Jude Dike, William Okafor, and Temitope Ekundayo founded GetEquity, a startup based in Nigeria that is changing the status quo of startup financing and venture capital by making it easy for African startups to get funding.
Essentially, GetEquity allows investors to find, create, and diversify investment portfolios “by accessing new investment opportunities, trade-in digital security assets, invest in local SMEs, and improve liquidity,” it says.
“GetEquity is challenging the status quo of start-up financing and venture capital. We are democratizing access to startup funding and thereby expanding the pie of previously underfunded and underserved startups,” said Dike.
The startup launched in 2021. Initially, the founders did not set out to democratize startups in Africa. According to Techcabal, Dike and Okafor, who are blockchain engineers, were building a blockchain exchange platform while Temitope was working around a big data analytics product.
“I met Temitope at the Mozilla Accelerator after we’d bantered on Twitter for the longest time. I and William are technical persons and Temitope is a business operator, so I asked Temitope to help us figure out the business side of our product and we’d help him build a technical team for his product,” said Dike, CEO at GetEquity, according to Techcabal. This led to the founding of GetEquity, one of the most innovative products in Africa.
Startups on GetEquity get instant access to several angel investors, syndicates and institutional investors. According to Techcabal, “startups also get the chance to raise investment from their communities and customers, giving ownership and building a stronger sense of belonging with their most loyal customers.”
While GetEquity appears like it was built on blockchain technology, Dike said their technology only employs the core blockchain concept, which is tokenisation. “Blockchain is all about ownership, accessibility and security, and we have borrowed this core concept to tokenise funding on our platform,” Dike said.
The company has a diverse team with backgrounds in law, marketing, investment, business development that analyze the potential growth of a startup before onboarding them on their platform.
In June 2021, the company announced the close of its six-figure pre-seed round led by GreenHouse Capital, a leading African fintech investment fund and platform.
“This pre-seed round investment will enable us to kickstart our vision of building Africa’s biggest startup financing ecosystem,” Dike said at the time. Bunmi Akinyemiju, Founding Partner of GHC, also indicated that the increased visibility that the platform will give African startups will inevitably result in larger investment rounds, faster closes, and an overall raising of the international profile of the African startup space.
