All about Business.
Circle, founded in 2020 by Nancy Kamal and Essam Maged and sponsored by 500 Global, makes it easy for real estate developers and property owners to interact with tenants. Milango, on the other hand, was founded by Amr Mostafa in 2021 and provides business clients with a suite of community management solutions to help them…
TMCEL customers, one of Mozambique’s largest telecom firms, will now be able to benefit from the financial convenience provided by Ericsson’s mobile financial services solutions, as TMCEL went live with the Ericsson Wallet Platform yesterday. Ericsson’s solution is expected to broaden the financial transaction community by contributing to economic and digital development, as well as…
Boxconn, a Ghanaian logistics startup, has already launched operations in Nigeria and Botswana and plans further expansion after facilitating thousands of deliveries. Boxconn, a logistics software platform that allows businesses and individuals to deliver on-demand, was founded in January 2021 by a team formed during the MEST Africa program in Accra. It provides a white-label…
Companies are using data to make more informed business decisions now more than ever before in a world of increased competition and ever-changing customer expectations. This data-driven approach has permeated almost every industry, with financial services being a forerunner. The value of data and analytics is derived from their ability to solve real-world problems through…
The Hatchery, an international clean-tech startup incubator based in Cape Town, has announced a strategic ZAR5 million (US$330,000) partnership with Valinor, a Norwegian clean-tech investment firm focused on sustainable solutions that promote economic growth. Disrupt Africa reported in November on the launch of The Hatchery, an international clean-tech incubator based in Cape Town that invests…
Silvertree Holdings has completed the full acquisition of South African meal kit delivery company UCOOK for US$12.3 million. Silvertree Holdings had previously invested in the startup, which has now been acquired entirely, with co-founders David Torr, Christopher Verster-Cohen, and Katherine Barry exiting and Silvertree’s Peter Allerstorfer and colleagues taking over the executive reins. In the…
TradeDepot, a Nigerian B2B e-commerce and embedded finance startup, has announced the acquisition of Green Lion, Ghana’s largest and fastest growing B2B e-commerce platform, in order to accelerate service delivery across the country. TradeDepot, which was founded in 2016, connects African consumer goods brands directly to a target market of several million retail outlets across…
According to a press report published by Forbes Middle East, OPay has received widespread support in Egypt. The Nigeria-based fintech firm is unquestionably one of Africa’s fintech unicorns and one of the continent’s most valuable startups. Since its initial launch in Egypt at the beginning of 2021, it has also been regarded as one of…
PayJustNow, a Cape Town-based fintech startup, has sold a controlling stake in its business to Weaver Fintech as it seeks to expand in the buy now, pay later (BNPL) space. PayJustNow, which launched in August 2019, is the largest business of its kind in Southern Africa, with over 180,000 customers and over 1,000 retailers carrying…
According to Bloomberg, the CDC Group, the United Kingdom’s development-finance arm, will provide a $100 million credit facility to First Bank of Nigeria Ltd. to help support women-owned businesses and small businesses in Africa’s largest economy. The funding will “address the challenge of limited access to capital faced by the country’s under-banked and underserved groups,”…
JPMorgan, the world’s largest bank, has become the first financial institution to enter the metaverse. Customers will be able to visit the bank’s Onyx lounge in the blockchain-based virtual world decentraland. The Onyx Lounge offers Ethereum-based services to JPMorgan customers, which are all detailed in a recently published report. The bank has issued reports on…
Zomato has reiterated its focus on the quick-commerce segment and announced an additional $400 million investment in the space over the next two years. The company also expanded to 180 new cities, bringing its total presence in India to over 700. Zomato’s adjusted revenue — a combination of revenue from operations and customer delivery charges…
Flutterwave, a Nigerian fintech unicorn, has unveiled new product offerings and features for individuals, business owners, and developers just two days after raising $250 million in Series D funding. This announcement was made on the company’s official social media accounts. Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga Agboola stated in a video announcement that Flutterwave is opening up a…
FSD Africa and Nigeria’s National Insurance Commission (NAICOM) have collaborated to launch BimaLab, an accelerator program designed to accelerate the development and adoption of digital insurance solutions. BimaLab Nigeria’s mission is to fill gaps in the insurance market by educating, nurturing, and promoting innovators and insurtech startups. The program will draw on Kenya’s BimaLab I…
The Createch Accelerator focuses on businesses that employ innovation or technology to improve value chains in Africa’s creative industries or to address market problems in these value chains. The program’s goal is to provide knowledge, networks, and assistance to companies operating at the interface of technology and creativity, allowing them to accelerate their route…
