TechVillage Innovation Centre × Avest
Scaling a Decade of Expertise
TechVillage Innovation Centre has spent ten years at the heart of Zimbabwe’s entrepreneurship ecosystem — mentoring founders, running programmes, and building connections across the region’s innovation landscape. Over that decade, their team built something that cannot be manufactured quickly: deep, practical knowledge of what founders need, when they need it, and who in the ecosystem can help them get there.
The challenge was not expertise. It was scale.
With a lean core team and a growing founder community, TechVillage faced a familiar tension: the more valuable their support became, the harder it was to deliver it consistently. Founder support was largely reactive — driven by who reached out, when, and through which channel. There was no structured way to capture requests, assign the right specialist, track progress, or measure the cumulative impact of the team’s work. The knowledge was there. The infrastructure to scale it was not.
At the same time, TechVillage was evolving. The organisation’s rebrand from Innovation Hub to Innovation Centre reflected something deeper than a name change: a strategic shift from an inward-facing local ecosystem to an outward-facing regional node — connecting founders not just to internal resources, but to a broader network of programmes, partners, incubators, and service providers across the innovation landscape.
Scaling founder support and building a more connected ecosystem were, in fact, the same problem.
What Avest Built
Avest — the venture studio capability within Assegai Analytics — partnered with TechVillage to translate their institutional knowledge into a platform. The result is the Startup Clinic: a purpose-built platform that formalises and scales TechVillage’s founder support model.
The Startup Clinic brings together the key actors in TechVillage’s support system — founders, specialists, hub partners, and the core team — in a single, structured environment. Founders can raise support requests across a defined range of business areas. Specialists are matched to cases based on expertise. The team manages workload, tracks progress, and maintains oversight across every active engagement. Ecosystem partners are integrated into the platform, enabling the team to route founders to the right programmes and actors rather than handling every need internally.
The platform was designed around TechVillage’s existing way of working, not a generic template. The goal was to operationalise what the team already knew how to do — and make it repeatable at a scale that was previously impossible.
The Outcome
The most direct measure of impact is capacity. The Startup Clinic enables TechVillage’s core team to support five times more founders than their previous model allowed — without a proportional increase in headcount. The same expertise, now structured and scalable.
Beyond raw capacity, the platform has shifted how TechVillage operates as an ecosystem actor. Rather than functioning solely as a direct service provider, TechVillage can now actively route founders to the right partners, programmes, and specialists across the innovation network — fulfilling, in practical terms, the vision behind the rebrand. The Startup Clinic is both an internal operations tool and an ecosystem coordination layer.
For TechVillage, this is what it looks like to turn a decade of domain expertise into a digital asset.
About This Engagement
The Startup Clinic was designed and built by Avest, the venture studio arm of Assegai Analytics. Avest builds platforms, products, and digital tools — for Assegai, with partners, and for clients — translating strategic intent into working software. This engagement is a co-branded venture: Avest provided the technology and build capability; TechVillage provided the domain expertise, ecosystem relationships, and institutional knowledge that give the platform its depth.
The Startup Clinic is live at startupclinic.org.
Avest is the venture studio capability within Assegai Analytics — a Data, AI, and Privacy Transformation partner. We advise. We operationalise. We build.
