Today, Kenyan tech startup Wowzi has raised $3.2 million to help African creators monetize their social media profiles across the African continent.
4DX Ventures led the round, with participation from To.org, Golden Palm Investments, LoftyInc Capital, Afropreneur Angels, and Future Africa. Andela co-founder Christina Sass and alumni Jessica Chervin, Justin Ziegler, and Johnny Falla participated as well. The $2 million seed round comes after a previously unannounced $1.2 million pre-seed round, bringing the total amount raised to date to $3.2 million.
Wowzi’s online marketplace democratizes influence, connecting everyday social media users with big brands, enabling nano and micro creators to earn money by spreading brand messages via social media. Wowzi plans to use the new funding to scale partnerships with local, regional, and multinational FMCG companies, Telcos, Banks, Creative Agencies and Development Institutions to create dignified digital economy jobs for African youth.
Wowzi’s self-serve online platform allows brands of any size or industry to create and manage massive, distributed messaging campaigns utilizing thousands of real, everyday customers and fans who get paid to offer authentic endorsements online for the products they already love. Brands like Netflix, Safaricom, Diageo, Coca Cola, P&G and Absa Bank are now designing campaigns involving 5,000 or more people at a time. Through scalable marketing automation, brands can run massive, hyper-targeted campaigns that achieve higher ROI for marketing dollars, consistently delivering better sales leads while increasing conversions.
In its first 18 months of operation, Wowzi has on-boarded 70,000 influencers across Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, primarily through word of mouth.
As a jobs aggregator, the Wowzi platform allows clients to offer multiple job types through the influencer app, so influencers can choose to dial up or down the number of online gigs they accept, and opt in to offline jobs or tasks, or engage in market intelligence gathering jobs, answering polls and surveys for brands, research companies, and development partners.
