Your Startup Funding Applications — Written, Reviewed, and Submitted
A single accelerator application takes a founder between four and ten hours. Most founders abandon the second one. We have spent four years inside these forms, and startups we have worked alongside have raised more than $600 million across the African continent.
We did not build this by guessing at what investors want. We asked them. Our question banks — and the criteria we write against — came from the investors who read these applications. You can hand the entire process to us, run it yourself inside our workspace, or buy exactly one application and see what happens.
We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or partnered with these programs. Founders applying to them use our tools.
It Was Never Your Idea. It Was Always the Process.
Founders lose funding rounds long before an investor reads a word of their deck. They lose them in a browser tab at 1am, staring at question seven of nineteen, with no idea what a good answer even looks like. We have sat with hundreds of founders across Nairobi, Lagos, Accra, Kigali, Cairo, and Cape Town. The same three walls come up every single time.
The Time Tax
An accelerator application is not a form. It is an essay collection. A first application realistically consumes four to ten hours of focused work — the scarcest thing a founder has. So the first gets done, the second gets started, the third never opens. Founders who apply to one program have roughly a one-in-fifty chance. The bottleneck is not ambition. It is hours.
You Are Writing Blind
The question on the form is not the question being asked. When Baobab asks “what is your traction to date?”, the partner is checking whether your growth rate is accelerating, whether revenue is contracted or one-off, and whether your numbers reconcile with the team size you claimed. None of that is on the form. A guessed answer reads exactly like a guessed answer.
One Story, Fifty Formats
Your company has one truth. But Baobab asks for it in 200 words, Antler as a video, Novastar as a theory of change, and a GSMA grant as a logframe with measurable outcomes and a risk register. You are not writing fifteen applications — you are translating one story into fifteen dialects, each time from a blank page. That work is mechanical. It should not cost you your evenings.
We Got the Questions From the Investors
Most application tools scrape the public form and feed the visible questions to a language model. You get a fluent answer to the surface question. It reads well. It tells the partner nothing.
We went the other direction. Over four years we sat down with investment committee members, fund partners, accelerator programme managers, and grant assessors across the continent and asked them one question: “When you read this answer, what are you actually looking for?”
What came back was the hidden layer. Not the question, but the scoring rubric behind it. What earns a yes. What quietly earns a no. Which numbers get checked against which. Those conversations are what our system is built on.
We know the real question
Every entry in our question bank carries the assessor’s framing alongside the public wording. Your draft is built to answer the question behind the question.
We write against known criteria
Answers are structured around what investors told us qualifies as a strong response — the evidence they expect, the order they expect it in, and the specificity threshold below which they stop reading.
We flag what will get you rejected
If your deck has no defensible market size, our system does not invent one. It tells you, before you submit, that this is the answer that will lose you the application.
None of this is a guarantee. Writing to an investor’s stated criteria dramatically improves how your application reads. It does not manufacture traction you do not have, and no partner is bound by what they told us over coffee. What we can say is that your answer will be built against a real rubric instead of a guess.
Fifteen Years of Raising Capital, Encoded Into a Product
Three Ways to Get Your Applications Done
We removed our free tier. Deliberately. Free users do not submit applications — they browse, they bookmark, they disappear. Every founder who has cleared a stage with us paid something first. So the entry point is honest and the price is low. Pick the level of help you actually need.
One program. One complete draft. No commitment.
- Complete first-draft answers for every question in one program
- Written against the assessor’s criteria, not the public form
- Built from your actual deck content — no invented figures
- Export to clipboard, Google Doc, or PDF — yours to keep
Unlimited applications. Every supported program. Full access to the tools.
- Unlimited application drafts across every supported program
- Persistent deck context — one upload, every application
- Answer library, deadline tracker, and revision history
- Pitch deck review with written feedback from someone who has raised
- Curated investor shortlist matched to your stage, sector & geography
We do the work. You get on one call and then get back to building.
- A structured discovery call — traction, unit economics, founding story
- We select or confirm the programs against our funding index
- Both applications written end to end — finished, argued, evidence-backed
- Supporting assets: rebuilt deck, explainer video, one-pagers
- You approve, we press send — and we track what happens next
From Blank Page to Submitted
If you are using the tools ($10 or $50), the question banks are already mapped, with the assessor’s framing attached to each question. Your job is to review and submit.
