The Pariti founder fellowship is a remote, data guided program that seeks to help founders become investment ready and access funding. To understand why we’re doing this I’ll back it up a bit.
In 2020 we designed a pitch review system that assesses the investment readiness of a startup based on their pitch deck, website and founder information. This assessment broke the company down into hundreds of factors and generated scores (e.g. Team score, Product score, Traction score, etc…). After generating these scores for 1,000 early-stage African startups and tracking their fundraise events in the past two years, we discovered a strong correlation between company scores and their likelihood to raise funding.
So armed with this insight, we designed a fellowship to support committed growth mindset founders improve their fundraising likelihoods by providing personalized guidance. The program will adjust to your individual needs to get you investor-ready.
<aside> 🗓️ Apply to join the next Cohort - Fellowship start date 25th April, 2022
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<aside> 🚫 Deadline to Apply - 1st April, 2022
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Gritty entrepreneurs in Africa who are going to continue to build their startup and find ways to secure funding regardless of what’s thrown their way. They also believe in a positive sum game, so they support other founders on their journey. They’ve made progress in growing their business and are seeking to raise a pre-seed or seed round of an average ticket size of $500k to take their business to the next level.
The fellowship runs for 6 weeks. Imagine a startup bootcamp that helps you achieve years of growth in a short period of time. The focus of the fellowship is guidance to help you secure funding.
We have a team of advisors who will be paired with each founder. Your advisor will help with assessing your startup and drawing a progress map of things you’d need to cover in the program. We understand that every startup needs and challenges are unique, so ideally everyone's map would be different. So if you’re struggling with your financial modeling your advisor could recommend that you schedule a session with the Pariti financial model expert to help you refine this. If it’s legal you need, you’ll be guided on that too. You would go through the area you’d need to improve on with your advisor and at the end of the fellowship you could be certified investment ready. On clearance you will be admitted to pitch on our demo day to selected investors who are curated just for you.
If you get into the fellowship and secure funding with the Pariti community fund you also get investment carry from all the companies invested in by the fund. That’s something exciting to look forward to.
Orientation / Onboarding
This is day one. You would be introduced to the other members of your cohort and the advisors and experts that would be supporting you as well as the program manager. You would be onboarded to the communication platform which you would use for interacting and engaging with everyone in the fellowship.
You would then have your first private session with your advisors to assess your business and map out what you need to do to be certified investment ready.
Campfires
There will be weekly roundtables and fireside chats. Here, you’ll learn from experienced founders, investors advisors, experts and peers. It’ll be a great opportunity to ask questions and learn.
Investment Readiness sessions
Days 2 and 3 would be focused on educating you on things you need to know to improve your fundraising likelihood across your admin, pitch and business.
1:1 Dedicated Advisor sessions
You would have several office hours with your advisor. Ideally you’ll have 2 a week.
Pitch Coaching & Teardown workshops
In the second half of the program, you are encouraged to sign up to pitch coaching and teardown sessions to practice your pitch and obtain feedback from the community.
1:1 Expert Consultation
You’ll have access to a directory of experts cutting across various subject areas such as product, finance, marketing / GTM, design, fundraising and pitching. Depending on the journey map outlined by your advisor you would schedule sessions with these experts.