Follow up Series: Pangea Accelerator Alumni Startups
We speak to the founders of WorkPay Africa and Onesha Kenya, Paul Kimani and Bernard Momanyi respectively, who have both received investment for their startups.
What is the key highlight or achievement your startup has had following the accelerator program?
WorkPay Africa: A lot has happened in the last couple of months and culmination of all this has been our rebranding from TozzaPlus to WorkPay. We now have a working product solving a real problem for our clients.
“In the past six months, we have managed to grow our active client base by 300% and our revenue by upwards of 500%. We anticipate growing this margin even further in 2020.” — Paul Kimani, CEO, WorkPay Africa.
Onesha: We've had our first profitable month courtesy of months of coaching from Pangea Accelerator. We are also having talks with local investors who have expressed interest to invest in Onesha. Moreover, we have 3 investors on our Advisory Board who have been instrumental in helping us build our niche and scaling our business.
What are your future plans for your startup?
WorkPay Africa: We would like to solidify our base here in Kenya for the next 15–17 months before embarking into any other country in Sub Saharan Africa. In terms of product offerings, we shall be adding more features as per our product roadmap and customer feedback. We will also be attending Oslo Innovation Week 2019 to pitch and interact with potential investors, Pangea Accelerator and ICT Norway have made this connection possible.
Onesha:We are currently working to grow the number of creative services Onesha can offer, from the current 10 to 30+ by close of 2019. We plan to pursue progressive micro-scaling to other towns in Kenya where businesses actively use creative services e.g Mombasa, Kisumu and Nakuru. By close of 2020, we plan to have a presence in either Nigeria or South Africa where consumption of creative services by businesses is almost triple what Kenyan businesses consume.
What is your experience working with Pangea Accelerator?
WorkPay Africa: We have had an amazing journey with Pangea Accelerator. Pangea Accelerator has walked with us and supported us around the areas of strategy, product development, governance and also investment, by being our very first external seed investor.
Onesha: Apart from Pangea Accelerator investing in Onesha, the Onesha team has also been taken through sessions to solve challenges in marketing, accounting and product development. If we had learnt on our own,we could have taken a longer period to master hence delayed time going to market.
