NAIROBI’S DIGITAL DISRUPTORS

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Solutions For Africa

WORDS RICHARD HOLMES

WHERE OTHERS SEE PROBLEMS, Ben Peterson sees opportunity. And with two decades of experience working with startup ventures across the continent, it’s now Africa’s tourism industry that he sees as ripe for innovation.

With an MSc from the London School of Economics, Ben is a former senior partner at AHL Venture Partners, one of Africa’s largest early-stage investors. He saw many problems begging for solutions, and not enough start-ups to find them.

“There are literally a handful of start-ups in the third-largest sector on the continent, which is tourism,” says Ben. “So there’s clearly a mismatch between the start-up community and this important sector.”

Cue the formation of Purple Elephant Ventures (PEV) in January 2020. “Of course, that was the best time to start a business in tourism,” he says wryly. But he and co-founder Jan van der Does de Willebois, a start-up funder and investment banker, bided their time, and by August 2022 they’d raised some seed funding. Nairobi-based PEV is, by design, a venture studio. “We design and build start-ups in-house, from scratch. We are builders. We are founders. At the moment we start three or four businesses in the tourism sector each year,” says Ben.

For PEV, creating a start-up is a five-step process, from identifying the problems facing the tourism industry to market research, recruiting a co-founder and competitor analysis. Crucially, all the startups in the PEV stable are built on a Venn diagram of climate change, sustainability and technology.

“We’re not building bricks-and-mortar businesses, and our start-ups are driving the tourism industry towards a greener future. Sustainability and climate change are parts of the way we look at every business opportunity,” says Ben. “We start with a problem – every good startup provides a solution to a problem. And the more acute or bigger the problem, the more successful the start-up is.”

Alongside Nomad Africa, a flagship media venture with a symbiotic tourism offering, the current focus of PEV is to help African hospitality businesses control, manage and monetise their clients through a dedicated digital platform they’ve dubbed Elephant Bookings.

While still in development and testing with a handful of pilot clients, Ben sees the platform as a full SaaS (Software as a Service) business that can manage the needs of a hospitality operation.

“It’s about building digital infrastructure to support every aspect of a lodge’s needs, allowing them to maximise efficiencies and revenue and really own their end customer,” says Ben. “It’s creating an endto-end digital platform that’s simple and powerful, from website to booking.”

Kijani – or ‘green’ in kiSwahili – is another PEV business offering a solution to a headache faced across the East African tourism industry: sourcing eco-friendly products and amenities in an age of heightened impact awareness.

“With a focus on sustainable and local products, Kijani provides everything a hotel or lodge needs to operate within a carbonneutral supply chain,” explains Ben.

But while he’s quick to enthuse about these successful start-ups, he’s just as open about the handful that have been launched, only to fail. What seems to set PEV apart is its ability to kill off a venture as quickly as it creates one in what Ben calls a “Darwinian system of start-ups”.

“One mistake often made with start-ups is that people think with their hearts and can’t always see the problems,” explains Ben. “Because we are a venture studio, we can be dispassionate about the opportunities, and we are looking for the problems from day one. If a business doesn’t perform, we move on.”

And there’s no shortage of opportunities. From destination management to linking carbon markets with tourism, PEV has a long list of sectors ripe for innovation. ■

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