Yesterday, we learned that Kimberly Bryant, the founder of Black Girls Code, had been removed from leading the nonprofit. In fact, she allegedly learned that she had been pushed out of her company after she lost access to her computer and email account. In a statement, its board said it’s currently investigating allegations of “workplace impropriety,” but Bryant remains a staff member. Not many news outlets were covering the situation, and we came to this shocking revelation from a series of tweets that Bryant tweeted out herself. She wrote: “Press
Black Girls Code founder Kimberly Bryant has been removed from leading the nonprofit. In a statement, its board said it’s currently investigating allegations of “workplace impropriety,” but Bryant still remains a staff member. In a tweet published on Tuesday, the tech leader said: “Press release: so it’s 3 days before Christmas and you wake up to discover the organization YOU created and built from the ground up has been taken away by a rogue board with no notification.” Many have rushed to her support with some people asking how they
Paylend, a Kenyan fintech startup focused on providing access to finance and digitizing MSMEs in Kenya, announced it has raised $2 million seed investment. The funding came from Next Chymia Consulting HK Limited, an Asian-based company that provides global entities with blockchain applications, consultancy services, and training. Paylend’s mission is to support MSMEs across Africa to solve access to continuous capital while bridging the consumer data gap by connecting consumers to products and services. Paylend’s model enables consumer data collection that allows for a thorough understanding of consumer needs and
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
