Cascador selects 10 Nigerian businesses for latest Scale Up cohort

by Ali Kennedy | Sep 2, 2026 | News

By Chimgozirim Nwokoma

Cascador selects 10 growth-stage Nigerian businesses for its latest Scale Up cohort, with a focus on capital readiness and sustainable growth.

Ten growth-stage businesses have joined Cascador’s latest Scale Up cohort, as the business support platform continues to focus on helping established Nigerian companies overcome the challenges of scaling.

Cascador’s 12-week programme provides selected businesses with training and support across key areas of growth, with participating companies also given the opportunity to pitch for a share of $50,000 in prizes.

The latest cohort was selected from more than 1,000 applications received by Cascador this year. 

The selected businesses operate across sectors, including agriculture, wellness, real estate and energy. The cohort also includes technology-enabled businesses such as Venco, SunFi, EHA Clinics and Beauty Hut Africa.

For Cascador CEO Trish Thomas, the organisation’s decision to focus specifically on growth-stage businesses is driven by the financing gap facing companies across Africa. 

While startups often attract significant attention from investors, businesses that have already demonstrated demand and are looking to scale can still struggle to access the right type of capital.

Thomas says this financing challenge has also influenced how Cascador has evolved its programme. In recent years, the organisation has placed greater emphasis on preparing businesses to become capital-ready, rather than focusing solely on improving their underlying business fundamentals.

“The biggest shift for Cascador in recent years has been a significant focus on capital readiness and not just business fundamentals,” Thomas said.

That focus has extended beyond training. Cascador has established a Catalytic Fund in partnership with Sterling Bank to provide debt financing to qualifying businesses.

According to Thomas, the fund was developed after months of research and conversations with companies Cascador had previously supported. Some of those businesses had gone on to raise debt financing but found that the structure and cost of that capital created additional pressure as they expanded.

“They were put in a position where even though their companies were scaling in local currency, they were really negatively impacted by the debt servicing requirements,” she said.

The financing challenge is particularly important for growth-stage companies, which may require significantly more capital than they did in their early years but may not yet have access to the funding options available to larger businesses.

Beyond access to capital, Cascador is also looking for entrepreneurs who can translate the lessons from the programme into sustainable growth.

While the businesses in the latest cohort span different industries, Thomas notes that the common thread is the founders’ ability to think strategically and apply what they learn to their companies.

The organisation also considers the broader impact of the businesses it supports, including their contribution to job creation and sustainability goals.

Inclusion remains another focus for the programme. Women-led businesses account for 60% of the latest cohort, highlighting Cascador’s efforts to increase the representation of women entrepreneurs within its programmes.

“The next chapter of Nigeria’s entrepreneurial story will be about what happens when proven businesses get the support they need to scale,” said David DeLucia, co-founder of Cascador. “That is the opportunity this cohort brings, where visionaries, innovators and impact-driven leaders can grow their businesses sustainably with lasting economic value.”

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Cascador Picks 10 Nigeria Scale-Ups as Economy Looks Beyond Fintech

by Ali Kennedy | Sep 2, 2026 | News

By Royal Ibeh

Cascador has selected 10 Nigerian growth-stage companies for its 2026 ScaleUp Programme, signalling a growing shift in Nigeria’s entrepreneurial ecosystem towards businesses solving problems in healthcare, agriculture, energy, manufacturing and other parts of the real economy.

The companies were selected from more than 1,000 qualified applications for the 12-week programme, which begins this month. Cascador said the number of qualified applications more than doubled from 2025, suggesting a growing pool of Nigerian businesses that have moved beyond the startup phase and are seeking support to scale.

The selected companies are Venco, SunFi, ColdHubs, EHA Clinics, Beauty Hut Africa, BEYOND Fitness, Ziba Beach Resort, Tulay Africa, Maanj Agric and Finger Chops.

Read also: Where are the banks, the businesses and the buildings owned by women?

Unlike many African startup programmes that concentrate heavily on fintech and technology businesses, the new cohort spans clean energy, food production, healthcare, agriculture, tourism, minerals, wellness, beauty and property technology.

