We connect Africa's largest institutions to the startup and talent ecosystems solving their hardest problems — across Nigeria, Francophone West Africa and East Africa.
Years of Open Innovation
Startups in Community
Active Regions
The continent's largest institutions are being disrupted. Innovation programmes keep dying. Western frameworks simply don't work here. We built Heave Ventures to fix all three.
Banks, telcos, insurers and energy companies face startup disruption from every direction — yet most have no structured way to engage, co-build, or invest in the solutions threatening them.
Most 'innovation' in Africa stops at the hackathon. Without programme continuity, hub management, and commercial pathways, good ideas never become real businesses.
Western frameworks don't map onto African market realities — informal networks, infrastructure gaps, policy constraints, and trust dynamics require a native approach.
We don't pick one lane. Our model spans the full innovation lifecycle — from strategy to delivery, from digital platforms to physical hubs.
End-to-end design and delivery of corporate innovation sprints, venture builds, and open innovation engagements.
Full management of hackathons, incubation programmes, and acceleration cohorts — from design to demo day.
Design and operation of physical and virtual innovation sandboxes — turning space into productive infrastructure.
Demo days, ecosystem meetups, and marquee innovation events that build community and attract deal flow.
Websites, web apps, and proprietary platforms — including VentureOS and Zimara.org — that power our programmes and our clients'.
Designing and deploying AI tools, workflows, and open innovation technology stacks for institutions and communities. This is how we work — not a feature we added.
Five structured phases — from initial diagnosis to complete capability transfer. We don't template; we design.
Map the institution's innovation maturity, strategic gaps, and ecosystem connectivity. Define what Corporate-Startup Fit looks like for this client.
Architect the programme — open innovation model, pipeline structure, governance framework, and metrics. We don't template; we design.
Stand up the infrastructure — digital platforms and sandboxes, physical hubs, programme workflows, and AI tooling. Execution with zero outsourcing opacity.
Run the programme end-to-end: cohort intake, mentor networks, corporate matchmaking, investor connections, and continuous reporting.
Transfer capability. Train client teams. Leave behind a self-sustaining innovation operation, not a dependency on Heave.
Banks, telcos, FMCG, energy, insurance — institutions that need structured startup engagement and digital innovation.
IFC, AfDB, SMEDAN, CBN and bilateral DFIs seeking deployment infrastructure for MSME and innovation mandates.
Ministries, state agencies, and trade bodies with formal innovation, digitisation, or SME mandate goals.
Multinationals who need local ecosystem intelligence, trusted partnerships, and supplier/distributor development.
Institutions building tech transfer offices, student venture pipelines, and industry-academia collaboration.
End-to-end design and execution of a national youth fintech challenge for a leading Nigerian bank — from brief to demo day.
Design, launch and ongoing operation of a premium co-working and innovation hub in Lagos' tech district.
Most African OI firms have no proprietary software. We built Zimara.org — a live SME creditworthiness engine with its own scoring model and financing pipeline — because real infrastructure requires real technology.
Train. Score. Finance.
Africa's SME Creditworthiness Engine
6 pillars — financial literacy, revenue design, marketing, operations, governance, and access to finance.
Proprietary SME readiness score — forward-looking, lender-trusted, richer than any credit bureau output.
Top graduates access grants, loans, and equity from our DFI, bank, and investor network.
Co-brand, fund the facility, or run a 90-day pilot cohort with your SME base.
The "Open-Innovation is African" framework gives every Heave engagement a proven intellectual backbone. We don't use borrowed Western templates — we wrote the book.
Zimara.org is a live platform with its own scoring model and financing pipeline. Most African OI firms have no IP of their own.
Deep Nigeria roots with active cross-border programming in Francophone West Africa and beyond. We don't map African markets onto foreign models.
Every Heave engagement includes AI-native tooling — programme automation to ecosystem intelligence dashboards. This isn't a feature we're adding; it's how we work.
Leading Nigerian Bank
"Working with Heave Ventures was a paradigm shift. They stripped away the noise and helped us build a structured engagement model with the startup ecosystem — from sourcing to commercial pilot in under 90 days. The result is a repeatable innovation engine we now own."
Ready to design, build, or operate your innovation infrastructure? We'd love to hear from you.
www.heaveventures.com · Yaba, Lagos, Nigeria