Fledge begins again! 10 intense weeks for seven new fledglings. This time in a brand new city, Barcelona. We’re excited to have a cohort filled mostly with West African companies. For the previous ten sessions we’ve had quite a few East African and Southern African startups, but none in person from Ghana before. We’re even more excited that two of these companies are founded...
My friend Ross Baird over at Village Capital posted a great bit of advice for the “tech” crowd in TechCrunch today: Dear Silicon Valley, You used to be the envy of the world. Over the last decade I’ve seen countless cities try to become you, from the Silicon Savannah to the Silicon Bayou. At last year’s Global Entrepreneurship Summit on Stanford’s campus, hundreds of entrepreneurs...
The Global Impact Accelerator Program is the first accelerator helping global impact businesses move to Canada under its Startup-Visa Program. This is a comprehensive, 4-month program powered by Fledge, operated by Spring.is targeting companies in healthcare, progressive food, sustainability, creative economy, and cleantech. Based in Vancouver, the Canadian leader for impact entrepreneurship, and...
The fledglings are back in Lima, from Monday, July 3rd through Friday, September 1st. Seven exciting startups from five different countries: AESA Foods grows bees in Nicaragua and sells honey and other bee-related products. Nicaragua. www.facebook.com/pg/AESAFOODS AMIntegrated Aerial radically improves agricultural yields in Nigeria and beyond through the use of aerial robotics in crop dusting...
Fledge9 wrapped up less than a month ago, but Fledge10 begins in Lima, Peru tomorrow and before that intensity builds, it seems a good time to wrap-up what Fledge9 did for each of the fledglings in Seattle. Africa Business Radio came into Fledge9 as a two-year-old, bootstrapped streaming radio station with a single stream of content. They left with a plan to create three more streams: East...
Fledge is over five years old, and for that half decade and more the industry has been debating how to measure the impact of a company and a portfolio. Using the Pinchot Impact Index, Fledge is able to not only do that, but also to show how that measure changes from session to session. More specifically, we measure three levels of impact for our portfolio of fledglings: the potential of the idea...
Africa Business Radio deems itself a media platform with a purpose, driven to provide content that offers success for business across Africa. One of the 6 startups from Fledge9, based in Johannesburg, South Africa, founder Soji Akinlabi has grown this business from just 1 streaming radio show two years ago to over 15 shows today. Each show strives to ask the question: How will this information...
Zirconia immortalizes steel. The modern, industrial world is built on steel, which before Zirconia was destined to all rust away. The breakthrough this team is bringing to market is a non-toxic, economically sustainable, spray-on ceramic that glassifies the surface of steel, applied indoors or outdoors at room temperature, applicable to new construction as well as existing, rusty surfaces. With...
Talking about doing your business, Americans take for granted how simple it is to “do your business”, flush, and get on with the day? Not the case in Uganda. The dirty truth is that only 6% of 36 million Ugandans have access to safe, clean sanitation facilities. The 3 million people in Kampala share just 1,000 flushable toilets. Fledge9 introduces Joelex, a Ugandan startup with a mission to not...
One of the exciting outcomes from Fledge is the discovery of a new, better business model that an entrepreneur never gave a second thought. For Fledge9, this extra exciting, as the Biogen Kenya applied four times with a business making biodiesel, and we fully expected them to leave the program with that business. Five weeks later, we have a new name, Zijani, a new logo, but more importantly, a...