Village Capital and Moody’s Foundation Announce the Most Investment-Ready Startups from its Innovation for Ecosystem Restoration Africa 2023 Program

Village Capital, with support from Moody’s Foundation, announced Octavia Carbon and Integrated Aerial Precision were peer-selected as the best prepared to receive investment as part of the Innovation for Ecosystem Restoration Africa 2023 program.

The program supported 10 startups developing solutions to tackle land degradation, waste management, forest management, agricultural resilience, sustainable fisheries, and other measures contributing to biodiversity conservation.

Central to this program was the VIRAL framework and peer-selection methodology, which enable startups to better understand where their solutions lie on an investment-readiness scale and, with support from a team of expert mentors, trainers, and the VilCap team, put measures in place to prime their ventures for investment and scale. These models are founded on unbiased evaluations and serve as a learning opportunity for startups to think like investors and learn from each other as they evaluate each other’s team composition, problem & vision, value proposition, product, market, business models, scale, and exit strategies, all within our Abaca web-app, which connects founders to investors, amongst other solutions.

“The VilCap team has been very diligent in creating structured and intuitive tools for analyzing aspects such as market analysis and investment readiness,” shared Duncan Kariuki, the Product Lead at Octavia Carbon, one of this cohort’s peer-selected companies. “This has been a value-adding experience to us as an early-stage company, especially as we seek to raise investment for our operations.”

Based in Kenya, Octavia Carbon designs and builds Direct Air Capture (DAC) technology to reverse climate change and end the fossil fuel age.

Nigeria-based Integrated Aerial Precision, an agricultural drone technology and data analytics service provider that delivers end-to-end solutions to farmers in Nigeria and across Africa was the second peer-selected company for its sustainable model and investment-ready proposition.

The Innovation for Ecosystem Restoration Africa 2023 program was supported by Moody’s Foundation. Watch this video to learn more about our partnership, the program, and our vision within this transformative space.