blueMoon Ethiopia

blueMoon is a new and exciting initiative to discover, incubate, and invest seed funds into innovative and scalable youth agribusiness startups in Ethiopia. At blueMoon, we believe that, once in a blue moon, exceptional ideas can turn into great businesses that literally change the world. Our approach is to try our best to discover amazing, out-of-the-box, disruptive, highly innovative, scalable, and potentially transformational ideas from youth interested in Ethiopian agribusiness. We run a national competition twice a year and accept up to 10 startups into our on-site 4-month program based in Addis Ababa. Once selected, we take a holistic approach to the support we give to our startups. During our 4-month incubator program, we offer: - a place to work alongside other talented entrepreneurs from around the country - training on both hard skills as well as soft skills - coaching our startup teams to go from a great idea to a value proposition, business plan, operational strategy, and investment pitch - links to blueMoon Lions, top agribusiness executives in Ethiopia - access to business service providers (web design, legal, admin, IT, etc) - one-to-one mentoring with business professionals with our international partner, the Mowgli Foundation - first seed equity investment on the basis of our unique 1-10-10 model - lions Den, our flagship pitch event at the end of the program - further rounds of financing with blueMoon Angels and blueMoon Crowd, our innovative online crowd equity funding platform Our approach is about turning great ideas into great businesses, by investing time, effort, skills, and money, into the people behind the ideas. Beyond business plans and pitches, we believe that the real traction comes from the people behind these ideas, and we strive to identify and invest in their talent, drive, passion, and innovative spirit with an eco-system approach to business incubation.