(Part 1 here)

I’ve argued before, alongside others, that the main inhibitor of ubiquitous and perpetual internet connectivity at a global level isn’t a technology problem, it’s a business model problem. Mostly the tech exists to put the signal everywhere. What we overlook when we say this is, that while that is true, it’s unsavory to point out that many of “those users” are not valuable – that the population covered won’t make a good return on business investment. So, even if you covered the initial cost of the equipment outlay in those areas with subsidized government funds, without a proper business model to support the ongoing operations of running the network, then the ROI would be weak and maybe even negative.

A low cost tower set up in rural Africa

The unspoken technology issue

Many of the incumbent ISPs and mobile operators have sunk too many resources into legacy technology, and then subsequently outsourced their technical capacity and platform knowledge to foreign firms. This leaves them in an unfavorable position when it comes to new technology that would decrease the cost of rollout by up to 90%, or of taking advantage of how software is changing the way networks work. Due to heavy GSM investment, the industry thinks it best to switch those from 2G/EDGE to 3G. This misses the mark, though. It’s iterative change driven by sunk costs, ignoring the fact that we’re moving to a data-only network world. GSM is a dead man walking. IP networks are the future.

It’s not just me saying this. Two years ago Deloitte was saying,

“African MNOs should create business models around smartphone users and brace for the rise of the data exclusives and data centric phone users.”

This then provides the opportunity. This is the time to bring new networks without legacy business or technology paradigms, and the ability to apply web-scale economics to the network itself, backstopped by new open software stacks and business models that don’t rely solely on end-user payment.

Fortunately, at BRCK we’ve been able to find great investors and strategic partners who see this bigger picture and understand the investments needed to make change happen in this connectivity industry of ours. BRCK, alongside some other firms, are on the forefront of changes happening across all types of data pipes, at the infrastructure level all the way through to the retail side – for both people and things. And as we start running the numbers it becomes increasingly clear just how big of an opportunity this actually represents. It only helps that many incumbents are stuck in aged technology stacks and legacy business models, so the window for positive change is here and profits are substantial.

East Africa Railways train

A new railroad

I tend to think of what we do in the connectivity space as similar to our forebearers building railroads, making it easier, faster, and more efficient to move data and connect far-flung parts of the world. The 1990s brought us the rebels in the form of scrappy upstart mobile operators and ISPs, they were real cowboys and renegades then! Inspiring leaders, courageously trying everything from pre-paid credit models in Africa, to thinking of mobile credit as cash, to digging the first fibre cables into the hard parts of the continent. Regrettably, these cowboys have handed the reins over to our modern day robber barons, sitting fat and happy on their oligopolies (or monopolies), and making damn sure that no one else has a chance to build something better if they can help it.

I like to think that at BRCK we are building the new connectivity railroads. The tip of the spear for us is unlicensed spectrum, where we take advantage of the ability to roll out public WiFi hotspots without much in the way of regulatory or political hurdles. We layer this with a free consumer business model, so that anyone who can get that signal can connect and take advantage of the whole internet. The underlying economics of the Moja platform are built around the idea of a digital economy. Businesses create engagement tasks that users can complete to earn value within the system. Users then spend their value on faster connectivity, premium content, or additional services. The flow of value into and out of the Moja platform creates the monetary value necessary to profitably run the network.

This is just the BRCK model, though, and as I sit on some global boards and in meetings, I hear of the others trying their new models as well. New technology stacks, driven primarily by open source software (and some key open source hardware plays), are a big part of the significant decrease in the cost profile (both CapEx and OpEx). But again, the business models… this is where we see the real changes coming and I’m excited to have a front row seat.

As these new railroads are built, by us and others, there lies such great opportunity for economic growth, social development, and business profit.

As with most CEOs of younger companies, I find myself on the investment raising treadmill. Doing so for a company focused on internet connectivity in frontier markets provides an extra layer of complexity, since it’s not as sexy of a proposition as a new app for ecommerce, agtech, fintech, etc might be. Those are easier to invest in since you’re playing with a world of software, not any hardware or infrastructure to muddy your hands with. Unfortunately, in my BRCK world, we have to deal with atoms, not just bits and bytes (though we do those too). Which is why many of my conversations find me explaining why connectivity is critical – thus this post.

What I find interesting is that everyone wants to benefit from a basic underlying availability of connectivity, but few understand what it is or why it is so important. If you’re with me at a public event, I’ll eventually spout off something along the lines of, “you can’t have a 21st century economy without power and connectivity.” This is my simplified way of stating that for any industry to be meaningful on the world stage (or even their own country stage), they need the ability to move data. If power and connectivity are the foundation, then the aforementioned ecommerce, agtech, fintech, and others are all pillars that stand on that foundation.

Economic growth

I’ve written before on how smartphone penetration has reached critical mass and proceeds on a noteworthy trajectory across Africa and other frontier markets. Africa, coming from a largely 2g/Edge based on old legacy GSM technology will have some of the highest growth rates in mobile data subscriptions globally, driven by chat apps and mobile video, as we transition to data-only networks. In 2022, there will be eleven times more mobile data traffic in Central and Eastern Europe and Middle East and Africa (Ericsson 2017).