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Cascador partners with Nigeria’s youth ministry to back young founders

by Ali Kennedy | Aug 14, 2026 | News

By Opeyemi Kareem

14th Aug, 2026

Cascador, a Nigeria-focused platform for growth-stage founders, has partnered with the Federal Ministry of Youth Development (FMYD) through the Nigerian Youth Academy (NiYA), a federal digital empowerment platform, to launch a programme to help youth entrepreneurs build stronger businesses. 

The NiYA × Cascador Founders Program will begin with a pilot cohort of 20 early-stage Nigerian founders, eight of whom will receive up to ₦5 million ($3,600) each in non-dilutive funding at the end of the programme. Applications for the program will open on August 19, and interested participants can apply on the NiYA website.

The programme adds to the Nigerian government’s efforts in supporting young entrepreneurs and early-stage businesses. In November 2025, the government’s Investment in Digital and Creative Enterprises (iDICE) programme invested in Ventures Platform’s $64 million first close of its Pan-African fund II.

“For NiYA, training is only one part of the journey. The real value is in helping young people move from learning to enterprise, from ideas to investable businesses, and from potential to sustainable economic participation,” said Ayodele Olawande, Minister of Youth Development. “The partnership with Cascador strengthens that pathway by combining business preparation with access to capital, particularly for young founders who may not yet have the formal structures or financial history that traditional funding often requires.”

The program will run for four weeks and cover business fundamentals, investment readiness and pitch preparation, according to the company. It will be delivered in person in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, and include virtual touchpoints and one-on-one mentorship.   

After completion, the eight top-performing founders will receive an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution designed to help them organise and manage their businesses in addition to the funding at a NiYA/FMYD-organised Pitch Day. The funding is non-dilutive, meaning the founders will not have to give up equity in their businesses in exchange for the capital.   

“NiYA and FMYD have already shown what real commitment to Nigeria’s youth looks like — the platforms, the reach, the ambition to train millions,” said Trish Thomas, CEO of Cascador. “What we’re building together now is the missing piece, a practical bridge from the ideation stage to real capital-readiness. When a Ministry so dedicated to its young people asked Cascador to help build that bridge, it was an easy decision.” 

Over the course of the program, NiYA and FMYD will handle founder sourcing, training and the day-to-day delivery of the programme, while Cascador will help define eligibility criteria, support investment-readiness training, judge the founders’ pitches and provide the funding for the top performers. 

The pilot is part of NiYA’s ambition to train and empower seven million Nigerian youth within two years. All 20 founders who complete the program retain NiYA alumni status and receive priority consideration for future opportunities, according to the academy.

The program builds on Cascador’s existing work supporting Nigerian founders, including through the Cascador ScaleUp, a program for growth-stage entrepreneurs focused on leadership and strategy. Its ScaleUp alumni gain access to the Cascador Catalytic Fund, which the company said deploys up to $5 million annually through a combination of debt and equity investments.

Since 2019, Cascador said it has supported 70 companies that have collectively raised more than $125 million.   

Link to TechCabal Article

Why Africa’s growth-stage companies need more than capital to scale sustainably 

by Ali Kennedy | Jul 24, 2026 | News

July 24, 2026, Op-Ed | By Oyin Solebo

Africa’s startup ecosystem has mastered the art of the launch. Accelerators and incubators have achieved exactly what they were designed to: help founders bring ideas to life, find early traction, and secure that first institutional check. But design has limits. When those same companies are ready to scale, the support that carried them begins to thin. This is the messy middle—and it’s where too many promising companies quietly stall or die. 

As companies move from startup to scaleup, the challenge shifts to building systems that allow a business to grow beyond its founder: robust financial management, structured hiring, institutional governance, and distributed leadership. Scaling without this infrastructure is like accelerating without steering; growth may come, but it is difficult to control or sustain.

Closing this gap means moving from instinct-led execution to structured, scalable growth. In practice, this means stronger financial health, decentralised leadership, good governance, and capital matched to strategy.

Ensuring founders are ready to absorb capital 

Before looking to fundraise, founders must answer a fundamental question: who is actually driving revenue, and is it the right customer? 

