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
Y Combinator’s latest batch — W22 — features 414 startups from 42 countries, representing more than 80 sectors. America reportedly has the most representation while India comes in second with 32 startups and Nigeria sits in third, having delivered 18 startups. This is the first time an African country is appearing in the top three. The W22 batch of the Y Combinator programme, which played a role in the early days of companies like Airbnb, Coinbase and Dropbox among others, is currently taking place, and concludes with a demo day end of
Microsoft said this week that it had fired some employees and terminated partnerships in relation to allegations made public Friday of bribery in its sales efforts in the Middle East in recent years. The disclosure came regarding allegations of bribery and corruption in Microsoft operations in the region made public by a former manager for the company named Yasser Elabd, who worked for the tech giant throughout the Middle East and Africa from 1998 to 2018, when he says he was fired. In an essay published Friday on Lioness, an outlet that documents
alGROWithm, a Nigeria-based growth agency is building Africa’s first growth talent accelerator. While most digital schools and programmes like Decagon, and AltSchool focus on solving the engineering and product talent gaps, growth is largely unattended to but alGROWithm’s GTAP aims to bridge that gap. The Growth Talent Accelerator Programme (GTAP) is a two-phase training programme in partnership with Digital Africa’s Talent 4 Startups Initiative which will help develop world-class growth engineers on the continent. Founded by Bili Sule in 2018, the agency uses growth engineering to design and implement sustainable growth models and strategies for African startups
Who Is Babajide Duroshola, The Ex-SafeBoda Executive, Who Joined M-KOPA To Lead Its Africa Expansion
M-KOPA, an African connected asset financing platform that provides underbanked customers in Africa to essential products including solar lighting, televisions, fridges, smartphones, and financial services, raised $75M after it clocked 2 million customers across four African markets. The “growth equity round” highlighted by M-KOPA in its press statement is its fifth equity fundraise – it has raised similar rounds of debt, too and in total, its equity raise stands at $190 million. It was previously backed by the CDC Group and Light rock took part in this round alongside LocalGlobe’s
In 2021, venture capital invested just $115 million in digital media globally, a tenth of the $1.1billion it funded in 2015, but not much came to Africa. Digital newsrooms in Africa are reportedly said to be more likely to receive story grants than business funding, with a few exceptions like OMG Digital. Of the reported $4.3–$5 billion raised by African startups in 2021 where fintech received 53–63% of the volume, digital media companies are one of many sectors that have traditionally been overlooked in the conversation of tangible ventures. But last week Big Cabal
The BBC reported nearly a quarter of the 76,000 foreign students in Ukraine were African in 2020, citing government data. Campaigners say these students were drawn to the nation’s relatively inexpensive tuition and easy access to European labor markets. 2015 data shows that foreign students inject upwards of $500 million a year into the Ukrainian economy — almost the entire sum of the financing for the country’s public higher education, according to a former education official. Black Women for Black Lives, a new coalition focused on helping Black residents escape