Mobile subscriptions (global)

• 250M smartphone subscribers in 2016
• 770M by 2022 (Y-o-Y growth of 30%) (Ericsson 2017)
• Over half of mobile phone shipments into Africa in 2016 were smartphones (Deloitte 2017)

All of this means that there are millions of new customers available for new, smart, and data-intensive financial products, agricultural services, marketplaces, logistics, and the list goes on. This is why we’re seeing the rise and rise of startups in these spaces, as well there should be.

What we’re not paying attention to is this: the market is still smaller than it could be.

Imagine that you’re finding amazing market traction with your new mobile lending app, or with your logistics system, or with your online goods marketplace. Imagine that you’re doing well. However, did you know that you’re only reaching 20% of the people who own smartphones in the country? Oh, right, that’s the piece that’s surprising! You could be doing even more, growing faster, and capturing more market share if only the other 80% of smartphone owners in your market could afford the costs of getting online regularly to use your service.

This is where BRCK is stepping in with our Moja platform (free to consumer internet). You’ll benefit greatly from our growth. We’ll benefit greatly from your growth.

Social development

Even though I’m largely driven by the economic reasoning for connectivity alone, since I believe that the best way for us to make significant change in Africa is to grow wealth for everyday Africans, there is a strong social argument for widespread and affordable connectivity as well.

Connecting an additional 2.5 billion people to the internet would add 2 trillion dollars per year to global GDP and create 140 million jobs.

• It enables improvements in health (Deloitte 2014)
• Unlocks universal education (Deloitte 2014)
• Strengthens civil society through public services, social cohesion, and digital inclusion (Deloitte 2014)

It turns out that if we connect people to the largest, greatest network of knowledge and information in the the world, then a lot of great social benefits are realized across a number of important areas. It’s hard to argue against more jobs, better education, better healthcare, more informed citizens, and a stronger civil society in any country.

Connectivity is the foundation

Like everyone else not involved in the plumbing and distribution of the internet, I used to think of this only academically. It’s easy enough to understand and think through intellectually. However, I found that in living it, in dealing with the practicalities of the internet, in coming to know the end-user, I began to appreciate just how important connectivity is. Building a new app or service can have big effects, changing the affordability equation for connectivity, and you send a shockwave reaching everyone, everywhere.

It was 5 years ago that we created BRCK as a company, and I’ve had the great joy of being on a journey with some fantastic people, including the three here with me in this picture (Reg Orton, Emmanuel Kala, and Philip Walton).

We had an idea of what we were getting into back in October 2013, but none of us were sure where it would actually take us. All we knew then was that the barriers to creating hardware had dropped enough for us to get into it, that there was a problem in the internet connectivity space in Africa (and other frontier markets), and that we had the right mixture of skills, naiveté, and optimism to figure it out. Over the next 12 months we grew to a team of 10 that had this the desire to meet a big challenge and believed we could do hard things. As I write this, 8 of those 10 are still at BRCK.

In the intervening years we’ve built three full products and taken them to market (BRCK v1, Kio Kit, SupaBRCK), and a fourth (PicoBRCK) that is still in R&D. That alone is quite an accomplishment. I hadn’t known back in 2011, when the idea for creating a device was first hatched, just what the life cycle of building a hardware+software product would be. I do remember having a conversation with an old friend, Robert Fabricant, that I thought we should be done with the first one in about a year. He laughed and said it would be at least 2-3 years. He was mostly right.

[foogallery id=”4816″]

I’ve since learned that it takes approximately 18 months for a product to go through the concept, design, testing, productization, and first samples stages. Then it typically takes us another nine months for iterations and small fixes on hardware to happen, while that same time is spent concurrently hardening up the software side of things. For example, our most recent SupaBRCK took approximately almost two years from conception to product, and then another six months of continued fixes/changes to the low-level software and the hardware, before it worked well consistently.

Asking the Right Question

You would often hear us saying, “Why do we use hardware designed for London or New York, when we live in Nairobi or New Delhi?” as a way to frame the problem we thought we were solving. It was only in late December 2014, after we had shipped the BRCK v1 to 50+ countries, that we realized we were only partially on the right track.

It turns out the problem isn’t in making the best hardware for connectivity in difficult environments. Sure, that’s part of the equation – making sure that you have the right tools for people to connect to the internet. But the bigger question involves people. Who is connecting to the internet and who isn’t? If, after many years of building BRCK, we had built the best, most rugged and reliable solution for internet connectivity, that would be something we could pat each other on our backs for. However, if the problem instead was “How do we get the rest of Africa online?”, and we were able to solve that problem, then that was a legacy we’d be proud to tell our children about one day.

Sitting in our tiny office around Christmas 2014, we started thinking hard about this bigger issue and began doing deeper research into the problems of this loosely defined “connectivity” space. We started doing some user experience research, man on the street interviews, to figure out what the pain points were for people in Kenya.