Many growth-stage founders can tell you their total customer count. Fewer can articulate which segment is the most valuable: which generates the highest lifetime value, at an acquisition cost the business can sustain? Customer retention tells the real story: strong retention signals something worth scaling. Weakening retention is an early warning that growth is filling a leaking bucket. 

The risk is scaling before this picture is clear: pouring capital into the wrong customer. Getting this right reorients everything that follows.

A company can also be growing, profitable on paper, and still die. Cash cycles—the gap between earning revenue and collecting cash—can pose an existential threat. Rapid scaling worsens this; without continuous working capital modeling, a company risks insolvency despite its growth.

Currency fluctuations also add complexity for companies that often operate across multiple currencies. Founders must develop treasury discipline, mastering conversion timing, reserves, and hedging. They also need fluency in unit economics to ensure growth builds, rather than erodes, enterprise value.

More importantly, on the organisational side of the business, founders need to learn how to delegate. Africa’s most resilient founders have survived on resourcefulness, navigating funding winters, currency crises, thinning talent pools, and unforgiving markets. That scrappiness is a genuine superpower, until it becomes the ceiling. 

Growth-stage founders are rarely taught organisational design or effective delegation. Many become the bottleneck, a key reason why 90% of African startups fail. Securing top talent requires unfamiliar skills: identifying exceptional candidates, selling the vision, and crafting creative compensation packages. Equity, deferred pay, part-time experts, and advisory boards can bridge talent gaps when the salary budget isn’t there yet.

Governance is also a cornerstone for growth and one of the most underleveraged tools in the growth-stage founder’s kit. Early boards often consist of family, friends, and early believers – not through neglect, but because no one had shown them what a growth-stage board should look like or how to evolve it.

The stakes compound with scale. A startup can operate informally early on, but at the growth stage, they face real contractual liability and closer regulatory scrutiny that require higher legal and compliance frameworks.

A board can feel like oversight a founder didn’t ask for. But that framing undersells what good governance actually offers: accountability that sharpens the founder, plus expertise, connections, and counsel a founder couldn’t yet afford to hire.

Aligning capital to strategy

Africa’s funding ecosystem has defaulted to frameworks developed in Western markets – Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) notes and equity raises as the standard instruments of growth. But capital should be chosen with intention, matched to what the business actually needs.

Debt funding hit a record $1.64 billion across the continent in 2025, up 63% year-on-year, suggesting founders are increasingly exploring a broader range of financing options. As more founders and lenders develop the track record and instruments to make debt work in African market conditions, equity should increasingly be reserved for what it is actually designed to fund: risk, not timing. Scaling requires evaluating the full capital stack: balancing equity dilution against debt covenants while exploring strategic partnerships, Development Finance Institutions (DFIs), and revenue-based structures. Catalytic or concessional capital can further bridge the gap to commercial readiness.

An early-stage company with no revenue history, collateral, or track record may have no choice but equity, while a growth-stage company with recurring revenue can hold a fundamentally different credit proposition. The ecosystem must meet founders with capital matched to strategy.

Africa’s founders have proven they can build. Helping them scale will shape far more than individual companies; it will shape African economies. Success will require an ecosystem designed to support founders beyond the early stage,  with the same quality of guidance, resources, and institutional support they received at the start. It is time to build the infrastructure for scale.

___

Oyin Solebo is the COO at Cascador, an Africa-focused platform for growth-stage founders building businesses that make an impact. She also serves as Advisor at Cone Ventures Studio, co-founding and scaling Africa-focused ventures, and as Senior Advisor at Ventures 54. Previously, she was Managing Director of the ARM Labs Lagos Techstars Accelerator, Techstars’ flagship Africa-based programme. 

TECHCABAL Article

How Cascador’s acceleration and funding program differs from YC and others

by Ali Kennedy | Jun 8, 2026 | News

CONDIA

June 8, 2026 | By Benjamin Dada

Cascador, an impact-focused accelerator for growth-stage founders in Africa, announced $5 million in equity and debt funding to seven startups at Pitch Day 2026, which was held on June 3, 2026, in Lagos, Nigeria.

“In just two years, Pitch Day has awarded more than $9M to growth-stage African founders, helping to build a new generation of entrepreneurs equipped to scale transformative businesses,” said Dave DeLucia, Founder of Cascador.

