Customer Spotlight: How Enovation Factory Is Building Cameroon's Next Generation of Tech Startups
When Hermès Nziko describes what drew him to Enovation Factory, he doesn't start with the technology or the programs. He starts with the founders.
"You get an entrepreneur who's been thinking about their idea for months, sometimes years," he says. "They just need the structure and the push to make it real. That's what we're here for."
Hermès is the Startup & Program Coordinator at Enovation Factory, a tech incubator and accelerator based in Yaoundé, Cameroon. His role sits at the intersection of two things: ensuring the programs run as designed, and ensuring the startups going through them actually get what they need.
It's a balancing act that requires equal parts operational discipline and human intuition. And in an ecosystem where resources are lean and expectations are high, both matter.
Building from scratch in Yaoundé
Enovation Factory launched its first cohort roughly 18 months ago. Since then, they've run three full cohorts, supporting batches of 16 startups each across a range of industries. Fintech. Green energy. Fashion. There's no single vertical focus, which is a deliberate choice. In an emerging tech ecosystem like Yaoundé's, the diversity of ideas is part of the value.
Each cohort runs for six months. Startups go through two tracks, incubation and acceleration, depending on their stage. At the end, there's a demo day where founders pitch to investors and potential partners. After that, they join the alumni network.
It sounds straightforward on paper. In practice, building this kind of structure from the ground up in a market where the infrastructure for it doesn't already exist is anything but.
"When we started, there wasn't a playbook for us to follow,"
Hermès explains.
"We had to figure out what works for our founders, in our context. The challenges a startup faces in Yaoundé are not always the same as what you'd see in Lagos or Nairobi or Paris."
The first cohort taught them everything
Enovation Factory's first cohort was run with what Hermès diplomatically calls "rudimentary tools." Google Sheets, Airtable, Google Forms, Gmail. Every incubator and accelerator starts somewhere, and most start exactly here.
The experience was educational in the best and worst sense. The team learned what worked in their program design. They also learned, very quickly, what couldn't scale. Nearly 600 applications poured in for the second cycle. Managing that volume across disconnected tools, with a small team already stretched across multiple responsibilities, forced a decision.
"By the time we were launching the second cohort, it became apparent that we needed to upgrade,"
Hermès says.
"Being a tech hub, it was fitting to look around and see whether there was a platform that could help us digitalize our program."
They found AcceleratorApp through a combination of ChatGPT and Google search, evaluated the feature set against their program structure, and moved forward after a product demo. Today, they use AcceleratorApp to manages their entire lifecycle: applications, program delivery, communications, community, and alumni tracking.
But for Hermès, the tool was never the story. The story was what it unlocked.
What changes when operations get out of the way
The shift wasn't just about saving time, though the time savings were dramatic. It was about what the team could do with the time they got back.
When application communications took an entire afternoon, that was an afternoon Hermès wasn't spending with founders. When data lived across five different tools, insights got buried under formatting issues and export headaches. When startups had to be prompted to engage with the program platform, the community felt forced rather than natural.
Once those friction points disappeared, the nature of the work changed. Hermès could identify applicants who were almost done with their forms and personally call them. He could spend time thinking about program design for the next cohort instead of troubleshooting the current one. Startups who came through the application process on the platform were already comfortable with it by the time the program started, so engagement happened organically instead of through constant nudging.
"With the second cohort, right from the application cycle, they were already using the app,"
Hermès says.
"By the time they got into the program, everything just kind of flowed naturally."
That flow matters more than any single metric. It's the difference between a program that runs and a program that compounds.
The team adoption curve
Hermès is honest about one thing: he's further along with the platform than the rest of his team. He puts himself at an 8 out of 10 on adoption. His colleagues, closer to a 4. And he's clear that this isn't a platform problem. It's a change management reality.
"Our team is really spread out in terms of the tasks they're handling," he says. "By the time we brought in AcceleratorApp, they were already set in terms of the tools they were using."
The breakthrough came when management saw the value and started pushing for broader adoption. And with each new feature that directly replaces a workaround the team was already using, buy-in grows. Hermès sees this as a trajectory, not a destination.
"The more we progress and explore more functionalities, the next cohort, we're probably going to get the whole team to buy into it more. Until we get to that sweet spot where it's basically an everyday tool for everybody."
What's next for Enovation Factory
With three cohorts behind them and a growing alumni network, Enovation Factory is starting to think beyond program execution. The questions are getting bigger. How do you keep alumni engaged years after graduation? How do you build the kind of entrepreneurial culture in Yaoundé that makes the next generation of founders possible? How do you take what works locally and share it regionally?
Hermès doesn't have all the answers yet. But he has a framework, a growing community, and the operational foundation to keep experimenting.
That energy, the genuine enthusiasm for the work and the founders it serves, is what makes programs like Enovation Factory worth spotlighting. The tools and the metrics matter. But it's the people behind them that make an ecosystem real.
Enovation Factory is a tech incubator and accelerator in Yaoundé, Cameroon, supporting early-stage startups through structured six-month cohort programs. For detailed operational results, read the full case study.
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