Emurgo Africa and Kepple Africa Ventures establish JV
Emurgo Africa, an Africa-focused entity of Emurgo Middle East and Africa, and Kepple Africa Ventures, a pan-African venture capital firm, announced the establishment of a business joint venture, Emurgo Kepple Ventures, to further accelerate its strategic partnership investing in African Web3 businesses.
Emurgo Africa and Kepple signed an MoU in September 2022 to jointly spearhead Web3 investment opportunities, including token investments in Africa. Despite recent challenges such as the crypto winter and regulatory setbacks, Emurgo Kepple Ventures believes there is a long-term fundamental need for blockchain-based solutions in Africa.
While there has been wide adoption of cryptocurrencies, active trading at various crypto exchanges, and growing money transfer services through stablecoins, startups are now creating diverse real use cases from Africa using blockchain technology and smart contracts.
For example, land title registry has not been properly functioning under the existing centralised system in many African countries. This has been a significant bottleneck in the growth of the real estate and property markets. To solve this issue, Web3 startups are creating decentralised registry systems to ensure transparent and immutable transactions. Another Web3 use case is crop insurance for farmers. Under the current insurance system, trigger events such as flooding or droughts have to be certified manually, causing errors and delays to cover insurance claims. Using smart contracts combined with satellite, climate, and ecological data, payouts to farmers can now be automated based on predetermined parameters.
The mission of Emurgo Kepple Ventures is to create a better world by empowering businesses and people with a more transparent and efficient system backed by products and services leveraging blockchain-based Web3 technologies. Emurgo Kepple Ventures aims to accelerate this transformation by creating more collaboration and synergies between Web2 and Web3 startups, and by catalysing the capital flow from conventional businesses and financial institutions to Web3 startups in Africa.
Emurgo Kepple Ventures will be led by current Emurgo MEA co-CEO Yosuke Yoshida who will serve as CEO.