Incubator

In partnership with Africa Startup Challenge, the University of Buea and private venture funding partners, we operate an “un-incubator” which is designed to accelerate the growth of startup companies. It’s well known that there’s a problem with seed capital in Africa and Cameroon is no exception. We’ve spoken with many enterprising young hackers who’ve found that funds were simply unavailable or local investors demanded absurdly high equity stakes in their businesses—at times as high as 50-75%.

In response to this, incubators have begun to spring up around Sub-Saharan Africa, many loosely based on Paul Graham’s popular Y-Combinator model. In this model, small investments of seed capital (between $5000 – $15,000) are made in the early stages of a startup in exchange for a share of equity in the company. The startup founders are provided with a workspace, advice, oversight and between 2-6 months to develop their idea into a functional product or service.

In contrast to this model, Limbe Labs does not necessarily take an equity stake in the companies we fund. Instead, we make use of other investment tools (such as small loans with low interest rates) for startup founders and give them office space, broadband and the support they need to grow their ideas into sustainable businesses. We believe that relationships with the founders of companies we work with are more valuable over the long run than the expectation of returns on our investments.

Limbe Labs reinvests a percentage of its profits from the outsourcing and consulting business units to cover the operating costs of our un-incubator.

Watch our blog for news about startup founders we’re working with, competition announcements and so on.