WhatsApp is beginning to roll out a new feature that will provide its two billion users the option to encrypt their chat history backup in iCloud or Google Drive, patching a major loophole that has been exploited by governments to obtain and review private communication between individuals. WhatsApp has long encrypted chats between users on its app. But users…
Flutterwave Inc., a Nigerian payments firm, is seeking fresh funding at a valuation of $3 billion or more, a figure that would roughly triple its last valuation, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The startup, which has offices in Lagos, Nigeria and San Francisco, recently held discussions with potential investors, the people said….
African blockchain company Bitmama has closed a $350,000 pre-Seed round, led by Flori Ventures, with participation from Nigeria-based investment fund Emergence Capital, Fedha Capital, and a host of VCs and angel investors. The Bitmama pre-seed round will be used to grow its operational presence, expand its team, and penetrate new markets across the continent, while rapidly scaling crypto and payment…
American technology giant Microsoft announced today that it will pull its professional social network LinkedIn from the Chinese market later this year. Microsoft purchased LinkedIn for more than $26 billion back in 2016. The news comes amidst a flurry of regulatory changes in the Asian nation, as well as rising tensions between the company and the country. Two…
Twitter says it’s going to test a new ad format and placement on its platform. On Wednesday, Twitter Revenue Product Lead Bruce Falck said Twitter would begin showing ads on mobile devices inside conversation threads after the first, third and eighth replies. While the company stopped short of confirming the change would be permanent, it did say…
South African school management and communication startup d6 has raised an undisclosed funding round from a group of local VC companies, and is now targeting global growth. Founded in 2017, d6 has developed ed-tech solutions consisting of a comprehensive communication and payment facilitation solution between a school, parents and learners, and a fully integrated cloud-based school administration,…
Mobile network provider, MTN Nigeria announced in a statement that the nationwide service outage that was experienced by its subscribers on Saturday, 9th October 2021 was a result of a disruption in its core network. The South African-owned company is the largest telecoms provider in Nigeria with about 71 million subscribers in Nigeria as at 2020. The outage…
South Africa’s Health Minister Joe Phaahla has announced that children and teens between 12 and 17 will now be able to get vaccinated against COVID-19. The announcement came during a media briefing Friday morning, where Phaahla confirmed that the decision was influenced by recommendations made by the Ministerial Advisory Committee (MAC) on vaccinations during a…
Sudanese classifieds and marketplace platform alsoug has raised US$5 million in Series A funding in a round that includes Egyptian fintech unicorn Fawry. Founded in 2016, alsoug is Sudan’s largest classifieds platform, and the startup has raised a US$5 million Series A funding round in order to build out an associated fintech platform, Cashi. “From our earliest beginnings…
With IT job vacancies continuing to climb as companies struggle to recruit and obtain critical skills in South Africa, there is an opportunity to upskill or reskill individuals to meet this demand. Prudence Mabitsela, founder and MD of Dynamic DNA, a leading training and skills development company empowering Africa’s ICT generation, believes these skills are…
DATE: October 29, 2021 (10am – 12pm EST) LOCATION: Virtual THEME: Global Health and Mental Wellness in a Post Pandemic World? What’s Next?” MEMO: An initiative hosted by the Global Startup Ecosystem in partnership with Google Cloud, AWS, IBM Cloud, Hubspot, Sendgrid, & More with 10 Global Speakers and 3,000 Digital Delegates for the day…
Impact Africa Network is creating From Here Ventures, a $25 million venture capital fund that will invest in African firms. From Here Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in extraordinary entrepreneurs that are building revolutionary businesses in Africa. Impact Africa Network, a non-profit startup studio founded in 2019, is now in its…
You have heard about Rent Small Small, right? Well, the Nigerian property technology startup that is reorganising the home rental market has been accepted to join the Techstars Toronto Accelerator Programme starting this October. Rent Small Small is just celebrating its third year anniversary. Techstars is an operational investment company that helps founders and early-stage entrepreneurs scale their…
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has called on countries to make digital data flow for the benefit of all. On this, UNCTAD said the world needs a new global governance approach to enable digital data to flow across borders as freely as necessary and possible. The UN trade and development body…
IHS Towers is the biggest operator of mobile phone towers in Africa. It also has presence in the Middle East and South America. The company first made attempt to list its shares on Wall Street back in 2018, but the market sentiments weren’t quite positive enough. A total of 22,500,000 units of shares are set…
