VC4Africa, the online community for African entrepreneurs and investors, has made its database of startups that are registered on the VC4Africa platform, available to the public.
The database can be accessed via an API (application programming interface) which will automatically embed public venture data from the platform on external websites.
As a custodian of a large volume of entrepreneurial activity on the continent, VC4Africa is in a unique position to crowdsource primary data on the African venture space.
“We’ve had requests in the past from members who wanted to embed our ventures map on an external website, or display a subset of our venture data that was relevant to their context. Open data permits not only this but a number of interesting questions to be answered. For example, how many companies focused on the health sector have successfully fundraised in the last year? Or, how does the rate of growth in companies tagged ‘solar’ reflect interest in the renewable energy sector? Queries such as these may be formulated and the resulting data combined with other external datasets,” Bill Zimmerman said on the announcement post.
Interested? The API is here on GitHub but you definitely want to read through the documentation first, get involved in the API discussion group and tweet @vc4africa when your project is live. They’ll be sure to announce your project to their network.
You’ll find more info here.
Photo Credit: Chewy734 via Compfight cc
