Investing in Africa’s potential, one person at a time.

Our vision is to see Africa thrive. We believe that happens when people are given a fair chance at realizing their inherent potential. Our mission is to enable young Africans to thrive by connecting them to global opportunity. Better education, global jobs, and seed capital for technology enabled startups.

Strained public education
systems in the global south

Problem: Populations in the global south are surging, governments have limited resources and cannot provide their citizens with equal access to high quality education. 

Solution: Private alternatives are needed to give the rising population of young people access to the skills they and their communities need to build better futures. 

Universities and schools provide an education but no guarantee of work

Problem: Universities and schools do not do enough to find meaningful work for their graduates. This means former students often find themselves working jobs that they didn't study towards.

Solution: Our approach is to match students to world class organizations where they can work remotely, and build a career doing what they studied towards.

Densification of high value opportunities in few leading cities

Problem: The densification of opportunity in the world’s leading cities is making them less livable: rents are soaring, the cost of living has risen greatly, pricing out lower income households & increasing the cost of doing business. 

Solution:  We believe we can fix this by building our campuses in less affluent parts of the world, places where opportunity is sorely needed but access to it does not exist. We can act as the necessary bridge that gives people access to meaningful work that can help regenerate these places and reduce the migratory load that is causing leading cities to overheat.

OUR
ADVISORS

Vitalik is the Founder of the Ethereum Foundation. Ethereum is a global, open-source platform for decentralized applications. Ether is the token whose blockchain is generated by the Ethereum platform. Vitalik is also a Thiel Fellow, having been awarded a fellowship in 2014. 

  • Vitalik Buterin

Balaji is an angel investor and entrepreneur. Formerly the CTO of Coinbase and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, he was also the cofounder of Earn.com (acquired by Coinbase), Counsyl (acquired by Myriad), Teleport (acquired by Topia), and Coin Center. 

  • Balaji Srinivasan

Akshay is COO at Notion. Prior to this he was Country Manager for LinkedIn in India. Prior to working as Country Manager for Linkedin in Bangalore, Akshay was principal product manager at LinkedIn based in Mountain View. Prior to joining LinkedIn he co-founded Pulse, which was itself acquired by LinkedIn.

  • Akshay Kothari

Yury is CEO at Openland, a professional messenger designed to support all communication needs of a modern business. It can be used for fundraising, sales, recruiting, customer service, and business operations. The company was founded in 2017 and is based in San Francisco.

  • Yury Lifshits

Tonjé Bakang Tonjé is part-time director at The Family,  a startup accelerator focused on nurturing European tech startups. Previously Tonjé was Founder & CEO of Afrostream, the “Netflix for African, African-American and Caribbean content” a streaming site serving the European and African markets. Prior to founding Afrostream, Tonjé worked in the entertainment industry for over 15 years.

  • Tonjé Bakang Tonjé

Joe is a Founding Partner of 8VC and was an early institutional investor notable companies including Wish, Oculus, Oscar, Illumio, Blend, RelateIQ, Joby Aviation, Guardant Health, Synthego, and in 2016 and 2017 was the youngest member of the Forbes 100 Midas List. Joe is a co-founder of Palantir.

  • Joe Lonsdale

Dr Mumba Chalwe is a Consultant Urological-Surgeon. She holds a Master of Medicine in Urology (MMED- Urol) and has vast experience working in both local and international healthcare settings. Dr Chalwe boasts of several awards and recognition from various organizations worldwide and has previously given a TEDx talk on women in STEM. She is an Associate Fellow of the American College of Surgeons.

  • Mumba Chalwe

Nolan is CEO of Double GDP, a San Francisco based startup building an end-to-end platform for cities to manage municipal and communal services in a more efficient, responsive and accountable way. Prior to this Nolan was Head of Global Customer Education and Community.

  • Nolan Myers

W. Gyude Moore is a visiting fellow at the Center for Global Development. He previously served as Liberia’s Minister of Public Works with oversight over the construction and maintenance of public infrastructure from December 2014 to January 2018.

Prior to that role, Moore served as Deputy Chief of Staff to President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and Head of the President’s Delivery Unit (PDU).

  • W. Gyude Moore

Amit is a serial entrepreneur and has founded companies spanning domains from consumer healthcare to cybersecurity. He's co-founder and Managing Partner of Nairobi-based Akili, Partner at NYC venture studio Prehype, and founder of Arabella, an Akili portfolio company and product development shop.

  • Amit Lubling

JD is a Co-Founder of Open Door and was previously VP of Product at Addepar. Whilst at Open Door, JD led the company’s growth team and product teams. Previously, as VP Product at Addepar, he launched products that brought over $100 billion in assets onto the technology platform.

  • JD Ross

Amjad is the Founder of Repl.it whose mission is to make programming more accessible by building powerful yet simple tools and platforms for educators, learners and developers. Prior to Replit, Amjad was a software developer at Facebook, and was a founding engineer at CodeAcademy.

  • Amjad Masad

Shola is Co-Founder and CEO at Paystack, a Lagos based  fintech startup. Paystack builds technology to help Africa’s best businesses grow.  Paystack was the first Nigerian company to be accepted to Y Combinator, and has subsequently processed billions of  Dollars worth of transactions for  African companies.

  • Shola Akinlade

Iyinoluwa ("E") is a co-founder of Flutterwave and Andela. He is presently Managing Partner of Street Capital, and an entrepreneur in the public interest. 

  • Iyinoluwa Aboyeji

Dustyn is co-founder and Managing Partner of Akili, a venture development firm and holding company. He works alongside Africa's most talented entrepreneurs and with the backing of its most forward-thinking corporates and investors to discover opportunities, build, and spin-out companies that are uniquely African with global ambition.

  • Dustyn Winder

OUR
BOARD

Mark Lutter is the Executive Director of the Charter City Institute where he leads efforts to build the global ecosystem of charter cities. Mark is also on the Board of Directors of Radical Exchange, and prior to that worked as an Economist at NeWay Capital.

  • Mark Lutter

  

Mwiya is Chairman and CEO of Explorer Academy. He is also a co-founder of Nkwashi, a private city being developed in Zambia, as well as Frontier Capital Partners, an Africa focused private investment firm.

  • Mwiya Musokotwane

Jordan is an Engineering Manager at Atrium. Prior to this he was Senior Data Scientist at the United States Digital Service. Jordan also served as Digital Service Expert in the White House.

  • Jordan Bramble

  

Spencer is Executive Vice President at the Allen Morris Company, a real estate development firm with over US$2 billion of real estate development pipeline. Spencer is also a co-founder of Frontier Capital Partners, an Africa focused private investment firm.

  • Spencer Morris

Sepo is the President of Explorer Academy, and its Vice Chancellor. Sepo holds a PhD in Economics & Management from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. She was previously Assistant Dean in the  School of Business at the University of Lusaka. Sepo is also a founder of Class Guru, Explorer Academy's learning management platform.

  • Sepo Musokotwane

  

Carl is Managing Partner at Frontier Capital Partners, an Africa focused private investment firm.  Prior to this Carl  led strategy at Bayport Financial Services, where he was part of team that built a US$30 million deposit taking platform. Carl also worked in private equity and M&A in Miami, where he was involved in over US$100million of transactions.

  • Carl Mbao

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