Posts in Category

Industry

Video-sharing platform, TikTok, has partnered up with Cyversity to connect underrepresented individuals with more opportunities in the cybersecurity world.  TikTok is championing the #SeeYourselfInCyber hashtag as a part of a new HBCU program set to launch later this fall. The program, made up of an online mentoring syllabus, will host in-person events at HBCUs to aid students with the skills needed to work within the cybersecurity sector.  The initiative aims to solve the issue of 3.5 million unfilled cybersecurity jobs by awarding 50 students a scholarship representing the platform’s ongoing commitment to helping the next

Founded in 2017 by Hilda Moraa, Pezesha is a Kenyan digital lending infrastructure that allows both traditional and non-traditional financial institutions to offer working capital to micro-, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). Now, the startup has secured an $11 million pre-Series A equity-debt round led by Women’s World Banking Capital Partners II with participation from Verdant Frontiers Fintech Fund, cFund and Cardano blockchain builder Input Output Global (IOG). The round also included a $5 million debt from Talanton and Verdant Capital Specialist Funds. Access to finance remains a key growth constraint

Kuda, a digital bank based in Nigeria and the U.K., has confirmed via email to media that it has laid off less than 5% of its 450-strong workforce, equivalent to about 23 people. There have been other startups, especially those that have raised vast sums of venture capital within the last year or two, that have laid off hundreds of staff; for instance, Swvl laid off 400 people; Wave, approximately 300; 54gene, 95; and Vezeeta, 50. The layoffs come a year after Kuda, which provides zero to minimal fees on cards, account maintenance and transfers,

One young company attracting interest in the field of autonomous driving is Heex Technologies, a POC-led startup offering a “smart data management platform” to help carmakers sift through the sea of data required to put autonomous vehicles on the road.  CEO and co-founder Bruno Mendes Da Silva was initially focused on solving the pollution crisis before this idea. “My original focus was on fighting pollution — I first launched an electric vehicle rental service after an academic exchange in Shanghai. [It was then that] I realized there are more problems

US-based fintech startup Deposits raised $5M in seed funding to develop its platform. The funding round led by ATX Venture Partners also included Cabal Fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and others.  The Dallas-based finance startup, co-founded by Joseph Akintolatyo and Daniel Paramo, is a cloud-based fintech platform that helps credit unions, community banks, insurers, retailers, and brands seamlessly implement digital banking tools onto their platforms. The program also allows companies to put together a package of financial features, including mobile apps, debit and credit accounts, virtual cards, peer-to-peer payments, and lending. Akintolatyo and Paramo launched Deposits

Nigeria-based fintech startup, Anchor has received over $1M in investment to help expand its workforce and services.  The startup fund program is backed by fund program, Y Combinator, and other venture capital firms, including Byld Ventures, Luno Expeditions, Niche Capital, Mountain Peak Capital, and angel investors such as the founder of SeamlessHR, Emmanuel Okeleji.  Co-founded in 2021 by Segun Adeyemi, Olamide Sobowale, and Gbekeloluwa Olufotebi, the banking-as-a-service platform, allows consumers to embed accounts, cards, payments, lending, and other financial features to their products within minutes.  “We’re now seeing a new development where businesses want to

Black-owned startup, thirdweb, has raised $24 million in investment funding. The funding round led by Haun Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Shopify, and Polygon, also included Shrug VC, Joseph Lacob, and others.  The ground-breaking tech startup founded by Steven Bartlett and Furqan Rydhan aims to provide developers with a Web3 development kit to help reduce the time and cost of building and launching applications.  The developer tool assists programmers in building NFTs, marketplaces, DAOs, and more.  “Web3 is the most important technological shift I’ve witnessed in my lifetime,” said Steven Bartlett, co-founder

Silicon Valley-based startup, Sanas, is working to build real-time voice-altering technology that aims to make international workers sound more “Westernized.”  For many years, Black workers have been advised to use their “white voice” when communicating with colleagues or customers in a professional working environment. Additionally, movie adaptations such as “Sorry To Bother You” show that Black workers achieve higher success rates when they choose to emulate a “whiter” voice.   Despite the program working to “protect the diverse voice identities of the world,” many wonder whether the product is actively working to remove unconscious

Capitol Music Group has severed ties with the FN Meka project following accusations that the AI rapper perpetuated racial stereotypes online.  FN Meka, a virtual “robot rapper,” created by the founders of Factory New, a “first of its kind, next-generation music company specializing in virtual beings.”  In a short time, FN Meka amassed over 10 million followers on TikTok and 500,000 monthly Spotify subscribers based on music and lyrics generated by an AI based on popular rap music.  The robot rapper, which industry professionals described as a “preview of what’s

If you’re a person with dark skin, you may be more likely than your white friends to get hit by a self-driving car, according to a 2019 study out of the Georgia Institute of Technology. That’s because automated vehicles may better detect pedestrians with lighter skin tones. The study’s authors started out with a simple question: How accurately do state-of-the-art object-detection models, like those used by self-driving cars, detect people from different demographic groups? To find out, they looked at a large dataset of images that contain pedestrians. They divided up the

1 27 28 29 30 31 56 Page 29 of 56