Launched in Dakar, LIONSTECH Invest is a network with the mission of helping high-potential, creative Senegalese startups speed up their path to finance and strategic collaborations.

The French Embassy in Senegal, the DER/FJ, Bpifrance, the AFD Group, and a number of other stakeholders in the country’s IT scene all contributed to this endeavour.

Support for startups is provided by the second part of the community, according to Kadiatou Traoré, head of Lionstech’s investment group. “We have a number of acceleration programmes that are supported by the partners of this initiative, including support structures in Senegal that will help us structure programmes that will be available to these companies,” she said.

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Lionstech Invest helps connect businesses with investors both near and far. The entrepreneurial ecosystem in Senegal is another target of this group’s efforts to improve and organise. This project was funded in part by the French Embassy and the Development and Economic Research Foundation for the French Community in the Pacific (DER-FJ).

Mathieu Becue, Attac’s CEO, says, “We have decided to submit a funding file to our Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to obtain funds to deploy this action. France’s contribution is 1 million euros, co-financed with the DER, which has also invested 1 million euros in this project.”

With “the expectation that this device can be propagated within the DER-FJ,” the programme will run for two years. The four axes that the systems rest on are:

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• Connect to innovation ecosystems in Europe and Africa through federating the ecosystem around a digital platform;
• Assist cutting-edge businesses in obtaining private funding;
• Encourage the development of regional angel investing groups to operate in tandem with their global counterparts;
• Create means for the DER and other members of the ecosystem to share the cost of financing projects.

The French Embassy has been involved in the development of this project from the beginning, and today marked the official launch of the Lionstech community, which is part of a project that aims to increase the exposure of Senegalese technology startups to the international and Senegalese financial communities.

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Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert. 
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard. You can book a session and speak with him using the link: https://insightsbyexpert