The New AI🚀
Web3 Afrika Dev Roundup Dec 12th-16th The Mastercard Foundation Africa Growth Fund+Visa Pledges to Invest $1 billion in Africa+Kenyan tech startups+Jack Dorsey’s Block Invests in Renewable bitcoin
RECENT HAPPENINGS 😁
➥The Mastercard Foundation Africa Growth Fund has launched a $200M funding facility for African SMEs.
The Mastercard Foundation Africa Growth Fund has launched a $200 million funding facility for African small and medium-sized enterprises.In order to help early-stage, growth-oriented SMEs on the continent, the Mastercard Foundation Africa Growth Fund (MFAGF) has been launched.
The Mastercard Foundation Africa Growth Fund is dedicated to creating opportunities for young people, especially young women, to engage in meaningful work.
➥Visa Pledges to Invest $1 billion in Africa to Accelerate Digital Transformation
During the U.S-Africa Business Forum, Visa announced a pledge to invest $1 billion in Africa over the next five years to advance resilient, innovative, and inclusive economies across the continent. Visa’s expanded investments demonstrate the company’s long-term commitment to Africa’s growth potential and will help enable greater access to digital payments as an entry point for expanding formal financial services for individuals and merchants.
The pledge will further scale Visa’s operations in Africa, and deepen collaboration with strategic partners including governments, financial institutions, mobile network operators, fintech, and merchants. The investments will also focus on strengthening the payment ecosystem through new innovations and technologies, supporting the digitization of economies, and investing in upskilling, talent development, and capacity building.
➥Kenyan tech startups shatter funding records according to a new report
Kenya is the second most popular investment destination on the continent after Nigeria, according to the publication. Between January 2015 and November 2022, 242 tech startups raised a combined US$1,281,918,200. So far in 2022, 63 Kenyan startups have raised funding, with the country’s running total for the year standing at US$506,686,000. This is approaching double the US$291,983,000 raised by Kenyan startups in 2021, and represents a record annual total for the ecosystem.
“Kenya has a well-established reputation as a pioneer in Africa’s tech space, as the home of the likes of M-Pesa, Ushahidi and the iHub, but its journey has been far from smooth. This report tells the story of the country’s startup ecosystem and its development since 2015, with record levels of funding now flooding into Kenyan tech companies,” said Gabriella Mulligan, co-founder of Disrupt Africa.
➥Kenya Fintech Cellulant Starts Expansion to South Africa.
Cellulant Ltd., a Kenyan payment-services provider, is starting a South African business after months of testing the market and is looking to wrap up fundraising for further expansion to the Middle East and UK.
The two-decade old company is looking to tap South Africa’s mature retail ecosystem, Chief Business Officer Sike Bamisebi said in an interview, with the United Arab Emirates and UK set to follow in the next two years.
IN CRYPTOCURRENCY 💲
➥Jack Dorsey’s Block Invests in Renewable Bitcoin Miner Gridless in Africa
Jack Dorsey’s Block Inc. is among the companies contributing to a funding round for a Bitcoin miner in Africa fired by renewable power. Digital payments firm Block and venture capital investor Stillmark have led a $2 million seed investment in Gridless, a miner that harnesses small-scale renewable energy grids in rural Africa, Block said in a December 6th statement.
Bitcoin mining is an energy-intensive process in which electricity-guzzling computers secure the digital assets blockchain by validating transaction data and unlocking tokens as a reward in return. Some studies estimate that the annual energy consumption involved exceeds the amount entire countries like Belgium use.
The investment is Block’s latest effort to push for sustainable and decentralized mining operations. It has recruited veteran crypto-mining engineers and managers to build out its mining unit and develop projects that can encourage individuals to mine Bitcoin. Most of the computing power for Bitcoin mining is currently from industrial-scale centers.
Gridless seeks to harness excess energy at small-scale renewable power sites in rural Africa, according to the statement. It has contracted five project pilots in rural Kenya with HydroBox, an African hydroelectric energy company, three of which are currently operational. Gridless plans to expand to other parts of East Africa in the near future, it said.
Mining profitability is heavily dependent on energy costs. The industry has been battered by persistently high electricity prices, a 66% slide in Bitcoin over the past year and stiff competition.
IN ACCELERATORS AND INCUBATORS.🌟
➥Venture for Africa is now accepting applications for the second cohort of its Fintech Bootcamp.
Venture for Africa (VFA), an immersion program and talent community designed to enable top local and international talent transfer into the African startup ecosystem, is now accepting applications for its second batch of the VFA Fintech Product Management Bootcamp.
Participants will learn about developing exceptional products for the African market through contextually rich content, interactive online workshops with product managers from some of the continent’s fastest-growing fintech companies, case studies, and real-world problem sets faced by VFA’s startup partners.
INNOVATION OF THE WEEK👌
GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer)
This is a type of artificial intelligence model that was developed by OpenAI. It is a machine learning model that uses unsupervised learning to generate human-like text. It works by pre-training a large transformer model on a massive dataset of text, and then fine-tuning it on specific tasks such as language translation, summarization, or question answering.
GPT is important because it has significantly improved the state of the art in natural language processing tasks and has enabled the development of many new applications and tools. It has also sparked a lot of interest.
FINAL TOUCHES👏
Story of the week👇
It is the end of the year and the team was ready to celebrate all of their hard work and accomplishments. Exciting outing to the IMAX theater was organized to watch the blockbuster hit "Wakanda."
After the movie ended, we went to our favourite spot for the party. They ordered round after round of drinks, laughing and chatting as they reminisced about all the highs and lows of the past year.
They had enjoyed a fun and memorable outing together, and they were grateful to the company for organizing such a fantastic end-of-year celebration.
Overall, the end-of-year party was a huge success thanks to the cooperation and enthusiasm of the entire team. They were already looking forward to next year's party and all the exciting experiences it would bring.Overall, it was a night to remember, a crazy, fun-filled celebration of the end of the year and the start of a new one.
Thanks for reading👌
Contact us: NGENI Linktree
Shiko Karanja✍
ABOUT NGENI🔥
NGENI is Kenya and East Africa's first pure-play and largest Blockchain & Web3 development engineering Studio with a 60-plus-person team. The studio recruits and trains recent graduates from STEM Universities across Kenya and today has twenty-five (25) 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.