54Gene, WellaHealth and ScholarX to Participate in Class 3 of Google Launchpad Africa Accelerator

Google has announced the 3rd class of its curated hands-on mentorship program, Launchpad Africa Accelerator. It includes a diverse group of 12 startups from all across Africa with three from Nigeria, 54Gene, WellaHealth, and ScholarX.

The Google Launchpad Accelerator program in Africa was launched in 2017 to support top seed startups on the continent. The launchpad accelerator has a target to provide over $3 million in equity-free support to more than 60 African tech startups.

The applications for this 3rd cohort opened after the completion of the 2nd class, which had 4 Nigerian startups in participation – Thank U Cash, Medsaf, FormPlus and AppZone.

Over 1000 applications were said to be reviewed by Google in all for its current Africa, Brazil and India cohorts. 12 African startups from across 6 African countries were eventually selected to partake in this 3rd cohort. They are:

• 54Gene (Nigeria) – This startup helps to improve drug discovery by researching the genetically diverse African population.
• ScholarX (Nigeria) – an edtech startup focused on education financing to help young Africans access quality education through scholarships, crowdfunding (Village), and e-learning. 
• WellaHealth (Nigeria) – a healthtech startup that runs a marketplace for affordable, high-quality disease care including a malaria testing service
• Zelda Learning (South Africa) – an edtech startup providing free online career guidance for students looking to gain admission into universities and linking them to funding and study opportunities.
• Data Integrated Limited (Kenya) – DIL automates and digitizes SME payments, connecting the underserved to high finance.
• Instadiet.me (Egypt) – Instadiet.me connects patients to certified nutritionists and dietitians online to help them maintain a healthy living
• Kware (Kenya) – Kware provides a rich digital banking platform to established fair lenders such as credit unions or savings and credit cooperatives (SACCOs), with an open API to enable and accelerate their inclusion into the formal financial ecosystem.
• OkHi (Kenya) – OkHi ensures a physical address for the billions in emerging markets without a physical address to “be included.”
• PAPS (Senegal) – A last mile logistics startup with live tracking, intelligent address system and automatic dispatch.
• Swipe2pay (Uganda) – A web and mobile payments solution that empowers users to accept mobile money payments and take their business computing to cloud.
• Tambua Health Inc. (Kenya) – This healthtech startup helps to detect diseases such as Tuberculosis and Pneumonia using a smartphone.
• Voyc.ai (South Africa) – A CX Research Platform that helps companies understand their customers by turning their customer research into insights, profiles, and customer journey maps.

These selected startups would get three weeks all-expense-paid training at Launchpad Accelerator Africa in Lagos. They would also get three months of mentorship, during which they would have access to over 20 teams of Google engineers, access to Silicon Valley experts and top local mentors.