Connectivity can generally be broken into two buckets:
First, accessibility – can I connect my device to a nearby signal?
Second, affordability – can I afford that connection?

The results were quite telling, it was definitely about affordability.

For everyone who’s not deep in African tech, let me lay out some interesting numbers for you. Accessibility in most of the emerging markets has been moving rapidly since the mid-2000s when we started to get the undersea cables coming into the continent. These cables then went inland and started a rapid increase in available internet connections and wholesale internet costs decreased rapidly. Since 2008, we’ve had more than one million kilometers of cable dug across the continent, and we have over 240,000 cell phone towers. Concurrently, the mobile device prices continued to drop globally, and by 2016 we started to have more smartphones imported into Africa than non-smartphones.

Reaching deeper into the market research, we started to study this affordability problem.

“A4AI found that the average price of 1GB prepaid mobile broadband, when expressed as a % of average per capita Gross National Income (GNI), varied between 0.84% in North America and 17.49% in Africa.”

It turns out that in almost every country in Africa, there is a consistent ratio among all the smartphone owners in a country: 20% could afford to pay for the internet regularly, and an incredible 80% couldn’t.

Interestingly, when we looked at who else was working in this connectivity space, almost everyone was focused on accessibility, not affordability. Those who were focused on affordability thought that just making the price cheaper was enough. What we’ve seen is that if you just make “less expensive” subscription WiFi (as most do), then you’ll capture another 10% of the market. And while that can make a profitable enterprise, it still leaves 70% of the market unaddressed.

This last blue ocean of internet users in Africa, as well as Asia and Latin America, is still largely ignored. Those who do have the resources to go after it tend to try with iterative approaches in both business models around affordability, and only marginal creativeness in solving for technology accessibility.

Moja Means ONE

It’s taken us 5 years, going through multiple iterations of new tech, building new hardware, and creating new software stacks that go from the firmware up to the cloud. We’ve been mostly quiet for the past year as we put our heads down and tried to take a new platform to market. Where are we now?

“Moja” means “one” in Swahili, and it was the brand name that we chose to call the software platform that we would build on top of the BRCK hardware. While Moja means one, “pamoja” means “together” or “oneness”, and that was the root we were looking for. To us, Moja is the internet for everyone.

We started by trying to make it work on the BRCK v1, but that was a bit like trying to make a sedan do a job built for a lorry (truck) – it wasn’t powerful enough. The SupaBRCK was envisioned as the hardware we could leverage that would allow us to not just have enough of a powerful and enterprise-level router, but a tool that was actually a highly ruggedized micro-data center. With this, we could host content on each device, as well as get people connected to the internet. Another way to think about the accessibility side of what we do is that we have a new model for how a distributed CDN works on a nation-scale, moving away from the centralized model that the rest of the world uses. In environments like Kenya, we can’t continue to just copy and paste models from more developed infrastructure markets, we have to think of new ways to deal with how the undergirding system actually works and operates.

We give the internet away for free to consumers. How does that work if we all know that the internet isn’t free? After all, someone always pays.

The business model is an indirect one. We charge businesses for some form of digital engagement on our Moja platform (app downloads, surveys, or content caching), and the free internet to our consumers is a by-product of this b2b business model. Like everyone else, we thought we could do it with advertising at first. But we realized that our unique hardware capabilities allowed us some other options, since advertising is a poor option for all but a few of the biggest global tech platforms.

Today we’ve deployed 850 of the SupaBRCK’s running our Moja software into public transportation (buses and matatus) in Kenya and Rwanda. They’ve been quite successful with almost 1/4 million unique users monthly in just the first three months. We have both a tested and working technology platform, as well as product market fit. With unit economics that make sense, a growing user base, and a business model that works, we’re excited for the growth phase of the business. This next step means going nation-scale in each of these countries, and also determining our next market to enter.

It’s important that ordinary people across Africa and other frontier markets can stop thinking about the costs of the internet and don’t have to turn off their mobile internet on the smartphones that they already have in their pockets.

Once they know they can afford it, the way they use the internet changes dramatically. An internet like this is feasible today, and it’s a cheaper, faster, more distributed, and resilient one. It’s also being built from the ground up in Africa, where we’re close to both the technology and human problems, and have a better chance of building the right thing.

Thoughts and Lessons Over 5 Years

First, make sure it’s a big enough problem.
If you’re going to spend 5+ years of your life on something, make sure it’s something that matters. At BRCK we are creating the onramp to the internet for anyone to connect to the internet, and a distribution platform for organizations trying to reach them. If we succeed we only succeed at scale, which by its nature means that we’ve done something big and that it has made a large impact on people.

Second, figure out what to focus on.
When you start out it’s difficult to determine product market fit. We started with a wide funnel of possibilities for our technology, industries that we could target and consumer plays. Over time, we were able to narrow down what could work, and what we could actually do, to the point where we focused on this big “connecting people” problem. We did detour into education with our Kio Kit, which we still think is one of the best (if not the best) holistic solutions for emerging market schools – after all, it’s in places across Africa, as well as the Pacific Islands and as far as Mexico. However, it proved to be too costly for our bottom line to hold inventory, sales cycles are too long, and it was largely a product sale. When we realized that, we started to focus most of our efforts on the bigger underlying issue across all of the markets, which was affordable connectivity and our Moja platform.

