AFRIKAS WEEKLY 📚

Web3 Afrika Dev Roundup Jan30th -Feb 3rd funding announcements+investements 🤑+web3 in Africa +whats on the horizon +Highlight of the week

Funding Announcements🌟

➥SA fintech startup Lulalend has raised a $35 million Series B funding round to help it scale its business. 

Founded in 2014, Lulalend is a digital lender catering to underserved small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The  startup uses an online application process, internal credit metrics, a proprietary credit scoring algorithm, and a diverse set of alternative data sources to provide short-term loans to small and medium-sized businesses that often need help to obtain working capital.

 Lulalend claims that based on these credit metrics, it can distribute funds in hours instead of weeks or months, which is typical with traditional lenders. It has disbursed billions of rand to small businesses across South Africa,

➥Egyptian fintech MNT-Halan has become Africa's ninth unicorn after raising $400 million in funding.

Egyptian startup, MNT-Halan, has today announced a $400 million investment that would see it become Egypt’s first unicorn and the first African unicorn in 2023. The startup, which provides financial services and an eCommerce ecosystem for unbanked customers in the North African country, will receive $260 million in equity financing and $140 million in securitized bond issuances.

 The private investment firm Chimera Investments invested $200 million in the company, giving it a 20% stake. The latest round of funding makes MNT-Halan the best-funded startup in Egypt.

Investments 🤑

➥Pan African private equity investor Convergence Partners has raised $296 million to invest in digital infrastructure in Africa.

Convergence Partners, the leading private equity investor dedicated to the technology sector across sub-Saharan Africa, announced the successful closing of its Convergence Partners Digital Infrastructure Fund (CPDIF) at $296 million, surpassing its initial target by over 18%. This achievement is despite subdued private capital fundraising on the continent in 2022.

The recent close of CPDIF marks a significant milestone for the company, as it represents Convergence Partners’ largest fund to date, bringing total funds under management to more than $600m. The close was backed by a combination of existing and new investors comprising leading global and regional development finance institutions (DFIs), pension funds, and financial institutions based in Europe and Africa.  

Founded in 2006, the firm focuses on Africa's Technology Media Telecoms (TMT) sector.

➥Google has unveiled its first dedicated Startups Accelerator for women in Africa to empower and support women founders on the continent.

Google Tuesday announced that applications are now open for the inaugural Google for Startups Accelerator Women Founders Africa Program. The program aims to empower and support women founders on the continent by providing resources and opportunities to scale their startups and address African problems.

The initiative will provide the founders with resources and opportunities to scale their ventures.

The highlight of the week 👇

➥OpenAI launches ChatGPT Plus, starting at $20 per month.

Aiming to monetize what’s become a viral phenomenon, OpenAI has launched a new pilot subscription plan for ChatGPT, its text-generating AI that can write convincingly human-like essays, poems, emails, lyrics, and more. Also known as ChatGPT Plus(faster response times, priority access to new features and improvements, and public access to ChatGPT during peak times).

➥ OpenAI releases tool to detect AI-generated text, including from ChatGPT

After telegraphing the move in media appearances, OpenAI has launched a tool that attempts to distinguish between human-written and AI-generated text — like the text produced by the company’s own ChatGPT and GPT-3 models.

Whats on the Horizons ⏭

➥ Africa Tech Summit has announced the final shortlist of ventures who will pitch Live on stage to investors, corporate, and media at the Africa Tech Summit in Nairobi from February 15th - 16th, 2023.

One of them is Blockchain-Based.

Thanks for reading👌

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Shiko Karanja✍

About NGENI🔥

NGENI  is Kenya and East Africa's first pure-play and largest Blockchain & Web3 development engineering Studio with a 80-plus-person team. The studio recruits and trains recent graduates from STEM Universities across Kenya and today has fourty one (41) talented developers, at our Kilimani Headquarters.

All engineers have successfully taken on complex coding challenges, and hackathons and have ultimately delivered on complex multi-Blockchain applications, bots, and dApps for international projects.