After 10 years, #StartupSouth pivots to unlock Africa’s off

After a decade of building platforms for entrepreneurs outside Nigeria’s traditional technology hubs, #StartupSouth is rebranding its flagship conference as OffChart NXT, in a strategic shift aimed at connecting Africa’s emerging businesses with capital, technology, industry and new markets.

The move follows 10 editions of the #StartupSouth Conference, which brought together founders, investors, technology professionals, policymakers, businesses and ecosystem leaders, particularly across Southern Nigeria.

The organisers said the new identity reflects the evolution of the movement and its ambition to look beyond established startup centres for Africa’s next generation of businesses and opportunities.

“For the past decade, #StartupSouth has worked from a simple conviction: geography should not determine how far ambition can travel. After ten editions, we felt the conference needed an identity that could carry the larger conversation we are now convening about people, markets and opportunities emerging across a wider map of African economies,” said Uche Aniche, convener of OffChart NXT and founder of #StartupSouth.

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The shift comes as Africa’s startup ecosystem remains heavily concentrated around a handful of established hubs, where venture capital, technology talent, accelerators and investor networks are more readily available.

OffChart NXT is seeking to widen that map by identifying founders building businesses in locations that receive less attention from investors and the wider technology ecosystem.

A major feature of the inaugural edition will be the ‘Startup Challenge & DealRoom’, which will offer a N30 million prize pool to emerging founders.

Unlike conventional pitch competitions, organisers said selected founders will undergo a structured venture-readiness process covering business traction, market opportunity and capital readiness before progressing to further evaluation, community voting and the final competition and DealRoom.

“The N30 million is important, but the real opportunity is to build a process that leaves founders stronger than we met them. We want to identify credible businesses, help founders sharpen how they think about traction, markets and capital, and put the strongest of them in front of people who can materially move their companies forward,” said Ani Oko, a member of the OffChart NXT Council and lead of the Startup Challenge & DealRoom Work Group.

The rebranded conference, OffChart NXT 2026, will hold in Port Harcourt on October 22–23 under the theme “Growth Doesn’t Follow Maps.”

The choice of Port Harcourt as the launch location is central to the platform’s proposition.

The city, one of Nigeria’s major commercial and industrial centres, offers a deliberate alternative to the country’s better-known startup hubs and reinforces the organisers’ argument that significant businesses can emerge outside established innovation centres.

For Tomi Davies, investor and technology entrepreneur, entrepreneurial potential exists far beyond locations where capital is already concentrated.

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“Great businesses don’t only come from places where capital already gathers. Across Africa, ambitious founders are building real businesses, solving real problems and creating jobs far beyond the established startup hubs,” he said.

With the rebrand, #StartupSouth is positioning OffChart NXT as more than a conference. It is seeking to build a wider pipeline connecting overlooked founders to investors, corporates, technology players and markets.

The broader ambition is to make geography less important in determining which African businesses get discovered, funded and connected to opportunity.

Royal Ibeh is a senior journalist with years of experience reporting on Nigeria’s technology and health sectors. She currently covers the Technology and Health beats for BusinessDay newspaper, where she writes in-depth stories on digital innovation, telecom infrastructure, healthcare systems, and public health policies.

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