Third, persistence trumps skill.
Building hardware is hard. It’s even harder doing it in Africa. The upside, however, is that you’re both closer to the problem and that, if you succeed in figuring it out, you have a good head start on everyone else. The process takes time, costs money, and there are people and organizations who don’t want you to succeed. It always takes longer than you want to get software working properly, or hardware built and reliable. We’ve often been faced by that same problem that plagues all venture backed companies in Africa, in that you have to do a lot of education to investors to even raise the capital, and then when you do, you get charged a premium for perceived risk. Partner organizations take resources and time to work with, and they don’t always come through on their promises. All of these things (and more) mean that the best ideas don’t always win in the market, because it’s those that push the hardest and longest that win.

Fourth, it’s the people you do it with.
If you’re going to be on a journey that takes a great deal of time, with intense pressure, and where success is not guaranteed, then you had better do it with people that you can trust, who you can work with, and it helps if you like them too. Throughout my work career I’ve been more fortunate than most (whether at Ushahidi, iHub, or BRCK), and this time is no exception. I get to work with a host of wonderful people; not just smart and talented, but also genuinely good human beings. It makes work a joyful challenge, not an exhausting chore.

So, to those back in the day who believed we could do this when it was just a sketch in my notebook, thank you Shuler, Kobia, Nat, and Juliana (and the rest of the team at Ushahidi). To our investors who have joined us in this dream of connecting and doing hard things, you’ve continued to step up and that has made this possible. Thank you.

To Jeff, Janet, Birir, Kurt, Barre, and Oira, thank you for sticking it out for all these years and stepping up to more leadership challenges as we’ve evolved. To Philip, Reg, and Kala, I want to thank you for making the impossible happen, time and again, each for more than 5+ years.

I was bumping along a waterlogged dirt road on the island of Pemba a couple weeks ago, trying to find my way to a lighthouse where the BRCK team was setting up a weather station. I stopped to check my map, and had a solid 3g signal I could use to check my map. Looking around I realized that all the houses in this section were wired up with electricity too. It turns out, though Pemba (a small island north of Zanzibar off of the Kenya/Tanzania coast) is a bit behind economically and it has that island slowness to it, that they meet the basic infrastructural requirements for a 21st century economy.

No matter where I’ve traveled, this holds true. Whether in the city edges in Nairobi or Lusaka, or the rural areas across Africa or Asia. If there is power, if there is connectivity, then people will find a way to further their lives in enterprising ways. And that word enterprising is important, because their ingenuity and drive are focused on finding a way to make money. For school fees, for food and living, for their future.

A Foundation of Power and Connectivity

Power and connectivity are the two foundational elements of a 21st century economy upon which all of the other pillars sit. Whether you’re talking about commerce or education, entertainment or logistics, you’re not going to play in the global economy unless you have access to reliable energy and internet.

It used to be that the way a country developed to a point where they could have nice roads and comfortable homes for the middle class came by building a low-cost manufacturing sector (witness the Asian tigers.)

Yet, today the world has turned.

Although manufacturing will always play a meaningful role in a country, you can now have far greater gains on the world’s economic stage for lower costs if you invest in digital communications and transactions.

McKinsey released a fascinating report on “digital globalization” where they show that increasing flows of data and information now generate more economic value than the global trade in goods.

Stop and think about that for a moment.

They’re saying that an industry that didn’t exist 15 years ago can now bring in more value to a country’s Gross Domestic Product than the centuries-old trade in goods.

And in Africa, here’s the reason this is a big problem. While the continent is moving forward, the internet is more available and devices for accessing it are getting less expensive, we’re still far behind. We’re simply not moving fast enough or staying close enough to the rest of the world. And that has profound consequences.

And there is only one investment needed: Digital infrastructure. This is the undersea cables, the terrestrial cables, the internet exchange points and locally stored content.

Regular commerce isn’t possible without physical infrastructure like roads, nor is ecommerce possible without digital infrastructure which gives us accessible internet.

In the energy space, smart friends of ours like Mkopa, SteamaCo and SolarNow (and many others) are working on ways to make power affordable. Truth be told, there has been a lot more money put to work in that space than on connecting people to the internet. What’s interesting is that there are now millions of Dollars spent each year on tech startups across Africa which rely on connectivity, but very few investment dollars being put to work on the connectivity frontier itself. There are some though, and that’s why companies like BRCK exist.

Whether in Pemba or Nairobi the face of Africa is changing, and power and connectivity are the reasons why. While I might ride on a bad dirt road to get somewhere, I know that if private and public organizations both focus on increased power and connectivity, we will get there.

