Quote from Ndubuisi Ekekwe on July 3, 2018, 6:09 AM

On the piece on total capital raised by African startups in first half of 2018, a user commented on LinkedIn thus:

User: We owe a lot to your type, who support the visibility of our start-ups with your daily display of lightening wit. My worry The fact that we led Kenya in terms of deals is great, we had 29 against Kenya’s 23 start-ups. However, we could only gross USD29.41m for 29 deals, while Kenya with lesser deals (23) got USD82.86m, this figure nearly tripled what we got. My question is: is it the quality of our solutions that is the issue or it’s a question of valuation by our financial advisers?

My Response: Do not worry - Kenya was credited with Cellulant which picked about $47m or so. But Cellulant is largely a Nigerian company with a Kenya HQ! Yet, that should not really matter. I expect most African nations to do Israel-US model (where people in Israel start companies with 100% focus to sell in U.S. with no interest in local Israeli market) in Nigeria say from 2022 at scale. Ghana does that already - you are in Accra but your main market is Lagos. Expect Rwandan techies to do same. So, the books can read Rwandan startup fund but that money is never wired to Rwanda but straight to Lagos from New York as that is where the company needs it for growth.