Access to credit is a big problem in Africa. Indicina is building the infrastructure to unlock it. Indicina, the digital lending platform providing analytics-driven credit decisions for lenders based in Lagos, Nigeria, has announced its seed round of $3 million. Berlin-headquartered and pan-European venture capital firm Target Global led the round with participation from Kuda, Kippa, and Edukoya. The firm’s partner Ricardo Schäefer will join Indicina’s board. Greycroft also participated in this round, and so did RV Ventures. What does Indicina do? It builds products using Open Banking so credit providers can approve more people,
Telecommunications company, Comcast RISE, has announced that it will award 100 businesses in the area with $1 million in grants. The grants will be available to small businesses that are owned and operated by women and people of color including Black, Indigenous, Hispanic, and Asian American owners. Atlanta makes up one of the five cities included in the Comcast RISE Investment Fund, which has allotted a total of $5 million to be distributed across 500 businesses. To date, the company has been able to provide $16 million to businesses owned by people of
A young Nigerian has launched a new social media app known as ‘ShapClick,’ a social media platform that aims to take over Facebook, Twitter, and others. The Nigerian app developer, Mohammed Aliyu, boasted that ShapClick would surpass other social media apps because of the installation of more authentication to protect end-to-end encryption of private chat between users and guarantee safety. A spokesman for Aliyu, Mr. Hyacinth Chiweuba, told Vanguard that ShapClick as an indigenous messaging application would enable users to chat and make audio and video calls, including an unrestricted
Diarrha N’Diaye-Mbaye feels like a mother of two. Her entrepreneurial child, Ami Colé, celebrated its first birthday a few months ago, while her actual child, which arrived in February, is only a couple of months old. N’Diaye-Mbaye, 32, launched the clean makeup brand designed for women of color during the pandemic, and now it’s projected to bring in $2.5 million in revenues by the end of the year, according to reports by BeautyIndependent. It secured over $1 million in pre-seed funding. Katherine Power, Lindsay Peoples Wagner, Hannah Bronfman, Henry Davis, Greycroft,
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,
The gaming industry is set to reach $222 billion thanks in part to Gen Z consumers who are the biggest and most monetizable audience, according to a new report published by Data.ai. There are more than 2.7 billion gamers worldwide, and with a young demographic it’s scale and appeal is attracting luxury brands like Balenciaga, who became the first luxury brand to partner with Fortnite on four virtual outfits, or “skins”, alongside accessories, weaponry and a virtual Balenciaga destination in-game. And in November, luxury fashion brand Moncler followed with in-game
Major beauty retailers are boosting small, minority-owned businesses in a bid to support Black women entrepreneurs. As of last year, 17% of Black women in the U.S. were in the process of starting or running new businesses, according to the Harvard Business Review. That outpaces the 15% of white men and the 10% of white women who reported the same. But only 3% of Black women reported running ‘mature’ businesses. And when it comes to the traditional workforce unemployment rate, it remains high among Black women, at 5.5% in March, compared with
Deborah Gladney and Angela Muhwezi-Hall are the sister duo and creators behind QuickHire, a hiring platform that connects workers to service and skilled-trade jobs. In November, QuickHire raised $1.41 million in an oversubscribed round of funding, making Gladney and Muhwezi-Hall the first Black women in Kansas to raise over $1 million for a startup, according to AfroTech. The round is a pretty big deal because Black female startup founders received just 0.34% of the total $147 billion in venture capital invested in U.S. startups through the first half of 2021, according to Crunchbase. QuickHire,
“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 2017, Iris Nevins decided to leave her job as a teacher in Florida to attend a bootcamp in the Bay Area – but it was not without its struggles. On a Go-fund Me page – where she asked for support – she said: “I began learning how to code through online tutorials, and 7 months later, I quit my job as an 8th-grade history teacher, left my organization, and moved to the Bay Area to attend a coding BootCamp. “Making such a transition is very costly as I had