This last week I was part of a BRCK expedition team that traveled from Nairobi through the Chyulu Hills, and oversea to the small island of Pemba in the northern part of Zanzibar. On the way, we installed some of our equipment, including:

• A point-to-point link running Moja WiFi, providing free internet access for Kenya Wildlife Services rangers who protect the rhino population.
• A weather station at a lighthouse on Pemba island, running off of our PicoBRCK device.
• A special SupaBRCK running Moja, educational content in a school on Kokota island, as well as training and use of the Kio Kit at the same location.
• A SupaBRCK Moja installed at the port of Shimoni in a store near the market.

One thing I’ve learned on BRCK expeditions is that there is no “normal” experience from one to the next. This one we had to be used to water everywhere, we lost or broke two phones and severely damaged a third, all vehicles behaved themselves (miracle!), and we had the Good All Over team with us that made it feel like a reality TV show.

We do these expeditions for two primary reasons: to have a fun adventure as a team, and to test our products far out in the field.

We do have a lot of fun, you can see that in the Instagram, Twitter, and blog posts. However, a requirement is that they also be challenging, providing a certain amount of physical and mental difficulty. We plan them this way for us to test ourselves, strengthen our internal team bonds, and stress out our equipment. It works, so we keep doing it year after year.

Creative solutions come from time with users

While we were out on this trip, there was a good Economist article published that references BRCK and what we’re doing. It’s important to remember that so few companies are actually out in the field trying to find solutions for people who aren’t financially wealthy. Logically this makes sense. Unless you’re a development company or a charity organization, you have to make money and if the numbers don’t work, then they don’t work.

The ITU calculates that in poor countries the average cost in 2016 of the smallest mobile-internet package was equal to 14% of the average national income per person, putting it out of most people’s reach.

One of the benefits of the BRCK leadership team playing such a direct role in these expeditions is that we are installing, testing, fixing, and using the equipment right alongside the users of it. We’re doing the messy work, but also having to explain how our platform works to the people we’re leaving it with. This is what leads us to creative solutions for both the technical and business problems that we find. It could be a better way to waterproof our gear, or it comes in a deeper understanding of how important it is to focus on our model of FREE public WiFi as we realize that these people will not be able to pay.

Just because the companies that came before us were unable to find a way to serve the needs of the people with small incomes doesn’t mean that there isn’t a way forward. It just means that we need to be more creative. Nothing builds creativity like sweating over a connection in rural Africa with your colleagues and the users breathing down your neck. 😉

There has been a lot of talk about “inclusive business” since the term was coined by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development in 2005. A business is said to be inclusive when it’s value chains purposefully “include” the needs and wants of low-income people and communities, and the company then implements on a business model built around more than just a profit-based bottom line. Those of us who have been part of building things like Ushahidi, iHub Nairobi, Gearbox, and BRCK are nothing if not inclusive business practitioners. However, the real issue comes down to who gets to decide the “who, when, and where” of what gets included.

Our experience of “making in Africa for Africa” has shown us that local design is by its very nature inclusive. When we design here in Nairobi we are using “from periphery to centre thinking”, and the chances of misreading low-income markets in our product design is greatly reduced. Designers who live and work in Manhattan (no offence to the amazing designers of that great city) must consciously find ways to build processes that include the issues faced by the global poor. In Nairobi one has to try hard not to.

When you design at the periphery – the whole point is that you by necessity “include” the needs and wants of low income people, not just because this is a BoP market in the Prahaladian sense of the term, but because you live and work in the same context as those you seek to serve by making great products and services that people want. At BRCK there is a design team with diverse experiences, including what it is like to live in low income areas and schools. These experiences and context inform the design process and iterative improvements to the products and services provided by the various initiatives.

Forward thinking companies like Intel have been pursuing business models that benefit from local learning. Intel took the BRCK hardware platform known as the Kio Kit and combined it with their innovative software and content, to produce a customised Kio Kit designed specifically for women and youth empowerment projects in Kenya; which are a part of a larger initiative from Intel Corporation to tackle the digital divide. This is what inclusive business is about on the ground.  From this partnership with Intel, we are finding that inclusive business goes hand in hand with appropriate technology and design at the periphery.

*Post by Juliana Rotich & Richard Klopp of BRCK.org,  an initiative to deploy reliable technology to the edges of society. Juliana will be at Skoll World Forum next week discussing how new developments in tech can accelerate change. Do connect with her there or you can reach out to juliana at BRCK dot org to discuss more on how to partner for deploying tech to the edges of society.

Two weeks ago our CEO Erik Hersman was invited by the Economist to speak on a panel about digital ecosystems at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

A short video was created with soundbites from the event.

The discussion was chaired by Matthew Bishop, Editorial Director, New Initiatives, at The Economist between the President of the Republic of Estonia, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Chief Executive Officer of CA Technologies, Michael Gregoire, the Chairman of Cisco Systems, John Chambers, the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the TradeUp Capital Fund and Nextrade Group, Kati Suominen and the Chief Executive Officer of BRCK and Founder of iHub Nairobi, Erik Hersman.

