Nana Ghartey’s voice assistant software may have started out in his grandmother’s house, but it’s now being used by the thousands of older and visually-impaired people all over Ghana excluded by Western voice technology. How did he get into tech? Ghartey taught himself mobile app development and built desktop applications, websites, and eventually mobile games, none of which were part of his school curriculum, by reading the programming textbooks that an uncle visiting from the US had left behind. Here’s his story. In 2010, the wealthiest American tech companies had
Brothers Raees and Ameer Cajee promised patrons they could make small fortunes off Bitcoin using their company, Africrypt. But in 2021, the brothers fled South Africa, claiming criminals had hacked the platform. According to angry investors, they fled with $3.6 billion in Bitcoin. The brothers were accused of carrying out the biggest Bitcoin heist in history. Local media, including Independent Online and ITWeb, were the first to report on the case. In 2019, Ameer Cajee and his younger brother, Raees Cajee, founded the crypto investment app Africrypt. The company claimed it used a trading
Uber today announced a significant milestone — it has completed 1 billion rides across all its markets in Africa. This milestone for Uber is coming nearly a decade after the mobility tech company set up shop on the continent in Johannesburg, South Africa. It has expanded to 30 cities including 21 in South Africa — its most dominant market, four cities each in Kenya and Nigeria, and two in Ghana. “Since entering the market in 2013, we have created over 6 million economic opportunities in over 50 cities across SSA
Nigeria’s Autochek has announced its acquisition of KIFAL Auto, a Moroccan automotive technology startup, to drive its expansion into North Africa. This announcement comes months after it acquired the Ugandan and Kenyan operations of Cheki, an online car marketplace. Autochek looks to bring Africa’s sales and servicing of cars online. It also aims to build the financial infrastructure to drive the penetration of auto financing across Africa. In October last year, the firm raised $13.1 million in a seed round and is backed by several investors, including pan-African VC firms TLcom Capital, 4DX Ventures,
“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,
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
Originally by Musawenkosi Cabe, NewFrame The exploitation of workers by tech giants is another pandemic while the world is battling Covid-19. Labor experts have called for the regulation of the gig economy, where loopholes see workers carrying all the risk with no benefits. As the world moves towards digitization, or what is termed the fourth industrial revolution, new forms of unregulated and precarious work have emerged. This space is dominated by tech giants such as Amazon, Uber, Facebook and Apple. Amazon made obscene profits in the midst of Covid-19. It
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
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
Last week, Yep!, a “financial super app” with payments, remittance, and banking features, announced that it has raised $1.5 million in a pre-seed round led by pan-African VC Greenhouse Capital. The San Francisco- and Lagos-headquartered startup was started by Olaoluwa Awojoodu, who then teamed up with Airende Ojeomogha and Garry Ottosen to start Yep!. The startup plans to go live across the five markets where E-Settlement is present, serving digital financial services to consumers, small business owners, and merchants. They also have a mission to enhance financial inclusion by leveraging PayCentre Africa — the startup’s agent banking platform, to
