Venture Labs East Africa yesterday launched their Kampala space in Bugolobi. It is a new platform for innovative high-growth ventures and brings together a global network of interpreters, technology partners and investors to accelerate and reduce all risks involved in launching transformative new ventures. They aim to build a collaborative platform for innovating, designing and launching lie changing new technology-enabled business ventures in frontier markets. With an initial idea of targeting start-ups.
Venture Labs is a group that researches into different market opportunities and different problems that are experienced by consumers and they come up with ideas for new business. They have been doing this for about 10 years in different parts of the world in Brazil, India, Mozambique, Australia and chose East Africa as their next stop couple of years ago.
The Managing partner at Clean Star Ventures Greg Murray (Image above) said
A lot of people are turning up in this part of the world and are trying to invest in these companies and opportunities and they are frustrated by the fact that there doesn’t seem to be amount of stuff to invest into and then the entrepreneurs here who are fantastic seem to be frustrated by the fact that there is not enough money. There is a huge disconnect between the problem solvers/innovators and the money that wants to get into that region. So we look, at that and think that what’s actually required is a place where you can bake things properly.
Where actually you can spend the time and the money. Spend a year and half going deep into a particular opportunity to see if it’s viable. For example, is it possible to create electrification in the bush, is it possible that we can replace charcoal as a fuel or is it possible that we can disrupt the way the information services are delivered and internet is delivered in this part for the world, can we change and help agriculture and do that in a way that makes us money.
The Kampala space is one of the five spaces in the region, and the aim is to network these spaces together with international investors, multinational companies, technology companies who all want to take this build approach to the marketing opportunities that are here in all sorts of sectors.
Venture Labs joins other incubation spaces in Kampala like Mara LaunchPad, OutBox, Hive Collab and the hub Kampala. It is located (Google Maps: here) in Bugolobi on Binayomba Road just before Ambrosoli International and Royal Suites.