2015 was a big year at BRCK, transitioning from designing, engineering and manufacturing a product to creating services that use the BRCK as an enabling device. The team itself grew from 9 people at the beginning of the year to the 40 people we have on staff today, and we expanded our offices (still in the iHub building) so we could finally fit everyone into a room.

To give an idea of what the company accomplished:

• Created 3 new hardware products; Kio tablet, Kio Kit, BRCK+Pi
• Built 3 new software products; Simiti ( our cloud-syncing CMS), CrisisStack, Kio OS
• Launched BRCK Education and are shortlisted for the Kenyan schools DLP project
• We’re well on our way to the second generation of BRCK software and hardware
• Raised $3m in investment

While the raising of the $3m capital is what this is about, it’s not the most important thing. Capital is a tool that helps us keep up our growth momentum so that the products and services we build can scale beyond what we could do organically alone. As I have learned, there are a few more complexities and more expenses when doing hardware, rather than just the software company background that I was used to. Over the last couple years we have been privileged to have some truly amazing investment partners and that has only continued with this most recent round of capital injection.

Steve and Jean Case were in our first round of investment, and after they visited Nairobi with President Obama in the summer of this year, they decided to reinvest. The same happened with our partners out of the UK, Synergy Energy. New investors are made up of some truly fantastic people that have a world of experience and connections in the worlds that we work in. For example, Jim Sorenson’s experience in building companies that scale, TED’s network and influence, MKS Alternative Investments brings us some fantastic manufacturing and network out of Europe and JP-IK has a world of experience in EdTech. We are truly honored to be working with them and appreciate their faith in us in growing BRCK.

The BRCK company will use these additional funds as we scale up production and distribution for BRCK Education products and services, and as we continue to build out the next generation of products for the company. There will be additional hires, primarily on the product teams (hardware/software), but also on the operations and business teams as we move forward. We’re looking for the best that Kenya has to offer.

The Press Release

Kenyan technology start up, BRCK, secures USD 3 million in funding from international investors

Nairobi, Kenya, 6 January, 2016: BRCK Inc, one of Africa’s most innovative startups, today announced that it has closed a Ksh 300 million (USD 3 million) funding round. This significant capital raise included investment from former AOL executives Jean and Steve Case, along with other participating international investors including Jim Sorenson, TED, MKS Alternative Investments, Synergy Energy and others. This amount is additional to the previous USD 1.2 million the company raised through seed funding last year.

Speaking on the equity injection, BRCK CEO Erik Hersman commented, “As a fairly young company based in Kenya, it’s incredible to have such a range of powerhouse investors backing us with their support. The investor interest we have received throughout the year has marked how far we’ve come from our Kickstarter and seed funding days. This new capital will catapult our efforts of improving the way information flows in the world.”

BRCK Ltd., founded in 2013, created the BRCK – a device seeking to solve problems of electricity and internet connections in low-infrastructure environments. Physically tough in design with smart technology and enough backup power to survive a blackout for 8-hours, the BRCK can provide failsafe internet connectivity in almost any situation.

Since the initial funding, BRCK Ltd. has evolved to sell the product in 54 countries across 5 continents and has also begun to revolutionise the Kenyan primary education system through the launch of BRCK Education with its flagship products, the Kio tablet and the Kio Kit – a digital classroom in a box. The new capital of USD 3 million will help expand the company’s operations, its ability to manufacture additional inventory, new designs of the devices and distribution across the continent and globally.

“As early investors in BRCK, we’ve had the benefit of observing first-hand the success the company has had in managing rapid yet sustainable growth as it fulfils its mission to keep Africans connected and drive the global digital revolution,” stated Jean Case, CEO of the Case Foundation. “We are excited to support BRCK as it enters its next phase of expansion, both improving and enhancing its product offerings uniquely suited to emerging market internet subscribers, and growing the company’s global footprint.”

Jessica Dick, Investment Manager for Synergy Energy said, “We are delighted to be participating in this round and to be supporting BRCK with the disruptive and inspiring work they are doing in technology and education”. Laurent Haig, partner at MKS Alternative Investments, followed up by saying, “At a time when education and information have never been so critical to the future of the world, connecting the 4 billion people that are not yet on the internet is a top priority. BRCK is taking on this challenge from a unique perspective, fuelled by deep knowledge of the realities of emerging countries’ infrastructure and users. We are proud to join this adventure, and work alongside the BRCK team to bring the benefits of information technologies to millions of people.”

The breadth of investor appeal was also highlighted at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Nairobi last year, when BRCK was one of the few companies that successfully secured funding at the event. Speaking on why BRCK stood out to him as a bankable business, world-renowned entrepreneur, business leader and societal innovator, Jim Sorenson commented, “BRCK’s roots are Kenyan, but its solutions know no borders. What the team offers is internet connectivity for the complex world we live in, and I’m excited to be a part of helping make that reality all the more possible.”

