The coronavirus pandemic crippled a lot of businesses and brought economies to its knees.

In the midst of all that, though, emerged some start-ups determined to help their economies overcome this impact.

About last month, the iNOVO Accelerator program was born from the partnership between Ventures Platform, Startupbootcamp AfriTech and UK-Nigeria Tech Hub to help these start-ups to achieve their goals.

As of the time the accelerator program was announced, more than 750 worthy applicants submitted for consideration. Only ten would eventually be chosen, though.

The lucky start-ups that would take part in the mentorship and training include:

• Agriple – provides farmers actionable data to determine what crop is best to cultivate
• Farmer First Technologies – financial player providing loans to farmers, and putting them in touch with buyers with better offers
• Foodbank.ng – reduces food wastage while providing food items to households at competitive prices
• Rural Farmers Hub – almost real-time advisory for farmers on crops, using satellite-based imagery.
• Afrilearn – gamified learning platform with video-based learning modules
• DigiLearns – AI-based learning tool with access to high quality educational content.

The others that round up the list are Schoola, Gleeworld Pharmacy, Wellvis and Pharmasev Health Project.

The program is expected to last three months during which these startups will also be exposed to a wide range of investors, amongst other resources that they will benefit from.

CrowdyVest burst onto the scene in 2019 as a local crowdsourcing platform for small and medium scale businesses to achieve their short- and long-term goals with investment from willing users.

The model has worked and grew the portfolio of parent company, Farmcrowdy.

As of the time of this writing, though, CrowdyVest has now become a company of its own too.

An investment round led by Tope Omotolani saw the new company secure important investment from a handful of investors which allows it to stand on its own. Tope also becomes the first CEO of the new brand as it forays out on its own.

The new company has reacted nicely to this exit by pivoting its business model to serve the target market even better.

One of the new products that has been added is a digital savings service for the thousands of platform subscribers that the company boasts right now.

We wish the company the best in all of its endeavours as it hopes to become one of the leading wealth management companies in the country soon.

The gig and freelance economy are booming in this part of the world too. The coronavirus pandemic might have helped this kind of work model gain more traction in little time also.

One of the start-ups that leveraged the boom in this gig economy is ImaliPay, creating financial solutions for different members of the gig economy.

As of the time of this writing, the working model of the start-up is one that allows freelancers to save their incomes and access loans that they can pay back as at when convenient.

ImaliPay has now secured a pre-seed funding to help them scale better and faster across Nigeria and Africa as a whole. The funding also makes it possible for the brand to come up with new financial solutions and products for its target market.

That said, ImaliPay might just be the one that brings serious credit history into our economy.

The more freelancers save their incomes on the platform – and the more they pay back their loans on time – the better their credit history. This allows them to access even better financial services that the firm provides in the future.

Even after the pre-seed round, we are yet to get details on how much the company got in total. What we know, however, is that the round was led by TEN13, an Australian Ventura capital. Also, part of the seed round were the likes of FINCA Ventures, Changeroom, Optimiser Foundation and Mercy Corps Ventures, among others.

To expand its services into the United States, Synatic has raised seed funding from UW Ventures and its partners – Allan Gray and E Squared.

With the funds raised, Synatic looks to deepen its low-code data platform and expand its customer base across the US.

The startup launched in 2017, and it has developed a low-code data automation platform. The channel enables enterprises to iterate quickly.

And it also provides rapid time to value for businesses that need to accelerate by leveraging multiple complex data systems.

The firm’s mission has been to provide powerful and simple data platforms to help enterprises build their businesses faster.

Synatic places primary focus on financial service companies; and it has over 40 enterprise clients across Africa, Australia, and the United States.

‘’We believe there is a wealth of talent and experience in South Africa. And it provides us with a great opportunity to build world-class products,’’ said Martin Naude, CEO of Synatic.

‘’We have found market-fit products. Hence, the need for capital to expand the team, deepen our tech, and grow our US customer base,’’

‘’We are privileged to have UW Ventures and their partners as our first investors. They get our vision to make powerful data automation a piece of cake. We therefore look forward to having them on board not only as investors, but also advisors.’’ Martin concluded.