Zimbabwean startup, BitFinance, accepted into Savannah Fund accelerator

A Zimbabwean startup called BitFinance that’s building a  Bitcoin exchange in Africa and a Bitcoin ATM just got admitted into Savannah Fund’s 4th accelerator class. The fund is based in Kenya and you probably remember them for being part of a funding round that went into biNu.

Savannah Fund says as part of the this class, BitFinance will get seed investment of between US $25,000 and $30,000. The founders of BitFinance are not strangers to Zimbabwe’s young tech startup ecosystem – there’s Verengai Mabika who is part of the team running Internet Society Zimbabwe, and Tawanda Kembo, known mostly for a startup called Virtual Bank as well being part of the team that was running Muzinda Hub before he left to join BitFinance.

On to what BitFinance does, before today we knew them mainly for the ATM called CryptoCounter that they are building, but the listing on Savannah fund says BitcoinFund, the exchange (a place to buy and sell Bitcoins) is their flagship.

Other startups admitted in this class are the following:

Djuaji  in Kenya & Malawi which facilitates scalable survey-based research to help businesses obtain data at low cost by paying respondents with mobile money. We couldn’t help notice that this is the same kind of mobile research business that biNu pivoted into.

Forex.co.ke, a Kenyan currency exchange startup promising to simplify the process of transacting forex.

Podozi.com, a Nigerian based eCommerce startup for beauty products like skincare, makeup, fragrance, bath products, baby products and men’s products.