Latest from Annie Njanja
Shamba Pride has since 2016 worked to enhance last-mile distribution for farm inputs and tackle price exploitation and quality issues for farmers through its merchant network dubbed digishops. The agtech…
Media & Entertainment
Amazon Prime Video is discontinuing support for local originals in Africa and Middle East
Amazon Prime Video is said to be downsizing its Africa and Middle East operations in a move that will affect teams in the two regions; according to a report in…
Featured Article
Homegrown African VCs emerge to fill in the gaps foreign investors cannot
The African startup scene is expanding beyond the traditional markets of Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, with accelerated activity now reported in other regions across the continent. As the market grows, there are calls for more local fund managers to unlock additional capital and support founders. This push arises…
Venture
Seedstars Africa Ventures gets $30M backing from EIB Global to invest in early-stage startups
Seedstars Africa Ventures has received a $30 million capital commitment from EIB Global, an arm of the European Investment Bank, which becomes the first major institutional investment for its first…
Featured Article
Last year was a tough period for African growth-stage startups and 2024 presents a mixed bag
Last year presented a tough period for African tech startups. Venture capital was hard to bag (as predicted earlier), bridge and down rounds became the norm, and news of fire sales, layoffs and startup closures reverberated across the continent. With the overall amount of VC funding raised in Africa dipping…
Egyptian B2B e-commerce startup MaxAB and Wasoko, a Kenya-based e-commerce player with operations in Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia, are in talks to merge operations, TechCrunch has exclusively learned from…
The global re-commerce market is poised for growth as consumers increasingly settle for pre-owned goods to save on cost, and as some observe conscious consumption. With the global re-commerce market…
Kenyan insurtech Lami Technologies in February last year announced its acquisition of Bluewave, another startup within the insurance space, to expand its product offerings and enable it to scale into…
Startups
Omniful, a supply chain and e-commerce enablement startup, emerges from stealth with $5.85M
Supply chain and e-commerce enablement startup Omniful has today emerged from stealth with $5.85 million seed funding led by VentureSouq, with participation from 500 Global, DASH Ventures, Jahez Group, SEEDRA…
Climate
Salesforce Ventures and Female Founders Fund back Kenyan climate-tech Amini in $4M seed round
Amini, a Kenya-based climate-tech startup bridging the environmental data gap in Africa, has raised $4 million in a seed funding round led by Salesforce Ventures and the Female Founders Fund.…
Venture
Saviu Ventures’ second fund reaches €12 million first close to back Francophone Africa startups
Saviu Ventures, a VC firm targeting startups in Francophone Africa, has made an initial close of €12 million for its second fund with the backing of private investors, including French…
Biotech & Health
Cameroonian healthtech Waspito gets $2.5M seed extension to scale, tap offline patients
Cameroonian health startup Waspito has secured a $2.5 million seed extension from DP World through Newtown Partners, Saviu Ventures, AAIC Investment, Axian Ventures and CFAO’s Health54 to spur its growth…
Pricepally, a Nigerian online grocery store for fresh produce and packaged food, has raised $1.3 million seed funding, backed by Samurai Incubate (a Japanese VC that also participated in the…
Government & Policy
Flutterwave cleared as Kenyan court okays agency’s request to withdraw second case
African fintech Flutterwave is off the hook in Kenya after the high court allowed the country’s Asset Recovery Agency (ARA), an agency that investigates and recovers proceeds of crime, to…
Meta is facing growing calls to set up a restitution fund for victims of the Tigray War, which Facebook is alleged to have fueled leading to over 600,000 deaths and…
SBI Holdings, a Japanese financial services conglomerate and one of the largest venture capital firms in the East Asian country, has made a $40 million multifund commitment to anchor Pan-African…
Kenyan B2B e-commerce company MarketForce has shut down operations in three of its five markets in Africa and is in the early stages of launching a social commerce spinout. TechCrunch…
The social commerce market size in Africa is expected to continue growing as businesses and micro-entrepreneurs embrace digital media, driven by the rising usage of apps like WhatsApp, TikTok and…
LeapFrog Investments, a private equity firm that is keen on the financial and healthcare sectors, plans to raise $1 billion for a new fund targeting businesses in “global growth markets,”…
Out of court negotiations between content moderators, Meta and Sama, the social giant’s former content review partner in Africa, over a labor dispute before a Kenyan court have collapsed. This…
UAE-based Zest Equity, a startup digitizing private market dealings, has raised $3.8 million in seed funding to build more tools for enabling fast and transparent transactions by ecosystem players while…
A Kenyan parliamentary committee formed in August to investigate operations and activities of Sam Altman’s crypto project, Worldcoin, in the East African country, has recommended for it to be shut…
TechCrunch Disrupt 2023
KSOC says it’s tackling cloud-native security in a way that is Kubernetes-first
The take-up of Kubernetes, a tool for managing containerized workloads, is only expected to increase as demand for cloud-native architectures and containerization continues. In terms of security, this can mean…
TechCrunch Disrupt 2023
South Africa’s FinanceGPT simplifies financial analysis, set to interface in local languages
FinanceGPT is a generative AI startup built to help companies in their financial analysis tasks. Initially built for startups without in-house finance teams, and VCs looking to run financial health…
FlexPay Technologies is a Kenyan fintech out to enable consumers to afford products that would have otherwise been out of reach for them.
Kenya-based EV startup Roam has unveiled a new shuttle bus model dubbed Move, coming as the East African country continues to push for the adoption of electric vehicles. Roam (formerly…
Featured Article
Tugende takes first step towards repayment of defaulted $5M Goldfinch loan
Tugende, a venture-backed lender based in Uganda, and Warbler Labs, the company building Goldfinch, a decentralized credit protocol, have agreed on a loan restructuring plan that may lead to the recovery of the $5 million loan that the East African motorcycle taxi financing company defaulted months ago. Warbler Labs arrived…
Crypto
Brine Fi challenges Coinbase, Binance with decentralized exchange as it nets Pantera-led $16.5M round
After the collapse of FTX, crypto traders have been looking for decentralized, non-custodial and safer ways to execute orders and store their assets. This explains why some decentralized crypto exchanges…
The Catalyst Fund has reached the first close of its $40 million fund intended for investment in climate startups in Africa. The fund announced today an initial close of $8.6…
Fintech
Kotani gets $2M pre-seed to help African workers send money home via crypto — without the internet
Of the many lofty promises of cryptocurrency, one of the most commendable ones is its potential to bring financial inclusion to underserved users. Nairobi-based Kotani Pay is a crypto payments…
