Afrigather 
Cape City-based accelerator Grindstone has introduced the 25 corporations who will embark on its year-long programme which assists high-growth, innovation-driven tech start-ups to turn into extra investable, sustainable and exit-ready.
The programme, which offers startups entry to information, networks, funding, and markets, contains 2 cohorts, one based mostly in Cape City and the opposite in Johannesburg.
Over the course of the programme, the chosen corporations will bear an intensive assessment of their methods and be supplied with teaching from international assets, together with among the Grindstone alumni corporations which have efficiently scaled their companies.
Grindstone is collectively owned by enterprise capital funding firm Knife Capital and Thinkroom Consulting which develops SMEs throughout Africa. It’s led by Andrea Böhmert, Catherine Younger, and Keet Van Zyl, who function companions, and the programme director is Will Inexperienced. The programme can also be supported by the SA SME Fund.
Talking on the launch of the accelerator, Ketso Gordhan, the CEO of the SA SME Fund, talked about that “Grindstone’s successful structured strategy to engineering progress for startups has been confirmed time and time once more, with the final cohort graduating with a mean of 88% income progress and creating 52 new jobs over a nine-month interval. The SA SME Fund continues to actively assist this programme because it undertakes to play a major position within the progress of the startup ecosystem and finally the economic system at massive.”
64% of the 2022/23 cohort of corporations are black-owned and 36% are women-owned. Full-time worker numbers vary from two to 13. The industries the startups are in embrace healthtech, artificial intelligence, edtech, fintech,legaltech, mobility,proptech, mediatech, and insuretech.
As a part of the programme, every of the 25 chosen corporations has agreed to make a non-refundable funding of R38,000 (~ $2300) in Grindstone’s GS Ventures, a women-led post-seed fund that invests in early-stage innovation-driven corporations.
Commenting on the programme, director Will Inexperienced pointed to the collective effort it took to assist the founders of the chosen corporations to scale their corporations.
“This announcement [of the selected companies] celebrates an ecosystem effort, as many people have been concerned at some stage of those entrepreneurs’ journey. I’ve straight labored with many of those founders for over two years and can proceed to take action. This cohort brings the tally of corporations now we have straight assisted to 115. It is usually our largest with a complete of 25 corporations, 14 from Gauteng, 10 from the Western Cape and 1 from Kwazulu-Natal,” he added.
In accordance with data from Tracxn, there are about 76 lively accelerators and incubators in South Africa. For a rustic with a quickly rising tech ecosystem, accelerators like Grindstone are a welcome growth as they assist entrepreneurs develop their concepts into possible and scalable companies.
This level is aptly summarized by the tech ecosystem skilled Nnamdi Oranye in a comment to IncAfrica: “Accelerators are more and more enjoying a vital position on the continent by offering entrepreneurs with a haven to study quickly, discover product market match and scale. From our information, we’re starting to see echoes of a correlation between scale-up funding and attending an accelerator. This bodes extraordinarily effectively for the African ecosystem.”