Book the call (30–45 min of hard questions). We go away and work — typically five to seven business days for both applications plus assets. You review, with one round of revisions included. We submit and track, with confirmation of both submissions and a calendar of what happens next.
Upload your pitch deck, once
PDF or PPTX. We extract problem, solution, traction, team, market data, and business model. If your deck is thin, our extraction tells you exactly where — the most useful deck feedback most founders will ever receive.
Open any supported program
Question banks are already mapped, with the assessor’s framing attached to each question. Select the program and the workspace loads every question, pre-drafted.
Review, polish, submit
You stay in control. Read each draft, correct the numbers, cut the sentences that do not sound like you, keep the ones that do. Most founders finish a full application in one focused session.
Run applications in parallel
Because your context is saved, the second program takes minutes. Founders routinely run Baobab, Antler, Novastar, and HOAQ simultaneously. That is the entire point.
$600 Million, Documented
Startups we have worked alongside have raised more than $600 million across the African continent over the last four years. We are not asking you to take that on faith. The full report — companies, timeframes, instruments, and an explicit statement of what our role was and was not in each case — is published in full. We publish it because most claims like this one are unverifiable by design. Ours is not.
A real founder. A real result.
“After 16 years of building, this is the first time that Soko Guide has been accepted for anything. Not a competition. Not a stage. Nothing — and then we just did this application in a few hours.”
What the Investors Told Us
The patterns that separate an application that gets read from one that gets skimmed.
Specificity beats polish, every single time
The most common failure mode is not bad writing. It is vague writing. Assessors are reading for evidence that you understand your own business at a granularity nobody could fake. Every draft we produce forces numbers onto the page.
Traction is a story about slope, not size
Early-stage investors do not expect big numbers. They expect a curve. A founder with $4,000/month growing 22% month over month is a vastly more interesting application than one with $40,000 flat for a year. Most applications bury the slope. Ours lead with it.
The team question is the real question
Almost every application asks some version of why you? Founders answer with credentials. Assessors are asking about founder-market fit — the non-obvious reason this specific person cannot stop thinking about this specific problem. That answer takes excavation, which is what our discovery call is for.
Applications are a portfolio, not a lottery ticket
Acceptance rates at top African accelerators sit in the low single digits. This is not a verdict on your company — it is arithmetic. Fifteen applications at 3% gives you a materially different outcome than one at 3%. Remove the hundred-hour constraint and the strategy becomes obvious.
Eligibility kills more applications than quality does
An uncomfortable number of founders spend eight hours applying to a fund that does not invest in their country, their stage, or their sector. Before we write a word, we check eligibility. It is the least glamorous thing we do and it saves the most time.
30+ Pre-Mapped Question Banks
We maintain and update the question banks for the programs founders actually apply to. When a program changes its form, we update within days. We add roughly four new question banks every month, prioritised by founder requests.
These are programs our founders apply to. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or in partnership with any of them, and no program listed has reviewed or approved this page. Do not see your program? Tell us — we will map it.
Simple. Low. No Subscription Trap.
We charge once. No recurring fee, no free tier, no cancellation flow to navigate at 11pm.
| Single Application | Self-Serve Workspace | Done-For-You | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $10one application | $50full access | $250two applications |
| Investor-sourced criteria | |||
| Pre-drafted answers | 1 program | Unlimited | We write them |
| Deck context saved | — | ||
| Answer library | — | ||
| Deadline tracker | — | ||
| Pitch deck review | — | New deck built | |
| Investor shortlist | — | Matched & vetted | |
| Discovery call | — | — | |
| Explainer video | — | — | |
| We submit for you | — | — | |
| Support | — | Priority email | 1:1 throughout |
One payment. No subscription. No equity. No success fee.
Questions we hear every time.
Straight answers, including the ones we would rather not have to give.
We would rather lose the sale than take the wrong founder’s money.
Not for you if you have no product, no users, no revenue, and no evidence of anything beyond an idea. No application, however well written, fixes that — and we will tell you so on the call rather than sell you a $250 package.
Not for you if you want a guarantee. There is not one.
Not for you if you want someone to invent your traction. We work exclusively from what is true. If your numbers are small, we present them honestly and let the slope do the arguing.
Stop opening a blank page at midnight.
The founders who get funded are not the ones with the best ideas. They are the ones who submitted — and who knew what the question was really asking. Upload your deck and get your first draft today, or hand the whole thing to us.
No subscription. No free tier. No equity. Just the applications, done.