Village Capital ("VilCap") announces the launch of its first Hardware accelerator in Africa, in partnership with Gearbox, a unique space for inventors to build and showcase innovative ideas in East Africa. With support from The Lemelson Foundation, The Doen Foundation, SGII, and VC4Africa, Village Capital and Gearbox are providing unique capacity building to 12 high-potential invention-based ventures to help entrepreneurs overcome the challenges unique to inventors in reaching scale.
The ventures will be selected to participate and shall receive extensive feedback from their peers, potential customers, investors and industry experts, as well as the opportunity to peer-select two participating ventures to receive $50,000, in pre-committed investment each.
The program is typically structured as three intensive 4-day sessions over 3 months (namely: Session 1 – October 21 – 24; Session 2- January 6 – 9; and Session 3: February 22 – 25), with additional remote collaboration online between sessions.
There is no cost to apply and no program fee for chosen enterprises. VilCap does not take equity up front for participation.
The application deadline is 7th September 2015, but early applicants will receive more attention from judges.
Of particular interest are ventures which improve access to energy for all, and increase agricultural productivity for small-holder farmers.
Examples include:
- Affordability: inventions that radically increase affordability of energy generation or agricultural products.
- Reduced Consumption: innovations that reduce the cost of consumption for small-holder farmers
- Efficiency: technologies that increase the efficiency of energy and/or agricultural distribution systems.
For more information on where to apply and how, please click here
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