ENDS

About BRCK
BRCK is a hardware and services tech company based in Nairobi, Kenya. As the first company to pursue ground up design and engineering of consumer electronics in East Africa, it has developed a connectivity device also known as BRCK, which is designed to work in harsh environment where electricity is intermittent. BRCK can support up to 40 devices, has an 8-hour battery life when the power is out, and can jump from Ethernet, to WiFi, to 3G seamlessly. The initial BRCK units started shipping in July of 2014 and by February of 2015, thousands of BRCK’s had been sold to 54 countries around the world.

BRCK is a spin-off from the world acclaimed Ushahidi, a Kenyan technology company which builds open source software tools and which has received accolades for the impact that its creative and cutting-edge solutions are having around the world.

In August 2015, BRCK signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Kenyatta University that covers joint collaboration in the design and development of innovative technological solutions, research, advocacy and stakeholder engagements, content development and training and capacity building. Through the partnership, the two institutions will roll -out cutting edge digital solutions that will transform the way education is delivered.

With the recently announced learning division of BRCK Inc led by Nivi Mukherjee, comes this exciting news about a major agreement signed between BRCK Inc and the venerable Kenyatta University.

Do see the announcement on the Kenyatta University website too.

Kenyatta University, BRCK sign digital literacy MoU

Nairobi, 7 August 2015 –Kenyatta University, a leading Kenyan academic institution and BRCK, a local technology firm based in Nairobi, have today signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to promote digital literacy in the country.

The MoU covers among other areas, joint collaboration in the design and development of innovative technological solutions, research, advocacy and stakeholder engagements, content development and training and capacity building.

Speaking after the signing ceremony, KU Vice Chancellor Prof. Olive Mugenda said the partnership will enable the two organisations to leverage technology as an enabler of delivering educational content and impart knowledge, skills, attitudes and values that will have far-reaching changes in the education sector.

“It is a great pleasure to partner with like-minded organisations such as BRCK with whom we have a shared vision and an appreciation of the role that technology can and should play in the overall education process. Both BRCK and KU are at the forefront of developing and rolling out cutting edge digital solutions that will transform the way education is delivered resulting in an enhanced learning environment that offers competitive advantage in the workforce for the young people of Africa and generations to come,” she said.

The partnership will also firmly establish Kenya as a global hub for digital education, by creating a unique centre where deployments of digital learning solutions, teacher training, curriculum design and device design, manufacturing and logistics knowledge gained will come together leading to a 21st century digital education centre.

The two organisations will leverage each other’s strengths to ensure a successful joint venture delivering uncompromised standards and techniques in teaching and learning. Kenyatta University has a dedicated division of research and a very vibrate innovation and incubation centre which has seen the creation of winning start -up companies in the country.  The institution also has a very strong digital school which was re-engineered recently.

On the other hand, BRCK has an unrivalled ability and capability to develop innovative connectivity technologies making the two partners a formidable, dynamic, forward-thinking team.

As part of the agreement, Kenyatta University will host the manufacturing and assembly plant which will enable the institution to manufacture more tablets. This will result in the creation of jobs for the youth, technology transfer and will also mitigate depreciation of the exchange rate through local production rather than importing the devices.

“We were the first university in the country to use tablets to deliver content to the students in the digital school. The tablets are very interactive with software that makes teaching easy and interactive. Following our partnership with BRCK, we hope to start a manufacturing plant to make cost effective tablets as well as scale up their use to other schools,” Prof. Mugenda added.

This partnership will create the infrastructure and skills not only for the digital learning but design, build and manufacture a myriad of technologies in future creating indigenous digital solutions for a myriad of applications in education and beyond that will be deployed around the continent.

BRCK Board member Juliana Rotich said: “Education has been identified as the common thread that will shape a sustainable future for economies around the globe and digital technology is one of the tools that will provide a leg-up to this new mode of learning. Through this joint venture, we aim to overcome barriers in the sector and offer constructive value through content, connectivity and functionality.”

About Kenyatta University

Kenyatta University is an international university based in Nairobi Kenya. It was established in 1985 through an Act of Parliament. The University’s main campus is located along the Thika Superhighway, 20 kilometers from Nairobi City center with 10 Satellite campuses and Distance and elearning Centers each. It offers over 500 programmes across 17 schools.

By April 2015, the student population was over 70,000 with a staff capacity of over 3,000, both teaching and non-teaching. Its infrastructural set up among other key ranking points has placed the University as the best in the country and regionally.

Kenyatta University has a cutting edge over other universities due to their emphasis on practical hands-on knowledge and the skills training imparted to both students and the larger international community.

Kenyatta University is home to some of the world’s top scholars, researchers and experts in diverse fields. The institution prides itself in providing high quality programmes that attract individuals who wish to be globally competitive. Towards this end, the University has invested heavily in infrastructure and facilities to offer its students the best experience in quality academic programmes under a nurturing environment in which its students learn and grow.

The university has partnered with other key organizations for example Young African Leadership Initiative (YALI) which is supported by the U.S. Government and the African Centre for Transformative and Inclusive Leadership (ACTIL), which is sponsored by the UN WOMEN.

