Dropifi, a startup whose smart widget allows companies to better analyze messages from their customers, just turned a trip to the Global Entrepreneurship Congress in Rio into a slot with one of the most successful and well-known accelerators in the world. The promising firm from Ghana was recently tapped by Dave McClure, the founder of 500 Startups, to join its sixth class—becoming the first African startup to be selected for the program.
“Very few seed investors in Silicon Valley will put money into markets as early as Africa, but we think talent exists in every corner of the globe,” said McClure. “Dropifi has a killer team and a promising product with global reach. The fact that they hail from Ghana makes it even cooler.”
Dropifi’s cofounders met and pitched McClure after winning an all-expenses-paid trip to Rio de Janeiro to participate as an official delegate in the Congress as the grand prize of Global Entrepreneurship Week’s Startup Open competition.
The Mountain View-based accelerator experiments with early-stage startup formulas in providing a mix of funding, mentorship and support services to help entrepreneurs scale fast or fail fast. Batch 6, as the new 500 Startups class is called, has a distinct international flavor with 22 of the 28 companies coming from outside the U.S.
The founding team traces its roots to a Startup Weekend event in Accra where they developed the idea for Dropifi during Global Entrepreneurship Week and launched in November 2011. Less than one year later, they bested 400 startups from 50 countries in the Startup Open—being named as the most promising young startup and winning the trip to Brazil.
“Being the first African startup to join a leading U.S. accelerator validates our idea and serves as a springboard for us to take giant leaps into helping businesses better interact with customers,” saidDavid Osei, co-founder and CEO of Dropifi, “We also see it as an inspiration for young African entrepreneurs and a signpost that Africa is geared up to be the next economic frontier.”
Since its launch on WordPress and Shopify late in 2012, the download of Dropifi has multiplied. There have been more than 8,000 downloads on WordPress and over 900 Shopify stores are using the widget to collect and analyze their incoming messages and leads.
“With this tool, companies generate more business leads, make better business decisions, offer a more personalized and better customer service experience, save time, increase productivity and boost their ROI,” Osei said.
In addition to recognition from Global Entrepreneurship Week and 500 Startups, Dropifi has also been featured by Forbes as “one of the top 20 tech startups in Africa” and has enjoyed positive coverage from prominent media outlets including TechCrunch, The Huffington Post, Yahoo Finance and CNBC.