Pitch Day happens at the end of every Cascador ScaleUp program cycle, which spans about 12 weeks. This year’s event brought together more than 300 investors, media representatives, and ecosystem builders for conversations with founders scaling impactful companies across Nigeria. Unlike Y Combinator’s Demo Day, where only the latest batch of startups can pitch, Cascador allows its alumni from other batches to participate. Thereby extending the value of the program beyond the current season, till when the alumni might be ready for scale-up capital. On the flip side, this also means that not every recent batch participant will get to pitch, unlike YC. One of the two equity beneficiaries from the Cascador Pitch Day 2026 event was from another cohort, Stears.

“Back in 2021, I joined Cascador with the intention of learning how to be a better leader…When we pivoted exclusively to financial data in 2023, the Cascador team was there again, supporting us as we learned the B2B ropes. On Wednesday at Pitch Day, what started as an educational opportunity became something more tangible as Cascador invested $450k in equity to back our growth,” said Stears co-founder and CEO, Preston Ideh.

Other acceleration programmes tend to have standard deals, funding type and amount, which can prove sub-optimal for some startups. For instance, the leading global accelerator invests $500,000 for 7% equity in the business. However, Cascador, through its $5M Catalytic Fund, tailors the financing to the needs of the business. The Fund can provide debt, equity, guarantees, and collateral support in partnership with Sterling Bank. Of the seven 2026 fund recipients, two got equity deals: Stears (Preston Ideh) with $450,000 and Indigenius AI (Yinka Iyinolakan) with $250,000, while the remaining five got debt funding deals of ₦2.5 billion ($1.7M) to Agriarche (Deina Mayaki), ₦2.5 billion ($1.4M) to Koolboks (Deborah Gael), ₦1.8 billion ($1.2M) to Powerstove (Okey Esse), ₦500 million ($357k) to First Electric (Daniel Komolafe), and ₦200M ($142K) to Fortics (Femi Oyewole).

Deina Mayaki of Agriarche, the largest funding recipient from the 2026 Catalytic Fund, shared her experience, “Cascador’s ScaleUp program built upon my team’s ability to translate learning into action by helping us refine our message and market position, adjust our funding strategy, and adapt without defensiveness. The Catalytic Fund due diligence team assessed Agriarche’s financial strength, resourcefulness, and track record of success, and they rewarded our high-potential for scale and impact today by awarding a new ₦2.5B credit facility to power our growth.”

Not every startup that begins an acceleration programme can complete it, as the realities of running a business and the intensity of the programme conflict. In 2025, eleven startups began the Cascador ScaleUp Program, but one, Chekkit, dropped.

Application for Cascador’s 2026 ScaleUp is still open

Since 2019, it has supported 70 companies that have collectively raised more than $125 million. All eyes are now set on the programme’s next cohort. “We’re now looking for the next cohort of exceptional founders to join our 2026 ScaleUp program and hope to see them on stage at the next Pitch Day,” DeLucia said.

Applications for the 2026 ScaleUp Program are open until June 15, 2026, as pre-program preparations begin on August 17, 2026. The programme covers logistics for selected founders, offers a $5,000 stipend upon successful completion, and $50,000 in pitch prizes awarded at Pitch Day.

The Judges for the Pitch Day prizes were Iyin ‘E’ Aboyeji of Future Africa and Nneke Eze of Vested World, and Daniel Adeoye of Verod Capital Management. Speaking about his experience with Cascador, Adeoye said, “Two years judging Pitch Day, plus a season as faculty for the Cascador ScaleUp program, taught me something the term sheets never capture: capital readiness, not capital, is what turns funding into scale. The founders on stage today walk away with customer pipelines, team training, mentorship, and bespoke support, the connective tissue that lets them multiply what they raise. This is not an accelerator. It is ecosystem architecture, and these founders are its proof.”

In addition to investment capital, two entrepreneurs received recognition for innovation and pitch quality. The Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA) Prize for Innovation awarded $10,000 to Indigenius AI, while Koolboks received $10,000 for the Best Pitch, awarded by the panel of judges.

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