Back in the dot-com bubble, my second-ever startup filed the paperwork to go public, but the NASDAQ topped off before we were able to complete that process. It’s long been a life goal to be part of a company to finish that process. That goal was not only achieved today, but by Africa Eats, my eighth startup. I’m now CEO of a public company. 🙂
Africa Eats is an investment company focused on lowering hunger and poverty in Africa by investing in companies that are building out the food & ag supply chain. In other words, a for-profit solution to the top two UN SDGs, that actually solves those issues by working with fast-growing, profitable African SMEs that increase the income of smallholder farmers and lower post-harvest losses.
You can buy (and sell) shares of Africa Eats on the Stock Exchange of Mauritius (SEM) under the symbol EATS. If you don’t have a brokerage account in Mauritius, you can buy (and sell) these shares using the new app from tuesday.africa.
But wait… there is more…
We didn’t just list Africa Eats today, we also worked with the SEM to create the SEM X, a new segment on their official stock exchange board for fast-growing, profitable SMEs, and we listed two such companies on that segment today too: Ziweto (ZWTO) and Paniel Meat Processing (ELIT, trading under the name Elite Meat).
Unsurprisingly, these are two of the successful “bizi” within Africa Eats.
The plan is to continue adding more bizi to the stock exchange each year, slowing growing the SEM to be the go-to stock exchange for funding successful SMEs across the whole African continent.
We chose the SEM for this project because that stock market has a long history of listing companies outside of their home country, and because the SEM allows listings to be in US dollars (USD).
And we chose the SEM because they embrace innovation. Two other launches today included (a) the first weekly closing auction (2:00-2:30pm GMT+4) to concentrate the orders of these mico-cap listings, and (b) Tuesday Markets as the first registered equity market maker in SEM history, ensuring the liquidity of these shares.
