Investor and Entrepreneur Forum -

Investor and Entrepreneur Forum
& Immersive Workshop (Invitation Only)

Wednesday, March 22, 4:25 - 5:35 PM PST

Session Description

Fundraising is one of the biggest challenges in an entrepreneurial journey. It is well known that African and Diasporan entrepreneurs face even bigger fundraising hurdles vs. their peers. In our interactive session, we will learn from entrepreneurs from the 2022 Builders of Africa’s Future and Accelerating Black Leadership and Entrepreneurship (ABLE) on how they have successfully overcome these hurdles. We invite entrepreneurs, foundations, venture capitalists, and investors to share best practices with the goal of improving the overall success rate of entrepreneurs in our community.

Session Agenda

For more information, please contact debra@africandiasporanetwork.org.

Keynote

Iyinoluwa Aboyeji is currently the CEO and General Partner of Fund for Africa’s Future (popularly known as Future Africa), Africa’s largest seed stage investor which has invested millions of dollars into over hundred startups across Africa. Prior to that, he co-founded Flutterwave, a billion-dollar global payments platform connecting African businesses and individuals to the global economy and served as its Founding CEO from May 2, 2016, to October 5, 2018. In those years, he led the company to become one of the fastest growing payments technology businesses of all time, processing over $2 billion across over 50 million transactions.

Moderator

Hugh Molotsi is the founder and CEO of Ujama Inc, the makers of Soko, the farmers’ market app that makes it easy to discover farmers’ markets near you and connect with their sellers. Hugh is a seasoned product and technology leader with over 30 years of experience developing global solutions for small businesses and consumers. Hugh is an accomplished innovator and has helped launch several disruptive products. He has expertise in leadership development and digital transformation and has led diversity and inclusion initiatives. Hugh had a 22-year career at Intuit, where his last position was Engineering Fellow and Vice President of Innovation.

Panelists

Born and raised in Paris, France, Dr. Hanane Chaibainou graduated recently from the University of Pennsylvania with a Doctorate degree. She is the former Moroccan Ambassador for the first Youth Forum at the UNESCO and a member of the Covid-19 taskforce for the American Moroccan Competencies Network (AMCN). Her passion for social work led her to become the President of Association Nahda for Education and Development in rural Morocco focused on supporting women and children in underserved areas. Dr. Hanane Chaibainou is now the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Biotessia, S.A., based in Casablanca, Morocco. As soon as Dr. Chaibainou is done seeing neurosurgical patients, she is fully dedicated to Biotessia.

Shasha has led big data initiatives at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, advanced drug development through modeling and simulation at Roche, Genentech, and Amgen, and co-founded Level 42 AI, Inc. Level 42 AI, Inc’s mission is to follow nature’s instruction to unveil and interpret functional health information hidden in plain sight and in “noise” for actionable insights. Level 42 AI software-defined hardware captures broad frequency, low amplitude human health information traditionally discarded as “noise” at accuracy and densities required for Level 42’s novel structured machine learning edge inference tools for real time actionable insights and lifestyle modification coaching.

Dana Weeks is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of MedTrans Go. MedTrans Go is a B2B healthcare appointment optimization platform solving the $150B problem of medical appointment cancellations in the US. Their tech-enabled portal provides healthcare facilities access to a customizable suite of services to address the root causes of their cancellations in one easy-to-use, integrated digital platform. Dana previously led several entrepreneurial ventures and held leadership positions at Pfizer, AT&T, and the Black Angel Tech Foundation, a 501c3 nonprofit organization she co-founded to support and increase the number of underrepresented minorities in technology.

Audience: Builders of Africa’s Future 2022 Alumni, Accelerating Black Leadership and Entrepreneurship Alumni; entrepreneurs, leaders of foundations, venture capitalists, and investors.

Builders of Africa’s Future

At USADF, we are committed to deepening the connection between Africa and the African diaspora in the United States. USADF first partnered on the Builders of Africa’s Future program in 2021 to provide catalytic funding to African enterprises with the potential to make significant social impact in their communities. We are proud to be supporting ADN, one of the United States’ preeminent diaspora organizations in its fifth year of the Builders of Africa’s Future program.

Through the ADN Network, I gained access to mentorship from Michael of Johnson & Johnson. I also got introductions for possible partnership opportunities and I got increased visibility for my business that paved the way for me to be selected as one of the Best 200 Business in Nigeria for the first-ever digital startup accelerator by Forbes International.

The most exciting part during the program was interacting with mentors and fellow awardees. I learnt what other people are doing in their communities and gained different insights on how my fellows tackle similar problems in different ways. As we are looking to scale our business to another region in Tanzania, I believe this kind of experience can help my business to succeed.

Being a part of the ADN network has meant a lot. We have grown and we have impacted. We were able to get help from one of their funders, the WISE Fund, and we were able to impact 200,000 people and it’s been a great experience.

Accelerating Black Leadership & Entrepreneurship

My admiration for Entrepreneurs and the businesses they start began as a kid growing up in and around SMBs. The risk of putting yourself out there each and every day for others is always present and deserves to be both respected and celebrated. All of us at Bill.com are excited to support entrepreneurs in any way that we can.

Being a member of the inaugural ABLE cohort was serendipitous. The program surfaced at a time we were evaluating how we could become more impactful domestically and more intentional globally as a company. From reading materials, workshops, and live exercises to mentoring, 1:1s, and peer exchange, we gained invaluable experience and gleaned vital expertise on how to pivot our business for success. Our company being selected as a 2022 backed Techstars Social Impact Accelerator was evidence of the effect the program had on WunderGrubs.

The ACCELERATING BLACK LEADERSHIP AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP (ABLE) accelerator program has provided solace and energy to keep my North Star in sight. The desire of ABLE small business and nonprofit organization leaders following a shared calling to deliver a variety of sustainable solutions to our communities is contagious and uplifting. The intelligence, talent, and determination to push, break or extinguish personal and societal barriers is invigorating. ABLE cohort members, facilitators, lecturers, and advisors have made this journey that much less lonely than it could have been, while I led Level 42 AI towards regulatory approval of our breakthrough disease screening technologies.

It is showing me how to craft my business into a form that is taken more seriously and highly fundable.