Developing countries are full of start-ups with inspiring ideas. With Seedstars, Alisée de Tonnac is creating the links required abroad to get promising business models off the ground. As a member of the Innosuisse Innovation Council until the end of 2023, she shares with us three particularly impactful entrepreneurial stories and provides some tips for success for Swiss entrepreneurs.

«When we met Gibran Huzaifah in 2013, he had an idea: to harness technology to enhance his fish farm in Indonesia, the world’s second largest aquaculture market. Using the Internet of Things (IoT), his system makes it possible to automate the feeding of fish and prawns in fish farms, a task which is traditionally carried out by hand and which accounts for up to 80% of production costs. In this country with a population of more than 270 million people, and where labour is cheap, Gibran faces an enormous challenge: convincing people that new technologies can make a business more productive and profitable. Being able to count on a solid network of peers, benefiting from advice and increased visibility, as well as the credibility gained through the initial partnerships, have all been crucial to the start-up’s successful trajectory. Ten years later, eFishery is valued at more than one billion dollars and has just raised 200 million from renowned investors such as Temasek and Softbank.»

«Although small in terms of the size of its domestic market, Rwanda is nonetheless a vibrant ecosystem, and a real gateway to the African continent for start-ups. Thanks to public investment, particularly in digital infrastructure and education, a prolific pipeline of talent has emerged, on a par with the dynamism of countries such as Kenya and South Africa.

The ambitions of these Rwandan start-ups have quickly spread beyond national borders, and a number of thematic summits dedicated to entrepreneurship are bringing people together across the continent, similar to what is happening in Europe. It was in Kigali that we first met Moses Mukundi. The Kenyan launched Eden Care in 2021, a digital health insurance that uses artificial intelligence to revolutionise a sector that is in dire need of change. Moses’ ambition: to provide hundreds of millions of people in Africa with access to affordable insurance.»

«In Mexico, fewer than one in ten people dares to seek legal advice, primarily out of fear of the costs involved. This is what motivated brothers Emiliano and Julián Ruiz to found ConfiAbogado in 2020, a kind of virtual legal assistant. The service is aimed at people on low and middle incomes. They are frequently faced with disputes and often excluded from legal advice, which in Latin America is often only accessible by wealthy individuals or large companies. On an online platform, the user describes their problem, and the system then draws on a network of certified lawyers and searches through more than 100,000 options in order to propose the best strategy and generate the appropriate legal documents automatically. This start-up has great potential for acceleration, and also illustrates the strength of innovation in a region of the world that has long been the preserve of the United States when it comes to making investments there. But all of this is changing, little by little, as Europe turns its gaze towards the South American continent, and vice-versa.»

1. The entrepreneurial adventure does not necessarily have to be a lonely one, so head to the hubs to talk to other people who share in the hectic day-to-day lives of entrepreneurs.
2. Try your luck in incubators, not only for the support they provide, but also for the visibility they give your business through media exposure, which will be useful when it comes to attracting talent and investors.
3. Think big: your technology must be capable of being deployed on a large scale, and of going international.