Building businesses that can go further…On Wednesday, October 7, we welcomed the first EWA Deal Room alumni meetup at EbonyLife Place in Lagos. Founders from cohorts across the programme’s history, mentors, investors, and partners shared the evening with us, and we used the occasion to announce the first EWA Deal Room grant pool.
One of the things I value about building Entertainment Week Africa is the opportunity to stay connected to the businesses that have grown alongside the platform, and to understand what they need to keep moving forward.
Last week, we brought together founders from across the EWA Deal Room’s history, alongside mentors, investors and partners, for our first alumni meetup at EbonyLife Place in Lagos. We also announced the first EWA Deal Room grant pool, which will support standout businesses from this year’s cohort and our alumni.
The grant pool will be awarded at Entertainment Week Africa, taking place in Lagos from November 17 to 22, 2026. A jury, including each business’s lead mentor, will assess participating businesses against defined criteria.
This decision comes from a question we have been asking ourselves as we build the 2026 programme: what happens after the advice, the introductions and the pitch?
Mentorship has value. Access to investors has value. But there comes a point when a business needs capital to hire, expand its operations, develop a product or reach a new market. We want the Deal Room to keep finding ways to support businesses at those critical stages of growth.
Since our foundational cohort in 2022, the programme has worked with founders across creator tools, music, art, sport, health, hiring and entertainment. Their progress is an important part of how we assess the value of the work.
Atsur, which verifies and tracks the ownership history of fine art, placed among the top five winners at the NBA Africa Triple Double Accelerator in Rwanda following its Deal Room pitch. Prop’ly supported more than 450 productions in 2024, while FriendnPal has delivered over 10,000 therapy sessions.
Aktivate is another example worth watching. The creator commerce platform recently partnered with Access Bank to give the bank’s SME customers more affordable access to creator-led marketing, drawing on a network of more than 50,000 verified creators. It is an example of a business taking a solution developed within the creator economy into a wider commercial market, with the potential to help other businesses reach customers and grow.
These are different businesses solving different problems, but they point to something important: creative enterprise has commercial applications across sectors, and the businesses serving this economy deserve the support required to develop sustainable models and compete at scale.
That matters in an environment where founders are building through demanding economic conditions. Keeping a business alive is one challenge; developing the systems, customer base, revenue and investment case that enable it to grow is another. The support available to founders needs to reflect both.
For 2026, we are sharpening the Deal Room’s focus on mature businesses that are self-managed and have demonstrated substantial traction. Our Lead Mentor, Kemdi Ebi, has also emphasised the importance of building a continuing community of experts who can support these companies with their day-to-day operations.
We are looking beyond the programme itself, too. Understanding investor returns and creating additional pathways for capital to reach these businesses are important parts of the work. Capital must be able to find promising businesses, and the conditions must exist for that capital to generate value over time.
This is part of what Closing the Gap, the theme for EWA’s fifth edition, means in practice. The gap is not only about getting founders into a room with investors. It is also about the support, resources, relationships and commercial opportunities that help a business progress after that meeting ends.
Seeing founders from our foundational cohort alongside more recent participants, including Adaobi Orajiaku of Atsur, Obinna Umeh of Growwr, Akinbola Asalu of Aktivate, Katharina Link of Pulse Ghana and Kemi Owo of Thallos, reinforced the value of maintaining that community beyond the programme.
We are building the Deal Room to create stronger connections between founders, expertise and capital, with the ambition of helping more promising businesses develop into sustainable enterprises.
If you know a founder building a strong creative business who would benefit from this year’s programme, we welcome your recommendations. Applications for the 2026 EWA Deal Room are open at https://ewafrica.com/apply/?role=deal
Entertainment Week Africa takes place in Lagos from November 17 to 22,