About BRCK 

BRCK is a hardware and services tech company based in Nairobi, Kenya.  As the first company to pursue ground up design and engineering of consumer electronics in East Africa, it has developed a connectivity device also known as BRCK, which is designed to work in harsh environment where electricity is intermittent. BRCK can support up to 40 devices, has an 8-hour battery life when the power is out, and can jump from Ethernet, to WiFi, to 3G, to 4G seamlessly. The initial BRCK units started shipping in July of 2014 and by February of 2015, thousands of BRCK’s had been sold to 54 countries around the world.

BRCK is a spin-off from the world acclaimed Ushahidi, a Kenyan technology company which builds open source software tools and which has received accolades for the impact that its creative and cutting-edge solutions are having around the world.

 Media contacts

Evelyn Njoroge, africapractice [email protected] 0721704712

Sally Kahiu, africapractice [email protected] 0706322488

There’s a press release (which always seem boring to me, but have added it to the bottom of the page) about Nivi Mukherjee, the founder of eLimu and long-time iHub member, joining the BRCK team offically. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing her grow her company from nothing, getting out ahead of the curve to create a new way to learn, study and test for the big KCPE exam that every kid in Kenya takes in 8th grade. She’s fought and shown the scrappy leader that she is for 4 years, so when we started looking at BRCK Education more seriously six months ago, Nivi was the one I went to for help. While we know a lot about tech and hardware, she knows a lot about education, teachers and students. She also taught us new fancy words, such as “pedagogy“.

The past 4 months have seen us working closely together with the eLimu team on some great projects, and without her understanding of how the education system works we wouldn’t be where we are today.

Nivi is now the President of BRCK Education, a new business unit for us that focuses school-based solutions where the BRCK software and hardware can be used to make a real difference. We’ve seen this happening in Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya as more schools get started with tablets and computers. Nivi’s job will be to fulfill on this in our own backyard here in Kenya, and also to take it to the rest of Africa and the world.

More news on this front soon…!

Press Release

BRCK appoints its Education President
Nairobi, 4 August 2015 – BRCK, a local hardware and services technology company based in Nairobi, has announced the appointment of Nivi Mukherjee as the head of its newly created division, BRCK Education.
Ms Mukherjee will be charged with driving BRCK’s efforts to provide hardware and software solutions to enable online and offline learning.

Commenting on the appointment, BRCK Board Member and Ushahidi Executive Director Juliana Rotich said:
“We are delighted to welcome onboard Ms Mukherjee who has a wealth of knowledge and expertise to take over the Education division. Through this division, we aim to creatively and effectively deliver 21st century technology that will revolutionize the education sector and eventually take digital literacy in Kenya and in the African continent to the next level.”

Ms Mukherjee joins BRCK from eLimu, one of the most talked about EdTech innovations in Africa where she spearheaded the digitization of KCPE curriculum content for Kenyan upper primary students and the development of a literacy application in English and Kiswahili.

The new president is expected to leverage the BRCK, a pioneering connectivity device that is designed to work in environments where electricity and internet connections are problematic. The BRCK is a WiFi access point with an 8-hour battery-life and the ability to store up to 2 terabytes of educational content.

“I am excited to join this great team that has demonstrated its ability to innovate effectively for Africa. I am privileged to be able to leverage this game-changing device, which will enable instantaneous access for up to 40 devices, to promote digital access in education. What remains now is to curate localized and culturally relevant digital content that will improve the learning experience and outcomes for millions of students on the continent,” Ms Mukherjee said.

She reinforced BRCK’s user-driven commitment towards developing sustainable and interactive tools adding that the organization is keen and ready to partner with teachers, parents, students, like-minded organisations and government institutions in order to bring far-reaching changes in the way education is delivered.

Notes to Editors
About Nivi Mukherjee
Nivi is a social entrepreneur, technophile, community volunteer and 2014 East African Acumen Fellow. She is passionate about educational initiatives that foster development and fun. She has spoken as an expert on eLearning, the African tech scene and innovation at: TEDxStellenbosch, South By South West – Austin TX, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan Business Conference Africa Innovate as well as appearing on Al Jazeera, CNN, Euronews and being featured on BBC and The Economist. In her spare time, Nivi organizes cultural festivals, bakes, knits, runs half marathons, folds origami and plays Fusball.

About BRCK
BRCK is a connectivity device designed in Kenya to meet the demanding challenges of life and work in harsh environments where electricity is intermittent and the internet is spotty. BRCK works to alleviate these issues by delivering a redundant data connection combined with a reliable power source to ensure that nothing gets in the way of getting the information you need. BRCK can support up to 40 devices, has an 8-hour battery life when the power is out, and can jump from Ethernet, to WiFi, to 3G, to 4G seamlessly.

BRCK is the first company to pursue and deliver using entirely ground up design and engineering of consumer electronics in East Africa. The initial BRCK units started shipping in July of 2014 and by February of 2015, thousands of BRCKs had been sold in 54 countries around the world, in both developed and developing markets.

The company is a spin-off from the world acclaimed Ushahidi, a Kenyan technology company which builds open source software tools and which has received accolades for the impact that its creative and cutting-edge solutions are having around the world.