You should probably know what NFTs are by now since these three-letter words have been floating around our headlines, Twitter timelines, and TV screens for the past few weeks now. But for those of you who are behind on this latest trend – we’ll let you off and give you a little reminder. What is an NFT? NFT means a Non-fungible token. The best explanation I’ve seen for it is “Non-fungible” more or less means that it’s unique and can’t be replaced with something else. For example, a bitcoin is
Nigerian mobility tech startup Metro Africa Xpress Inc. (MAX)has secured $31 million in Series B funding. The latest funding round was led by the global private equity platform, Lightrock, making its first investment in the African mobility space. Through their Digital Africa initiative, the UAE-based international venture capital firm Global Ventures also took part in the round, as did existing investors Novastar Ventures and Proparco, the French development finance institution. MAX currently designs and assembles its line of electric motorcycles. The firm says, “beyond solving the mobility challenges in Africa, we
POCIT recently sat down with Bruce Hamilton, 30, and Mario Mitchel, 35, the founders of Mech Ventures, an early to late-stage venture capital firm that invests early in founders building fast-growing technology companies.
Black tech entrepreneurs in the United Kingdom are not shying away from speaking about the difficulties of getting funding from investors. Now they say they have to rely on foreign investors to get their businesses off the ground. When I first heard that this was happening – I wasn’t entirely shocked because this conversation had been long brewing for many years now. Between 2009 and 2019, only 0.24% of all venture capital available to UK startups went to just 38 Black founders, according to Extend Ventures, a non-profit that tracks the
A female-centered private equity fund dubbed Alitheia IDF has raised $100 million to support “gender-diverse businesses” in Africa. The news comes just one year after raising $75 million from investors. This is a massive achievement as women-only founders have received less than 1% of the nearly $5 billion raised by startups across Africa so far this year. This time around, involved in the fundraising was the African Development Bank, Bank of Industry Nigeria, FinDev Canada, Dutch Good Growth Fund, and the European Investment Bank. Closing the round, European Investment Bank (EIB) committed $24.6 million.
Deloitte Digital has announced a new initiative with The Stepladder Foundation to provide laptops, software, and study materials to UK students enrolling in Stepladder courses. The Stepladder Foundation is a charity offering flexible approaches to learning for Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic young people identified as disadvantaged. They’ve previously run programs across London, Birmingham, and the West of England- and are now focusing again on Greater London. They take referrals from schools to recruit, but some participants ‘step up’ and enroll themselves when they hear about the initiative. Their flagship programs last
CinetPay has secured $2.4 million in seed funding with venture capital funding from 4DX Ventures and unicorn Flutterwave. The startup, a payment gateway that allows e-merchants and merchants to accept mobile money and other payments in Francophone Africa, was founded by Idriss Monthe and Daniel Dindji in 2016. It acts as an online and point-of-sale payment solution for merchants to process payment from more than 130 payment operators — mobile money, bank cards, wallets. On the platform, merchants have to open an account and upload their KYC, integrate Cinet’s APIs, and collect payments. It came
Gender Equality in Tech (GET) Cities, led by SecondMuse Foundation and Break Through Tech, has launched a third city hub in Miami as part of Pivotal Ventures’ $50 million investment focused on diversifying the tech industry. The hub, dubbed GET Miami, will work collaboratively with the region’s tech ecosystem to propel more women, trans, and nonbinary people, particularly Black, Latino/a, Indigenous, and people of color, into tech education, careers, and leadership. The company’s main blueprint is to address the challenge of inclusion by leveraging three key pillars – academia, industry, and entrepreneurship. GET Miami will
TechRise, a program from tech organization P33 that’s been hosting a weekly pitch competition this year for Chicago’s Black and Latino entrepreneurs, will return next year after a successful 2021 run. The program was launched with a $ 5 million fund to invest in startups owned by diverse entrepreneurs up and down the city in April. TechRise aims to channel more funds to minority-owned startups, which receive just 1.9% of all startup funding in Chicago, according to P33. In addition, corporate sponsors like Verizon, Discover, and Valor Equity Partners have
Hundreds of Black women in Georgia will receive a guaranteed monthly income of $850 to improve their mental health and address the racial wealth gap. This money has no conditions attached, meaning they could use it towards their startup costs. The In Her Hands program will grant 650 Black women below the federal poverty line the cash with no conditions attached for two years. Launching early next year and distributing more than $13 million, it is poised to be one of the US’s largest guaranteed income pilot programs. The median Black family in the U.S.
