UK Minister for Women and Equalities Liz Truss has launched a task force chaired by Anne Boden, CEO and founder of Starling Bank, focused on supporting women-owned businesses. Black entrepreneur and investment manager June Angelides MBE is part of the force. She is best known for starting the UK’s first child-friendly coding school for mums, Mums in Tech, while on her second maternity leave from Silicon Valley Bank. Angelides is also one of a handful of Black women in venture capital. Launching today, the task force will use its convening
South African educational technology (edtech) startup FoondaMate has secured $2 million seed funding in a round led by LocalGlobe, a UK-based venture capital firm, to drive uptake of its WhatsApp and Facebook-based learning chatbot across the globe. How does it work? Foondamate helps students with their revision by giving them immediate answers to questions and access to revision papers, while also guiding them in responses to questions. It aims to level the playing field in education by empowering the 345 million+ students who currently have limited access to internet-enabled education
Facial recognition company Clearview AI, popular for gathering images from the internet to create a global facial recognition database, has been fined more than £7.5 million by the UK’s privacy watchdog. The fine comes just months after a trio of senators called on federal agencies to stop using facial recognition technology built by Clearview AI. In letters signed by Sens. Edward Markey and Jeffrey Merkley, as well as House Reps Pramila Jayapal and Ayanna Presley, the technology was said to pose “unique threats” to Black communities, other communities of color,
“Anyone can make music on their PC now,” laments DJ Sumbody of Ayepyep, Ngwana Daddy and Monate Mpolaye fame. “You don’t have to go to the studio. You get a program, you do beats. If they can master it, it’s a track, it’s out there. It’s simple now.” While preceding genres and music movements have taken advantage of the ready availability of software that can be purchased or digitally cracked to mimic a physical studio, amapiano has been the most radical departure from established and entrenched ways of making, marketing,
In February, Prestige magazine published a list of the top-selling pieces of crypto-art to date, with all entries sharing some common traits – they were all men and all white. And when you look into the news reports of those who’re supposedly ‘killing it’ in the NFT or crypto space most of them look the same. But here at POCIT – we’re all about shining a light on the communities that are sometimes cast to the side and forgotten even when they’re making a considerable impact. Before we begin – for
Nzambi Matee, a 30-year-old who quit her job in oil and gas to work on her passion full-time, has created a lightweight and low-cost building material that is made of recycled plastic with sand to make bricks that are stronger than concrete material. Every day her enterprise, Gjenge Makers, churns out 1,500 bricks made from industrial and household plastic that otherwise would be dumped in the city’s overflowing garbage heaps. In 2021, the team recycled 50 tonnes of plastic but Matee has ambitions to double that amount this year as
Back in April 2021, João Gualberto, the district mayor of Mata de São João, held an in-person auction letting Brazilian technology companies bid for a contract to supply facial recognition technology for the public school system. The $162,000 tender was won by PontoiD, and in July that year, two public schools — João Pereira Vasconcelos and Celia Goulart de Freitas — began secretly rolling out the facial recognition system, without informing parents or students in advance, according to research by Rest Of World. Students were registered on the system, which
CarePoint, a Black-owned technology-driven healthcare startup that seeks to make healthcare accessible, has just raised a $10 million bridge round to accelerate its growth across Africa. How does it work? Patients are able to access care virtually through CarePoint’s MyCareMobile app, which links them to diverse services through teleconferencing, including consultations with their doctors, test results, and 24-hour emergency response. The funding round was led by TRB Advisors and brings the total funding raised by CarePoint to $30 million. It follows an $18 million Series A round announced in November last year.
Recent YC graduate Topship has raised a $2.5 million seed round months after concluding the recent YC winter batch with Flexport as its lead investor. Other backers include Y Combinator, Soma Capital, Starling Ventures, Olive Tree Capital, Capital X and True Capital. The individual investors in the round include Immad Akhund, Mercury CEO and Arash Ferdowsi, co-founder of Dropbox. Topship is considered a borderline local and international shipping solution between digital freight and e-commerce fulfillment. It was founded in 2020 during the pandemic when co-founder and CEO Moses Enenwali reportedly noticed a surge in merchants’ needs for
Identitypass today announced that it has raised $2.8 million in seed funding, months after graduating from Y Combinator. The round also comes a few months after the startup raised $360,000 in pre-seed investment last November, bringing its total funding to $3.1 million. The startup, launched in 2021, is focused on making it possible for digital businesses in Africa to easily verify their customers within seconds. It’s a simple compliance and data security platform that allows online businesses to easily verify and confirm a transacting party’s identity using existing forms of identification. Identitypass