Payments company Stripe announced it’s building out a new crypto team to help build out the “future of Web3 payments,” according to public statements posted to Twitter on Tuesday. Stripe, which had once been among the first to support Bitcoin payments before leaving the market a few years ago, has been watching for the right time to get back…
South African student housing marketplace DigsConnect has secured a ZAR3 million (US$200,000) grant from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation to help university students from low-income backgrounds secure safe and affordable accommodation. Launched in 2018, the DigsConnect platform allows landlords, estate agents and property managers to post their property listings, with students then searching and filtering through these listings to…
Tech giant Microsoft has announced that it has expanded its Azure Availability Zones, making them generally available in the Johannesburg data centre region (SA North) of South Africa. Azure Availability Zones form an important building block of comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery strategy by ensuring resiliency and availability of business-critical applications and data through modernised…
French President Emmanuel Macron has made a new EUR130 million (US$150 million) commitment to support 500 African startups as part of a rejigged Digital Africa initiative. Launched in 2018 with the mission to equip African tech entrepreneurs with capabilities to design and scale up ground-breaking innovations for the real economy, Digital Africa brings together startups, academia, incubators, institutional…
There is good news for companies who wish to keep their data safe, and who are opposed to paying hackers ransom money in order to have critical data returned in the event of a hack. This input comes in the recent announcement that global giant Microsoft, the American multinational technology corporation, is investing in cloud…
Sudanese classifieds startup, alsoug has received a $5 million investment co-led by Egyptian fintech company, Fawry. The investment is the first foreign investment into the Northern African country since sanctions were lifted in 2020. alsoug is Sudan’s largest classifieds marketplace and allows consumers to buy and sell products including real estate, cars, electronics, and furniture as well…
WhatsApp is a breeding ground for scams and fake news that has gone viral, and while the Facebook-owned chat platform says it tries its best to scour these from its service, many still seep through. “We work diligently to reduce any spam messages that come through our system. Creating a safe space for users to…
Alphabet’s Google will tell its cloud customers the carbon emissions of their cloud usage and open satellite imagery to them for the first time for environmental analysis, as part of a push to help companies track and cut carbon budgets. The new features were among announcements Google Cloud made Tuesday to kick off its annual customer conference,…
Eden Life, Africa’s first home services app for scheduling food, laundry and cleaning services, has completed a $1.4m Seed round, led by UK-based LocalGlobe, along with participation from Samurai Incubate, Future Africa, Village Global, Rising Tide Africa and Enza Capital. This brings Eden Life’s total investment to date to $2m following pre-seed backing from all of Andela’s original co-founders, and additional accelerator…
Microsoft Africa Development Centre (Microsoft ADC), the premier Engineering Center for Microsoft, has announced the commencement of its Game of Learners Clinic, a 3-month intensive programme for students in the university and beginner developers across West Africa. The programme is scheduled to commence in October 2021 and will allow participants to level up on .Net,…
Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu of Lagos, professionals and experts in the technology sector have stressed the importance of technology in the drive towards the smart city project of the state. Specifically, Governor Sanwo-Olu expressed his administration’s commitment to greatly invest in technology, which according to him, is critical to the development of the state and nation…
After testing last month, Twitter is rolling out a feature to all web users that will let them remove followers without blocking them. This safety feature can be helpful if you want to avoid the repercussions of blocking someone — if a blocked user navigates to your profile after you block them, Twitter will tell them that…
A massive 2.4 terabytes per second (Tbps) Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack has been mitigated by Microsoft, the company says. The attack targeted an Azure customer in Europe and was 140% higher than the highest attack bandwidth volume Microsoft previously recorded in 2020. This attack occurred in early August of this year and is currently believed to have…
MTN Uganda is offering free shares to Kenyan investors in a bid to motivate them in buying stocks in the telecom firm. MTN Uganda yesterday opened an initial public offering (IPO) at $250-million yesterday. South Africa’s MTN Group is currently selling 4.47 billion shares in its Ugandan arm at a price of Ksh6.20 ($0.056) per…
Internet security provider Kaspersky has blocked more than 206,000 mobile malware attacks across the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa (META) region in just 6-months measured, between January to June 2021. Out of these attacks, a combined 30,000 originated from Nigeria (14,071), Kenya (10,697), and South Africa (5,499), respectively. Significantly, for the African countries monitored, Nigeria…