Norebase, the trade technology company building a single platform for businesses to start, scale and operate in any African country, has secured a $1M pre-seed funding round. The company is laser-focused on building two-pronged platforms that offer African and non-African businesses access to the African continent as one big market while creating a channel where African founders can access the international markets (such as the USA). Using Norebase, established companies can expand to new locations while new businesses can be incorporated in any African country of their choice in just a
OnePort 365, a platform that claims to solve problems by providing end-to-end digitization of freight management for stakeholders, is building an operating system for cross-border trade in Africa. It says its platform covers air freight, ocean freight, inland haulage (trucking, barge, and rail), pay-as-you-go warehousing, marine insurance, and customs brokerage. Traders can connect with shipping and inland transportation vendors and manage the entire process (from booking to payments), including real-time visibility of their shipments. When it comes to payments, OnePort 365 claims to aggregate different methods enabled by the Pan-African
Google has opened its first product development center in Africa. Located in Nairobi, the center is designed to build “transformative” products and services, company officials have said. It comes after the tech giant revealed plans to invest $1 billion over the next five years in October last year. The center is Google’s second major research and development investment in Africa after the tech giant set up an AI and research center in Ghana in 2019. The firm will reportedly hire more than 100 tech talent including software engineers, researchers, and
Emmanuel Okeleji is the co-founder and CEO at SeamlessHR, a cloud-based HR and payroll technology company that recently announced its $10 million series A. His work and entrepreneurial experiences span multiple industries, including healthcare, agriculture, and education. By the end of medical school, Okeleji had gone through a Goldman Sachs investment banking internship and kicked off an incorporated software development company alongside his current co-founder, Deji Lana. One of the tools they built back in the mid to late 2000s, a software tool for cooperatives, is still in use today.
Njoku Emmanuel is somewhat obsessed with coding. After his father seized his laptop for reportedly “coding too much” and not focusing on his studies, he dropped out of school to focus on coding. Speaking in-depth about his experience, he said: “any time I was going to school, I was going to charge my laptop and code. I didn’t tell my parents. When they gave me money to buy textbooks, I used it to buy coding courses on Udemy.” His father somehow found out he has been missing classes and invited him
Timeless London-based watch and accessories company, Vitae, reached two major milestones last year securing $1million in sales and distributed 5,000 solar lamps to Sub-Saharan school children. The solar-powered lamps were distributed in partnership with Pen to Paper Ghana, a Ghanaian non-profit that works to deliver lamps to students so that they can complete their school work with efficient lighting. But now its founder William Adoasi has just announced that the brand is launching each limited edition watch with an NFT. Talk about innovative! In a video, Adoasi said: “It’s William
Imalipay, which describes itself as a one-stop-shop financial services platform, has closed a $3 million seed in debt and equity round. The fintech raised an $800,000 pre-seed round in 2020. It was launched in late 2020 by Tatenda Furusa and Oluwasanmi Akinmusire after Furusa noticed the challenges ride-hailing drivers faced when accessing working capital or emergencies like running out of fuel in Nairobi. COO Akinmusire and Furusa met while working at Cellulant before starting ImaliPay. They received funding from Google Black Founders Fund last October before closing this seed round, which welcomed participation from Leonnis Investments.
Global digital payments giant Visa has opened up an innovation studio in Kenya, its first in Africa and sixth globally, after posts in Dubai, London, Miami, San Francisco and Singapore. The goal is to bring developers, Visa’s internal and external clients, and other partners together, to jointly build innovative payment and commerce solutions. It comes after the company previously used its existing innovation hubs to design products for the African market, including a collaboration with Nigerian Fintech Paga to develop new merchant acceptance solutions involving QR codes and NFC technology. “Sub-Saharan
ChainIDE, a firm helping develop company MVPs, and Conflux, a software delivery service for engineers, have teamed up to launch ‘The Hydra Developer Bootcamp’ for Web3 developers in Africa. The bootcamp aims to provide cohort members with hands-on blockchain 101 training, insight into the African blockchain, crypto industry, and a unique outlook on the future prospects of the Metaverse and Web 3. More than 200 people have reportedly already signed up for the event, according to TechCabal, while the first two modules have already attracted more than 500 views in
Churpy, a Kenyan fintech startup, has secured a $1 million seed round led by Unicorn Growth Capital. Also participating were Antler East Africa, Nairobi’s business angel network, and a group of Rally Cap LPs. The round will be used to support expansion to Egypt, Nigeria, and South Africa. The startup said it wants to transform how businesses manage the debt owed to them by their customers through its Software as a service (SaaS) product – which automates the labor-intensive processes of reconciling incoming payments and invoices that are still predominantly manual for most local
