Press Release: Announcing e SABU CFO Service and Governance Platform for Africa Tech Startups
Dubai, UAE from 3rd Africa Legal Network Conference– Bridging the Gulf
Savannah Fund today launches e SABU, a virtual CFO service and Governance platform to allow African tech startups to access global standard accounting, reporting and governance to support growth. Africa Startups often start in one country and are limited by service providers who don’t understand startups or can afford them. Founders often have to wrestle with basic book-keeping, compliance to more complicated valuation to support fundraising. Working together with partners Wells Levitt and Axis (part of the Africa Legal Network), we also have a good relationship with Stripe for US jurisdiction setup and payments for global ecommerce. The platform aims to level the playing field for African startups who lack access or can afford such services vs their global counterparts . Like the accelerator, where Savannah Fund provides tech “soft infrastructure” in mentoring and guidance to startups across 4 cohorts and 14 startups across 6 countries, e SABU is a service created to support the startups vital business monitoring and reporting until they reach a level they can hire a CFO (beyond Series A).
We believe it’s an important service and support we can offer startups to improve not only their chances of success in addition to the work may others are doing in building out workspaces, incubators and accelerators to thrive and grow across a challenging and fragmented continent.
e SABU Service will also enable startups to better understand their business and consequently make better business decisions for growth across Africa and become more globally competitive. Such challenges we hope startup founders can better address include:
- What is my current valuation and am I ready to fundraise? What is most compelling about my startup?
- Am I growing fast enough? What is a reasonable pace of month to month growth for my B2C startup.
- Which is the most attractive country to best enter to start scaling my business outside of my home country? How has the Naira or Kenya shilling’s exchange rate going to affect my growth prospects?
- Which jurisdiction and who should I work with to set up my venture for pan Africa growth?
- What should I be communicating to my board and investors?
- What’s the cost and impact of going B2B vs B2C in Africa?
The Service will be initially available for startups in our portfolio companies in Kenya, Ghana and Nigeria in beta this year. And we will open the service to select startups outside the portfolio. If interested please visit www.savannah.vc/cfo
We seek to offer 3 levels of service:
- CFO level Standard of Reporting and Governance: Because qualified startup CFOs are in short supply and expensive in Africa- e SABU will provide core financial metrics reporting and accounting to meet basic levels required for compliance and demanded by investors.
- Support for Cross Border and Global Growth from Mauritius & USA: One of the biggest areas of learning as a small fund operating for 4 years investing in over 20 startups on the continent is how to operate across 7-8 countries. We will help take startups from their home country, often small and lacking in appropriate legal framework to grow, and help with structuring to to US Delaware and/or Mauritius and setting up regional offices. Startups can directly tap our knowledge of working across 8 countries in Africa for growth- an example would be a Kenyan startup seeking to expand to Tanzania.
- Fundraising and Valuation Support: Fundraising for African originated startups is extremely difficult especially for a Series A or growth round. We will begin to offer more support in not only connecting with foreign investors but helping build materials required such as financial models and valuation calculations.