Dropifi becomes first African investment for Silicon Valley’s 500 Startups

Dropifi, a smart widget that allows companies to better analyse incoming “contact us” messages, announced today that it has joined the sixth batch of companies to be taken up into the 500 Startups Accelerator Programme.

As we noted last year, the team behind Dropifi are re-imagining one of the web’s oldest and most resolute elements, the “Contact us” form. The Dropifi solution consists of a website plug-in, optional QR code (for print-outs) and an analytics tool.

The plug-in simplifies and speeds up contact form implementation on company websites and presents an unobtrusive interface to customers. The novelty QR code can be printed out and is a fun way of directing users to a company’s online Dropifi contact form. The final part of the solution allows companies to extract intelligence from messages received through their Dropifi contact forms and makes responding to incoming messages easy.

Dropifi, founded in November 2011, joined the 500 Startups programme in April 2013 as the first African company to walk through the #500strong doors. Since 2011 Dropifi, graduates of the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology programme, have been making waves in their local Ghana as well as internationally. Most recently Dropifi won the Global Start Up Open competition where it beat out 50 international start ups to win the Kauffman Foundation backed award. Dropifi was flown to Rio in March to attend the Global Entrepreneurship Congress (GEC) and collect this award.

While in Rio Dropifi pitched to Dave McClure, Founder of 500 Startups, and shortly after received an invitation to join the accelerator programme.  "Dropifi is the first African investment for 500 Startups. Very few seed investors in Silicon Valley will put money into markets as early as Africa, but we think talent exists in every corner of the globe. Dropifi has a killer team and a promising product with global reach. The fact that they hail from Ghana makes it even cooler,” explains Dave McClure.

Using the Dropifi contact widget, companies filter out spam through proprietary anti-spam technology, see incoming message trending data in relation to industry metrics, the demographic and social media profiles of the sender, analyse the real emotions behind the messages and easily integrate with their existing CRMs, e-commerce and blogging platforms.

“With this tool, companies generate more business leads, make better business decisions, offer a more personalised and better customer service experience, save time, increase productivity and boost their ROI,” comments David Osei, Founder and CEO of Dropifi.

Since launching on WordPress and Shopify late in 2012 there have been over 8,000 downloads on WordPress and over 900 Shopify stores are using the Dropifi widget to collect and analyse their incoming messages and leads.

Dropifi are in San Francisco for four months, three months at 500 Start Ups headquarters in Mountain View and one month taking part in the programme’s Demo Days and final investor meetings.

“Being the first African startup to join a leading U.S. accelerator validates our idea and serves as a springboard for us to take giant leaps into helping businesses better interact with customers,” adds Osei. “We also see it as an inspiration for young African entrepreneurs and a signpost that, Africa is geared up to be the next economic frontier.”