Askya Investment Partners has opened applications for a new programme built for African AI startups. The firm will work with ten companies over six weeks. None of them will pay cash or give up equity to take part.
Babacar Seck founded the firm in 2024. He built his track record at AXA, where he advised the chairman and chief executive. He then joined Proparco’s $300 million venture capital programme as a founding member. Later, he served as chief executive of Digital Africa.
Seck has backed close to 20 startups across his career. His portfolio includes Moniepoint, Jumia, GoMyCode, and Complete Farmer. According to TechCabal, those investments have returned more than $120 million in profits to investors. In fact, one of the companies also achieved a listing on the New York Stock Exchange.
Seck is careful about how he frames the new programme. He does not call it an accelerator. Accelerators, he explains, focus on fundraising. They train founders to pitch and end with a demo day that works like a sales pitch. Askya wants something different.
Many African startups find demand for their products but still fail to scale. Weak governance, poor hiring, and fragile technology often hold them back. Seck argues this rarely comes from a lack of intelligence or integrity among founders. Instead, it comes from limited exposure to people who have solved these problems before.
Askya’s programme will pair founders with experienced operators and builders. Masterclasses will cover go-to-market strategy, distribution, pricing, governance, and technology. The coaches include people who have built businesses past $50 million in revenue. Some also come from NVIDIA and Google.
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Seck also points to a deeper problem. Africa’s tech ecosystem, he says, does not talk to itself. For example, data centres struggle to find customers even though many insist the continent needs more of them. Meanwhile, global cloud providers report that some African startups spend upwards of $30 million a year on cloud services.
Corporates and governments say they want to work with local startups. However, they often do not know which ones are strong. Universities, on the other hand, train AI engineers who then take jobs abroad, simply because too few local companies operate at scale.
Askya plans to bring telcos, banks, and technology companies into the programme. These corporates will present real business problems to founders during workshop sessions. The firm is also partnering with Deep Learning Indaba, one of the largest AI communities on the continent. This partnership will connect participating startups to a wider network.
Applicants must be African-founded and based on the continent. Founders need to work full-time on their business, have a working product, and already have paying customers. So the programme is not for idea-stage startups. Still, Askya does not require huge revenue either. Companies can apply anywhere up to the pre-Series A stage.
Seck says he weighs four things when he evaluates founders. First, the startup must solve a real problem rather than build a solution nobody needs. Second, its product must be meaningfully better than existing alternatives. Third, the team must have the skills to execute. Finally, founders must show genuine commitment to the problem they are solving.
That last point matters most to Seck. Askya is not chasing founders who want a quick exit. Instead, the firm calls its target companies tech Dangotes, a reference to businesses built to last for decades rather than years.
Seck puts it simply. Building a great business does not take five years. It takes seven, ten, or fifteen.
Askya guarantees a cheque to only one startup in the cohort. The minimum commitment is $200,000, though the firm may invest in more than one company. Still, Askya insists the real value lies elsewhere. Founders gain mentorship, corporate connections, and access to an ecosystem that most early-stage startups cannot reach on their own.
Askya sees this six-week programme as a starting point, not a one-off event. So the firm plans to scale it in future editions. This fits its broader goal: positioning Africa as a producer of AI technology rather than just a consumer of it.
