Seven African startups are among the eight selected to take part in the inaugural cohort of the Last Mile Money Accelerator, a four-month programme managed by IDEO and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The aim of the Last Mile Money Accelerator is to supercharge inclusive fintech startups with grant capital, world class…
Moroccan B2B e-commerce and fintech startup Chari has raised a US$5 million seed round which values the company at US$70 million and sets it up for expansion into French-speaking Africa. Founded last year by husband and wife team Ismael and Sophia Belkhayat, Chari.ma allows traditional proximity store owners in Morocco to order products and have them delivered….
South African prop-tech venture building group Castle One has received a “significant investment” from HL Hall and Sons Holdings in a deal it says will unlock new, synergistic value for the benefit of the real estate industry, both locally and abroad. Founded by tech entrepreneurs Jonothan Rawson and Mark Forrester, Castle One has been active in the…
Nigerian fintech startup Bitmama has closed a US$350,000 pre-seed funding round to grow its operational presence, expand its team, and penetrate new markets across the continent. Launched in 2019, Bitmama provides a secured blockchain infrastructure that allows users across Africa to transact Bitcoin, Ethereum, Celo and six other cryptocurrencies. With users across Nigeria and Ghana, Bitmama has…
Keeping track of your finances can be one of the most important things you do. It allows you to manage your money and it will help you determine what you should spend your money on and what things might be better to wait on or go without for now. It’s now easier than ever before…
Contactless payments made using mobile phones will almost double over the next two years – twice as fast as the growth of contactless card payments. A study by Juniper Research found that the volume of mobile contactless transactions rill rise from 26 billion in 2021 to 49 billion in 2023, driven by enhanced security, convenience,…
Kenyan agri-tech startups have been invited to apply for the O-Farms accelerator programme, which is focused on circular agribusiness with the goal of making circularity a mainstream approach for improved rural livelihoods and sustainability. Funded by the IKEA Foundation, O-Farms is led by Bopinc and Village Capital and is focused on accelerating the next generation…
Much like my compadre, Jerry Hildenbrand, I buy tech across a wide range of popular brands. For me, there’s really no such thing as “brand loyalty” as I, too, just want to be able to use “cool tech.” But there’s one section of the tech market I won’t touch anymore: any Android-brand tablet. I’m not here…
Tunisian data management and analysis startup Biware has raised a MAD3.5 million (US$1.2 million) seed funding round to help it expand its team and launched new branches. Founded in 2011 by Mohamed Amine Boussarsar and Walid Kaâbachi, Biware assists businesses in extracting value from their data for strategic purposes, such as increasing revenues, lowering costs, and reducing…
South African startup Stone Three, a leading industry 4.0 solution business that combines expert services with the power of machine learning to solve problems that increase operational productivity and keep people safer, healthier and happier, has raised expansion funding from Knife Capital. The end-to-end solutions for AI-augmented digital productivity, health and workplace safety offered by Stone…
Facebook had its largest outage ever that took down WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and even Facebook’s internal tools for over six hours on Monday night. The social giant blamed the outage across its platforms on configuration changes made to routers that coordinate network traffic. “This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our…
Peer-to-peer (P2P) cryptocurrency trading platforms are now the engine of growth as Africa pulls ahead of the rest of the world in grass-roots adoptions of virtual cash. Retail-sized transfers make up a larger share of the continent’s cryptocurrency activity on the continent with P2P enabling the practical use of digital money. In countries like Nigeria and…
The Airtel Africa Group has announced the new appointment of Olusegun “Segun” Ogunsanya, as its Managing Director (MD) and CEO. Ogunsanya took the helm of the group as of 1 October 2021. This comes as former CEO, Raghu Mandava, who led Airtel Africa since 2016, was announced to be stepping down from the company’s board of directors…
YouTube announced on Monday that it’s expanding video action campaigns (one of Google’s interactive ad types for video) to connected televisions (CTV) to make YouTube ads more shoppable. The company says this new move will help advertisers drive more online sales and grow their businesses. For context, when viewers see a video action campaign on…
The Engineering team at Facebook has revealed the underlying factors that led to six hours of global outage that also affected WhatApp and Instagram. The global social networking company lost billions of dollars to the outages that started about 4.43pm (WAT) on Monday. According to NetBlocks, which tracks internet outages and their impact, the outage had…
Less than a third of African countries have achieved the global goal of vaccinating 10% of their populations against Covid-19 by the end of September, according to the World Health Organization. This is an indicator of the challenge the continent is facing in procuring vaccines amidst their uneven distribution for poorer countries of the world….
