THIS WEEK IN REVEW: Insight roundup for September✨👇
Web3 Afrika Dev Roundup Sept 5th-10th more funding +Coinbase Grant to Aya+ Binance opens Education Hub +Nigeria free virtual zone +what's on the horizons
🌟FUNDING ANNOUNCEMENTS.
➥Bitmama raises additional $1.65 million in pre-seed funding.
Blockchain payments startup, Bitmama Inc., has raised an additional $1.65 million in pre-seed funding. This brings its total funding for this round to $2 million, having raised $350,000 10 months ago.
The latest round is led by Unicorn Growth Capital and Launch Africa Ventures, with participation from Adaverse and follow-on from Flori Ventures, which led its earlier pre-seed round. New investors in the round include, Tekedia Capital, GreenHouse Capital, ODBA, Five35 Ventures, Chrysalis Capital, Enrich Africa, Thrive Africa, Angellist Ventures, and angel investors including, CELO founders; Rene Reinsberg, and Marek Olszewski, and Honey Ogundeyi.
The startup says the new pre-seed round will be used to expand its operational presence, strengthen its team across different markets, consolidate its product offerings, and plot market penetration across Africa, while rapidly scaling new use cases for cryptocurrency within the continent. At present, the company’s major products are the Bitmama exchange, which allows users to access virtual assets and explore several cryptocurrency use cases, then Changera, a social payment solution that allows non-crypto-savvy customers to use their money without limits, from anywhere in the world.
➥NowNow Raises $13m Seed Funding to Promote Financial Inclusion Across Africa.
NowNow, a Nigerian digital system startup, announced Wednesday it has raised a $13 million seed round.The funding round was led by NeoVision Ventures Ltd., DLF Family Office, and Shadi Abdulhadi. With the new funding, the startup said it will improve financial inclusivity across Africa and drive empowerment, as well as introduce new products that will further enhance its already existing services.
Founded in 2018 by Mahesh Nair and Sahir Berry, NowNow is a Fintech platform that allows users to send and receive money, purchase airtime and pay bills with ease.
➥Nestcoin’s Metaverse Magna raises $3.2Million to Build Africa's largest Gaming Community.
Metaverse Magna ,a blockchain gaming platform, has raised a $3.2 million seed sale token round to expand its efforts to build Africa’s largest gaming DAO and provide gamers with access to world class opportunities.
The second venture to be publicly announced by Nestcoin, Metaverse Magna ,was incubated in partnership with Old Fashion Research ,a multi strategy blockchain investment fund. The raise will be instrumental in MVM realizing its vision of a world where everyone has equal access to wealth-building opportunities through gaming.
About Magna
Metaverse Magna was launched in December 2021 and is building its community of gamers as a gaming guild. It offers play-to-earn scholarships to over 1,000 gamers to play crypto games like Axie Infinity and Pegaxy. Since its launch ,the venture has grown to over 100,000 members across its products and community.
➥African Startup Aya, Receives Grant From Coinbase Giving.
Coinbase giving, a program within Coinbase focused on the goal of increasing economic freedom came up together with Aya, an online platform that connects the best African talent with organizations all over the world to help fund Aya’s web3 Fellowship.
About Aya
Aya provides a platform where the African workforce can work with organizations.
➥Binance Opens Educational Hub in Cameroon to Offer In-person Blockchain Training
Binance prioritizes educating about web three education and advancement in Africa through webinars, workshops, meet-ups and so much more. In addition to providing crypto education and up-to-date crypto news, the center will host regular in-person events.
WEB3 CORNER 🚀🚀
Web 3.0 is all about the users and to find the users to adopt this technology, it’s important to think, create and invest around the popularly used platforms which in this case is the mobile phone. In the same way mass adoption of Web 2.0 involves technological innovations for mobile phones such as apps, Web 3.0 has to focus on ways to have better reach to people both offline and online.
So far, we see Web 3.0 creations such as NFTs being popularized using social media through avatars. We see more crypto exchanges and the DeFi platforms on mobile phones for real-time transactions and easier on-ramp and off-ramp. By popularizing these dApps in Web 2.0 using social media, more people get to learn about the technology.
As we concentrate our effort on making Web 3.0 mobile-friendly, it is also important to note the 3.7 billion people across the world who have no access to the internet. As much as Web 3.0 is all about accessing the new wave of the internet, the technology needs to also cater to the population that is marginalized.
Institutions such as Kotani Pay are ensuring that everyone can access the full blockchain functionality with either a smartphone or a feature phone. This is made possible by leveraging familiar interfaces such as Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) to deposit and withdraw to their crypto wallets.
It’s safe to say that Web 3.0 is already here as more innovators are embracing and thinking around this technology. The development of this transformative force is proving how useful it will be in the future by providing data privacy, security, and ownership but highly dependent on where the numbers are. Integrating Web 3.0 to mobile phone users not only encourages mass adoption but also its relevance and accessibility to its beneficiaries.
INSIDE AFRICA🌍
➥Google Selects 60 African Startups for Equity Free $4m Funding.
American multinational company, Google has been on a mission in offering support to thriving diverse, and inclusive startup communities around the world.Recently, the company announced the selection of 60 eligible black-founded startups across Africa for its second cohort of Google for startups Black Founders Fund (BFF) for Africa.
The startups will get equity-free funding between 50,000 and $100,000 and $200,000 in Google Cloud Credit. The top five countries with the most startups selected for the program are Nigeria with 23 grantees, Kenya with 12 grantees, Rwanda with 6 grantees, South Africa with 5 grantees and Uganda with 4 grantees.
They include Stears Business, Eden Life, Eversend, ZayRide, Spleet, LifeBank, Kapsule, Healthtracker, Garri Logistics, FlexPay, KUDIGO, Healthlane, Clafiya, etc.
➥Nigeria to launch a free zone for crypto With Binance.
The Nigerian Export Processing Zones Authority (NEPZA) is in discussions with crypto exchange Binance over plans to create a virtual free zone focusing on blockchain and the digital economy, the agency said in a Saturday press release.
NEPZA, which helps regulate and operate free zones in the country, wants the result to be similar to Dubai's virtual free zone. In this area, foreigners will have complete control over the businesses they run in Nigeria. In addition, they will also be able to operate quota-free, tax-free and tariff-free.
WHAT'S ON THE HORIZONS.
Upcoming events⏩
➥The upcoming Africa Money & DeFi Summit in Ghana has 10 ventures to showcase the exciting future of Web3, FinTech and DeFi in Africa
The Africa Money & DeFi Summit has announced the final shortlist of exciting ventures who will Pitch Live on stage in West Africa to over 400 fintech and crypto leaders, in Accra on September 27th – 28th.
DID YOU KNOW?🤔
📌Africa leads the world in the share of overall crypto transactions volume coming from peer-to-peer platforms.😁
🙌STORY OF THE WEEK.
September started on a high note 💪 as this week we were redefining the Indensity Training Program. Our goal is to ensure the program produces the required results. We had most of the developers undergoing regular evaluations, which helps them better understand what’s expected of them, improve communication between management and them, and give each one proper recognition for their work.
This not only helps them but the company at large.🤝
Goals are set expressly for the strengths and weaknesses of the individual here, and this helps them improve their skills or learn new ones. Their mentors work with the given developer to set goals that are reasonable and relevant to their position. As they say, divided we fall; united we stand. 🤘
Have a lovely week ❤
Thanks for reading👌 We are working hard to give you the best information tailored to your interest.😁
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.