Excitement, as YC comes to town

Nigeria’s quest of becoming a hotbed for technological talent looks set to garner more momentum with US-based start-up accelerators, Y Combinator, set to embark on a tour of the country’s tech capital, Lagos, starting from September 23 to 28, 2016.

The visit of YC, renowned as the world’s foremost start-up incubator, having provided seed funding for thousands of establishments that have gone on to become household names such as Dropbox, Airbnb, Reddit, Weebly and Stripe, is coming on the heels of the recent visit of Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, to Nigeria.

The tour, which kicks off on Friday, September 23, at the Landmark Event Centre, will have in attendance YC’s CEO, Michael Seibel, and one of the outfit’s partners, Qasar Younis.

Seibel, before his recent appointment as CEO of the California-based start-up accelerator, was the co-founder of Justin.tv and CEO of SocialCam, while Younis, before taking up the position of partner at YC, was the founder of Talkbin, a company recently acquired by Google.

During their weeklong visit, they will meet and share their knowledge and experience with technology entrepreneurs from across Nigeria with the intention of finding and funding the next big tech start-up at an event to be hosted by Ingressive, an investment group that connects Africa’s top founders with Silicon Valley’s capital and expertise.

“We want to fund the best start-ups from around the world,” said Younis. “We’ve met some very talented founders from Africa, and we can’t wait to meet more founders in Lagos to see how we can help this start-up community.”