By Staff Reporter
CKROWD, Africa’s most preferred and premium content streaming platform, has secured $60 000 pre-seed funding and $100 000 export grant investment, respectively from an international angel investor group, as well as backing from the Export Expansion Facility Programme from NESP.
The investment will be used to disrupt the African and Afro-diaspora tech and content creation market and allow African content creators across Africa and the Diaspora to monetise their content and protect their content through structured IP and copyright infrastructure.
The African creative sector possesses the buoyancy and potential to earn 2.5 billion dollars, according to a forecast from global consultancies.
This comes as Africa’s young population and the many untapped opportunities, however, the lack of immediate revenue from produced local content, the disparity in remuneration with some of the Western content creators, the lack of understanding of cultural difference across African countries, and lack of intra-African content integration have impeded real exponential growth for the creative industries in Africa.
The export grant will all allow many storytellers and content creators to profit from revenue opportunities for the platform, while also providing an online portal where original, exclusive varieties of African content are well organized, can be accessed with ease, and consumed as on-demand short videos and live series.
Ckrowd’s receipt of the grant as part of the EEFP is a testament to the importance of the tech entertainment industry and how important is to diversify African digital economies, by capitalising on many verticals, including culture, edutainment, information, and e-sports.
Ckrowd’s groundbreaking use of video technology and monetisation features to securely offer a profit to content creators, also confirms the company’s commitment to promote opportunities to help increase the exports of the creative industry and revenues earned by content creators.
Sensing an opportunity, Kayode and his team launched Ckrowd’s as a technology service to export African local content for global consumption and position the technology to generate foreign exchange, revenue and create job opportunities for African youth.
Kayode Adebayo, Ckrowd’s CEO said: “This is a great win for African people. The Ckrowd platform, similarly to a large arena in the cloud, can broadcast live and short on-demand video content and charges access fees on behalf of the content creators.
“This allows the platform to uniquely function as an EdTech, Media-Tech, and Ad-Tech hybrid. We continue to welcome investments as we continue to grow partnerships across the continent and the African Diaspora.
“Our mission is to tell our stories, shine a light on the beauty of African culture and, lifestyle while delivering economic value to African creators, who have always and are pioneers and trailblazers in showcasing the beauty of our culture and our people. The platform pays 70% of total income on content to creators, which we believe it’s the highest payout on digital content to African Creators.”
Ckrowd plans to use its new capital to double down and expand with new innovative technologies and strategies to get more customers, accelerate growth, and intra-African creative industries. In addition to that, the company plans to hire more talent, especially in product, R&D, and engineering.
