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The Africa Ecosystem Catalysts Facility has announced $500,000 in new investments across three startups: Built Financial Technologies, GrowForMe, and SAYeTECH. The $4 million pilot investment facility is managed by Village Capital, with funding from FMO and the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO). This brings its total investments in Ghana to $850,000 across five companies advancing SME enablement, agriculture, manufacturing, healthcare, and logistics.
The facility’s latest investees include:
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Built Financial Technologies, a fintech platform helping SMEs digitise operations and access embedded finance through tools for accounting, payroll, invoicing, payments, and inventory management. The company has onboarded more than 18,000 SMEs across Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria and processed over $1.5 billion in invoices, enabling businesses to manage operations more efficiently while improving access to financial services embedded within everyday business workflows.
“Our embedded lending solution has grown by more than 250% over the past two years, so a significant portion of this investment will go straight into helping more SMEs access the capital they need to grow,” said Edward Neequaye, CEO and co-founder at Built Financial Technologies. “What stood out was how VilCap structured the funding around the realities of our business and growth trajectory, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach. That flexibility gives us the support we need to scale sustainably, invest in AI across our platform, and strengthen our go-to-market efforts.”
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SAYeTECH, a manufacturer of smart agricultural machinery designed for African farming conditions, including threshers and grain-cleaning equipment, helps reduce post-harvest losses and labour intensity for smallholder farmers. SAYeTECH’s equipment can process crops up to 40 times faster than manual methods, reducing some harvesting and threshing activities from days to just hours.
“Most traditional financing options available locally are not designed for businesses like ours that are building industrial solutions for agriculture,” said Theodore Ohene-Botchway, co-founder and operations lead at SAYeTECH. “This investment gives us the patient, well-structured support we need to prepare for market entry, strengthen partnerships and distribution, and position the company for sustainable expansion within the ECOWAS region.”
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GrowForMe, an agritech platform connecting farmers, aggregators, investors, and off-takers through services including input financing, warehousing, aggregation, and commodity trading. The investment will support the company’s efforts to strengthen agricultural value chains and expand access to financing and market infrastructure for farming communities. Since launch, GrowForMe has impacted more than 19,000 farmers and facilitated over $3.9 million in commodity trade.
Husein Merchant, investment officer at Village Capital, said, “These startups are building practical, locally grounded solutions to challenges that affect how small businesses and farmers operate every day. What’s notable is that they’re not waiting for the infrastructure to catch up; they’re building it themselves. Getting the right capital behind them is how those solutions scale.”
These investments complete the Africa Ecosystem Catalysts Facility’s initial portfolio in Ghana, with future investments planned in Nigeria and Tanzania.
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