Sam Gichuru
Start-up accelerator Nailab, short for Nairobi Incubation Lab, recently rebranded. We talked to Nailab’s CEO and co-founder to find out more about the rebranding and their plans for the future.
Why rebrand?
This is in line with Nailab’s new strategic direction where we are focused to not only grow entrepreneurs that have solutions that will impact the local market, but those that will also hugely have a global impact and clearly map Kenya as a lead tech innovation hub in Africa.
What has changed as far as how Nailab operates?
Nailab has increased its members of staff to align the internal resources with the new strategy. The Nailab is working to refine the services it offers to make them better and also include new dockets. The incubation Manage, Zack Mukewa, joined the team in February to spearhead the team’s new strategic direction and grow Nailab’s Incubation and business development docket.
What are Nailab’s plans for 2014 and going forward?
The incubator seeks to expand its reach by targeting more entrepreneurs from other urban centers within different counties to enable the country have equal opportunity growth in the IT sector. This will be done in collaboration with universities and other IT centres that will provide the knack for tech entreprenueral growth.
What is your view on the Kenyan start-up landscape? Can anything be improved?
The start-up landscape in Kenya has come a long way and day after day, we are seeing an increase in innovations that will revolutionaries this country in different verticals. This can only mean one thing, the youth and entreprenuers in Kenya are hungry and are striving for the best
We need to see more investors come in to support this growing enterprises. We also need more market strategic partners to help create the necessary uptake of the products and increase the market reach. The government also has a major role to play in creating and enabling business environment for startups, this could extend to providing specific grants to seed companies & adopting local solutions, gokibali.com is a good example of government adoption of local tech.
What are some of Nailab’s achievements?
1. Over 30 start ups have successfully gone through our business incubation program
2. We won a government contract in 2013 worth $1.6million to help map out the possibility of setting up incubation centers through out the country.
3. We partnered with Ideasafrica.com, an aggregation platform for entrepreneurs across Africa, to host the pilot virtual incubation program from the month of October with currently over 750 entrepreneurs using the platform to network with fellow entrepreneurs across Africa.
4. We have fostered partnerships with various Universities to discuss the potential for partnerships in setting up campus incubators i.e. Inoorero and JKUAT.
5. We held our first 2 day hackathon outreach program out of Nairobi in collaboration with JKUAT Mombasa in the month of October 2013. The event saw over 150 entrepreneurs and IT students attend the forum in which they were tasked with formulating and developing different business ideas. A total of 15 ideas were developed and the 3 winning ideas were taken into the virtual incubation program.