Herconomy, a community-based startup that empowers women through financial services, capacity building, jobs, and networking, has raised $600,000 in a pre-seed round to extend their platform’s product offerings.
Members of the Herconomy community, venture capital firm Oui Capital, and a slew of angel investors led the pre-seed round, including Nkiru Ayemere, CEO of Zephans & Co; Ehi Onwudiwe, Director of Business Transformation at Ernst & Young; Ope Makinwa, Head of Reserve at Diageo; Ama Akpata, co-founder of Jand2Gidi, and a slew of others.
According to Ife Durosinmi-Etti, the company received commitments for $5.7 million from 509 community members within 24 hours of the round starting, but only accepted what it needed to scale — $600,000.
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“I pitched the idea of Herconomy to several investors but we didn’t get any yeses at first,” Durosinmi-Etti said. The game-changer for them was getting selected for the Startup Bootcamp Accelerator program. During the program, they fine-tuned their business model, got advisors on the program. “I quickly figured that many female-led startups do not get funding easily, so I decided to create a table for herself,” Durosinmi-Etti said.
Why The Investors Invested
“Our thesis is that community is very key to the future of consumer fintech in Africa. The company has a very strong community element, and also focuses on creating financial products and prosperity for women- who have historically been underserved with financial services. We like the company very much and are happy to be on this journey with the team,” Olu Oyinsan, Managing Partner of Oui Capital said.
A Look At What The Startup Does
Ife Durosinmi-Etti founded the Herconomy group in June 2018 after community members were interested in her book, “Accessing Grants for Startups.” The group became known as AGS Tribe, and it provides women with global access to a variety of opportunities.
The team at the startup then followed up with the launch of a new app to broaden their horizons.
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The app has a three-tier membership structure: a freemium subscription that gives members free access to their community and opportunity board; a Silver subscription that gives you access to their weekly capacity building workshops called the Lightbox; and a Gold subscription that gives you access to the community’s affinity network, which gives members discounts from over 60 brands like Raddison Blu Lagos, Qatar Airways, and Adidas. Gold members (those who pay $120 a year) have additional privileges using the mobile app. They also launched a job portal and went on to become Amazon’s first recruitment partner in Nigeria for the EU region.
Herconomy currently boasts a community of over 15,000 people, with 20% of them being paid members.
The startup intends to introduce its community members to financial services that it believes will be beneficial to them. It has organized various saving challenges over the years, managing at least 500 women who have saved a total of $100,000. Herconomy intends to create a savings solutions with its new funding, where members can earn high interest.
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions.
He is well versed on issues of ESG (sustainability), media and entertainment law, corporate finance and governance.
He is also an award-winning writer