LoftyInc Capital Management is a venture capital business with the goal of “creating an ecosystem of Africans investing in Africans solving African problems.” The business announced the first closing of its US$10 million LoftyInc Afropreneurs Fund 3 (LAF3) in September, as it ramped up its participation in the African startup area. This followed after…
Paratus announced in February that it had reached an agreement with Google to be the landing partner for the Equiano cable in Namibia. The agreement includes the construction and management of a cable landing station for the Equiano subsea cable in Swakopmund. Paratus has already completed the construction and is on track with its aggressive…
DigsConnect, a South African student accommodation marketplace, now has over one million listed beds. The DigsConnect platform, launched in 2018 by Alexandria Procter and Greg Ramsay-Keal, allows landlords, estate agents, and property managers to post their property listings, with students then searching and filtering through these listings to find accommodation that meets their needs, as…
Finance options and transactions are undergoing a massive transformation all over the world. Payments, lending, asset, and wealth management are all being reshaped by digital technologies as individuals and organizations adopt more effective digital solutions to solve problems in virtually every aspect of life. Nigeria’s financial landscape has not lagged. According to a McKinsey report…
Mdundo, an Africa-focused music streaming service, is counting on more collaborations with telcos across the continent to increase its earnings and user base. Last year, the company signed agreements with MTN and Airtel in Nigeria, as well as Vodacom in Tanzania, which appear to be paying off, as its user base nearly doubled as it…
Kenya’s central bank has asked the public to share their thoughts on the possibility of adopting a digital currency by May 20th, just one day after it was revealed that Zambia is also testing its viability. Nigeria was the first African country to launch its central bank digital currency (CBDC), dubbed the eNaira, in October…
A few months into the coronavirus pandemic, in April 2020, a team of four African-origin students in Sweden—including The Gambia-born Lamin Darboe, who had recently moved to Stockholm to pursue a master’s degree—participated in a climate action challenge organized by the Norrsken Foundation and Stockholm Innovation & Growth (Sting). Though the team, which also included…
SendChamp, a Nigerian startup, provides communication APIs and customer relationship management tools to developers and businesses, allowing them to reach their customers through various messaging channels. SendChamp was founded by Goodness Kayode and Damilola Olotu with the goal of improving customer relations for both technical and non-technical business owners. The APIs provided by the startup…
Docklands Ventures has acquired South African startup ParkUpp, a marketplace that connects owners of parking spaces with companies and individuals in need of parking. ParkUpp was founded in 2016 with the goal of improving the parking experience for shopping malls. After realizing that the market was too small, the company pivots in 2018 and launches…
Greycroft and Tiger Global, two American venture capital firms, led a $15 million Series A funding round for Nigerian investment platform Bamboo, which allows Nigerians to buy and sell US equities in real time via their mobile computers or phones. Motley Fool Ventures, Saison Capital, Chrysalis Capital, and Y-Michael Combinator’s Seibel all participated in the…
Lami, an insurance technology company, has announced the acquisition of Bluewave Insurance Agency, a Nairobi-based insurtech firm, for an undisclosed sum, allowing it to reach Africa’s underserved population and fill the existing insurance gap. Lami will continue its goal of democratizing insurance goods and services for low-income Africans by providing users with accessible and affordable…
According to Bloomberg News, Ford Motor is planning an additional $20 billion investment in the development of electric vehicles. According to the report, which cited people familiar with the plan, the $10 billion to $20 billion investment will be spread out over the next five to ten years and will include converting its current factories…
There has never been a more exciting time to be in the African startup scene. According to a recent BCG report, the number of local startups that received funding increased by 46 percent between 2015 and 2020, a growth rate six times faster than the global average. The very nature of the startups in our…
BlackBerry announced on Monday that it will sell its legacy patents, primarily related to mobile devices, messaging, and wireless networking, to a special purpose vehicle formed to acquire the company’s patent assets for $600 million. BlackBerry stated that the transaction with Catapult IP Innovations will have no effect on customers’ use of its products or…
Many organizations are seeking ways to offer their products and services to customers in an efficient way in order to save time, ease the processing of the orders and provide the highest quality of delivery as at the expected time. One major opportunity that most start-ups are not taking advantage of is the availability of data in…