Lagos-based startup smallChops is planning on expanding to other cities in Nigeria and across Africa having seen an average 20 per cent month-on-month growth since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Formed in August 2016 and first reported on by Disrupt Africa way back in 2017, smallChops allows users to order different finger food – “small chops” – packages…
South Africa’s water system is in trouble. In the 2020/21 financial year alone, there were over 55,800 pipe bursts, over a third of reservoirs have supply problems, and years of underfunding of infrastructure replacement and maintenance have drastically reduced the lifespan of around a quarter of the country’s asset base. If there’s one lesson we can…
People who visit a fancy place for the first time tend to take pictures to document the memory, sometimes by posting on social media. Being the authority on cool or quaint spots can be a ladder for influence, attracting advertisers and brand endorsements. But where do people find fancy places? For a birthday hangout two years…
According to a report published by the World Bank, it was observed that while Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) create 7 out of 10 jobs in emerging markets, access to finance has remained a key constraint to SME growth. The Report noted that access to finance is one of the most cited obstacles facing SMEs to…
The German government has pledged €100 million to the African Development Bank’s (AfDB) Sustainable Energy Fund for Africa (SEFA), demonstrating its support for efforts to harness Africa’s renewable energy potential and accelerate the continent’s transition to sustainable energy sources. The announcement was made at the United Nations High-Level Dialogue on Energy, which took place on…
The World Bank has approved $11.5bn in lending to Western and Central African countries for 98 operations. The World Bank made this known in its ‘Annual Report 2021: From crisis to green, resilient, and inclusive recovery’. The bank said: “In fiscal 2021, the bank approved $11.5bn in lending to Western and Central Africa for 98 operations, including…
The ninth edition of the Angel Fair Africa event will take place in Mauritius in November, with Dr James Mwangi and Esther Dyson as keynote speakers. The annual Angel Fair Africa is an event that brings together accelerators, incubators and emerging businesses from across the African continent and investors to do deals. This year’s edition takes place…
South African startup abela is supporting the informal economy with the same autonomy and security that banks offer to the formal economy via a QR code-enabled system. Launched in August 2020, abela started as a QR code-enabled payment platform offering users without a bank account the ability to receive tips and payments digitally. Since then, it has…
China, the most populous nation in the world, passed its first significant data privacy legislation in August. Moving forward, any global business or aspiring startup doing any type of trade or offering services online likely will be affected because they’ll be engaging with Chinese residents covered by the Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL). Although this seems like…
“New Zealand’s central bank is exploring the possibility of issuing a digital currency, saying the benefits it would bring include its potential use as a monetary policy tool,” reports Bloomberg. The central bank cites “the declining use, acceptance and availability of cash in New Zealand, and emerging innovations in private money, namely stablecoins.”While developing a central…
Last week, the Wall Street Journal published internal research from Facebook showing that the social media company knows precisely how toxic its own product is for the people who use it. But tonight, we learned how the Journal obtained those documents: A whistleblower named Frances Haugen, who spoke with CBS News’ 60 Minutes about the ways Facebook is poisoning…
Over 264 million of the global populations are affected by depression, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) report. It was also noted that the causes of depression include complex interactions between social, psychological, and biological factors. Life events such as childhood adversity, loss, and unemployment contribute to and may catalyze the development of depression….
During his address to the nation on Thursday evening, SA President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that the Department of Health would begin rolling out vaccination certificates as the government made its final effort to reach its goal of vaccinating over 33-million people by December 2021. Currently, 17-million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine have been administered, with…
In July, video conferencing mainstay Zoom announced that it was stepping into its first major acquisition buying cloud call centre service provider Five9 for $14.7-billion in an all-stock transaction. The deal was supposed to be finalised within “the first half of 2022.” Now, CNBC reports that Zoom’s agreement with Five9 has fallen through after Five9’s shareholders rejected the deal….