The world’s first venture studio, Purple Elephant Ventures (PEV), based in Kenya and focused on the tourism industry, has closed a pre-seed round of $1 million. With the money, the venture studio hopes to launch three startups at least once annually.
The venture studio, which was established by Ben Peterson, Jan Van der de Willebois, and Mikul Shah, claims that the majority of its startups are scalable, tech-first solutions that expedite crucial efforts to increase the resilience and sustainability of Africa’s tourism sector in the face of climate change.
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The goal of PEV is to guide African tourism toward a more environmentally friendly future. The third-largest sector of the African economy, which employs millions of people throughout the continent and suffered greatly from the COVID pandemic, is tourism, which is also particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
Fede Pirzio-Biroli, the founder of Playfair Capital, Ian McCaig, the former CEO of lastminute.com and a board member of M-Kopa, Anthony Rock, the president of Rock Impact Capital, The Untours Foundation, Rich Hoops, executive director at Impact Capital, Jim Villanueva, managing director of Global Partnerships Social Venture Fund, and Helena Riese Harstad, co-founder of PEV, all participated in the pre-seed.
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Ben Peterson, CEO of Purple Elephant Ventures, commented on the raise by saying, “We’re sitting on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to modernize a major continental industry while driving real climate action victories. African economies rely heavily on tourism, but sadly, there have only been a few startups that have attempted to modernize this largely offline sector. We came to the conclusion that the sector could benefit from dozens of startups, each tackling a different set of significant problems, so we created PEV.
PEV has established two startups so far. The first is Nomad Africa, a content-to-commerce company that educates the African continent’s domestic travel market about eco-friendly and regional travel options. The other is Elephant Bookings, a SaaS company that assists African hospitality providers in going online to increase efficiency.