Tecmie Venture Studio

We are a venture lab that builds and backs Web3, AI and SaaS products, and the parent of Daccred, ChatKJV and Afrikathon. Our GitHub organisation calls us a “venture lab, experimenting with AI/ML & Web3 tangents” and has been open since September 2014, which is the earliest date we can put on the studio. I founded it and still run it, working with a small number of founders at a time on products for both consumers and businesses. By our own count the products we have built have reached over 23 million users in Sub-Saharan Africa.

How the studio works

Most of what we ship starts in-house. We run an idea as a research experiment first; if it holds up it becomes a product, and a few products become companies. The explore index shows that path directly. Wyre and Daccred both started in research, and Daccred went on to become its own company.

We run two lanes. One is products we own and operate: Daccred and its credentialing tool Attest, ChatKJV, Workforce and Wootiv. The other is programmes we run for a wider community: Afrikathon, Build Africa and TETA.

There is a fellowship behind the founder side. I was a MEST Fellow in the class of 2020, one of 50 picked from more than 18,000 applicants. We do not publish an investment thesis, a fund size or a cheque size, because we do not run the studio that way.

Portfolio

• Daccred: verifiable credentials on the blockchain, and Attest at attest.so, which won the Public Goods Award at the Solana Radar hackathon and an award from the Stellar Community Fund. Background on /explore/daccred.
• ChatKJV: a scripture chatbot that went viral before GPT-style assistants were common. Background on /explore/chatkjv.
• Afrikathon: our pan-African hackathon, 22 countries and more than 12,000 young people.
• Workforce, Wootiv, Wyre, BBN Poll and ApplyBetter.

The research lane runs alongside all of it: Lab AI, Fundraise AI, Blockchain Polls Market (which became BBN Poll) and Rettiwt.