“I really hope that one day, YC will recognise the value of what I’m building and back my startup. That will be the game changer.” This is Ayo*, a Lagos-based founder, sharing his hopes of being selected into one of Y Combinator’s cohorts last year. Like many founders, Ayo associates YC’s acceptance with startup success. “The money, the network, the opportunities—nothing beats it,’ he added emphatically.
Ayo’s startup did not make it to YC’s list in the end, but that has done nothing to his faith in the accelerator. He will continue to try until he gets in, he says—a possibility that is now much slimmer, given YC’s recent scale-back from Africa.
Y Combinator (YC), one of the world’s leading startup accelerators, has been a major player in shaping Africa’s tech ecosystem since the middle of the past decade, when tech-powered upstarts began to spring across the continent. The accelerator has backed over a hundred startups, including some of the…
