such as M-Pesa, Mobikash, and Airtel Money to conduct their daily business. These countries and services, more than anything else, have helped to establish Sub-Saharan Africa as the world's mobile money capital.
East Africa is responsible for approximately 53 percent of the increase, despite the fact that it has fewer service providers than the West African region. Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to gain 79 million new mobile money users by 2020. It had a total of 293 million registered accounts with a total value of $273 billion dollars.
However, while the operators provide basic financial services such as cash transfer and receipt, they have fallen short of providing other more impactful financial services such as savings.
Nairobi-based Techcrunch estimates that Kenyans will have saved up to $13 billion by 2020, with more than 70% of them participating in informal saving groups and cooperatives.
Alexis Roman, the CEO of Koa, stated that many Kenyans were dissatisfied with the quality of financial services they were receiving because most of them were manual, making them time-consuming, expensive, and prone to error.
The fact that when we spoke to people and they shared their experiences with cooperatives and savings groups, we were left wondering why there weren't better alternatives was shocking. When describing the problem that underpins the way financial services are used, the word "access" is frequently used as a keyword. However, we believe that access is not the problem; rather, it is the ease with which or the efficiency with which the service can be accessed. The fact that we had made such an obvious observation was what spurred us to create Koa," he explained.
At the moment, the fintech only offers savings, where users can deposit money without having to go through any hassles and earn interest on their savings. Although the startup currently only offers banking services, it has plans to expand its offerings to include financial technology tools that will allow other startups to launch fintech products more quickly.
Finally, Koa aspires to become a digital banking platform that provides a variety of services such as lending and investing. Approximately 5,000 users have signed up for Koa's beta version of its app since it was launched in April 2021.
We wish the African flagbearers the best of luck as they compete for a $100,000 cash prize at the Techcrunch Startup Battlefield at Disrupt 2021 in San Francisco.
