Week In Review:Insight Roundup for November 💯
Web3 Afrika Dev Roundup Nov21-25th Nov more fundings +finplus win+ venture capital fund to support AI and blockchain startups in Africa. +Highlight of the week +chippercash acquiring zoona
Funding Announcements 🔥
➥Egypt Fintech Blnk has raised $32m in a funding round to expand instant credit access to consumers.
Blnk, a fintech platform that enables instant consumer credit in Egypt, has closed one of the country’s biggest funding rounds for a startup this year, raising $32 million, its chief executive said.
The company, launched in October 2021, raised $23.7 million in equity and debt funding and $8.3 million in securitised bond issuance, co-founder and CEO Amr Sultan told Reuters.It is on a mission to make it easier for consumers to purchase products and services conveniently at the point of sale.
➥Kenyan fintech startup Finplus Group has announced its software has now processed over US$1 billion in combined transaction value in five years of operations.
Founded in 2017 by Kageni Wilson and Bernard Banta, Finplus provides fully-managed software to help financial serviKenyan startup Finplus passes $1bn transaction value markets providers operate efficiently and scale cost-effectively in any market.
Its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform enables the easy creation, rapid launch and efficient management of digital deposit, loan and insurance products, and contains modular solutions that entirely automate or dramatically accelerate things like onboarding, KYC validation, risk decisioning, bulk collections and disbursements, and SMS and email communications.
In Accelerators and Incubators 🎉
➥IFCAfrica has established a venture capital platform to fund tech startups in Africa.
IFC’s new platform aims to strengthen the regions’ nascent venture capital markets, which have demonstrated early growth potential but face challenging global economic conditions. IFC will make equity or equity-like investments in tech startups and help them grow into scalable ventures that can attract mainstream equity and debt financing. IFC will also use the platform to collaborate with other teams in the World Bank Group to create and bolster venture capital ecosystems through regulatory reforms, sector analyses, and other tools.
IFC will invest in early-stage companies addressing development challenges through tech innovations.
➥Modus has announced a $75M venture capital fund to support AI and blockchain startups in Africa.
Modus, a New York-based venture platform, has opened Modus Africa, a venture capital fund supporting artificial intelligence and blockchain startups in sub-Saharan Africa.
Modus operates three business units that target entrepreneurs and startups in the MENA and GCC countries as a “holistic venture platform.” One of these is the Venture Builder, which works with start-up and MVP-stage businesses.
Corporate Innovation is another service platform that the company offers to assist businesses and government agencies by making use of their own in-house expertise.
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➥Chippercashapp is acquiring Zoona a true pioneer of Africa’s Fintech industry.
Pan-African cross-border payment app Chipper Cash is set to acquire Zambian fintech company Zoona Transactions International. This will allow them to better serve individuals and businesses while also expanding our physical footprint across the continent.
➥Dutch investment company CardanoDev has partnered with InfracoAfrica to bridge the infrastructure access gap in Kenya.
The partnership is supported by FSDAfrica, a financial services company focusing on financial sector development in Africa.
➥Nigerian fintech startup joinkuda has launched in the UK as part of its major global expansion drive.
Kuda, the London-based and Nigerian-operating startup taking on incumbents in the country with a mobile-first and personalized set of banking services, is expanding to the U.K. by offering a remittance product to Nigerians in the diaspora.
The digital bank has seen some success since launching in Nigeria in 2019. Kuda claims to have up to 5 million users, more than thrice the number it had last August during its $55 million Series B round, money it raised to enter into other African countries like Ghana and Uganda this year. Expansion into those countries is yet to materialize; instead, Kuda has opted to launch in the U.K., a move the company says is part of a major global expansion drive.
Kuda's expansion seeks to accelerate cross-border remittance for Nigerians in the diaspora.
Highlight of the week.🙌
➥How Kenya’s InstaSend helps you build secure, scalable fintech products faster
Kenya’s IntaSend is providing payment infrastructure for startups, businesses, and developers to build secure and scalable fintech products faster. Founded by Felix Cheruiyot and Moses Korir in September 2019, IntaSend enables startups and developers to create fintech products and go live in days, at a fraction of the cost. The startup enables developers to create fintech products that can collect, disburse, and hold funds with a few lines of code.
Did you know👌
In 2020, Facebook (now Meta), after seven years of operating its Johannesburg office, announced that its new Lagos office would house a team of engineers. It was the first time Meta was expressing optimism that a local African office can build products for the continent and the rest of the world. This coincided with the beginning of a romanticisation of Africa by the tech community.
Earlier in 2019, Twitter’s then-CEO, Jack Dorsey, had rounded off an African tour by pledging to stay on the continent for a few months in 2020. In 2021, Twitter announced that it was setting up its first office in Africa.
Africa’s tech ecosystem was burgeoning and was minting both startups and tech at an impressive rate. Everything seemed to be going well until it wasn't.
Earlier this month, the newly assembled 20-person Twitter Africa team celebrated the launch of their office in Ghana, but in less than a week Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, sacked most of them during his mass layoff of 3,700 employees. This raised many questions about the importance of Africa as a market for Big Tech. Many asked why Musk couldn’t have retained the new team since they were small in size and served over one billion people.
Thanks for reading👌
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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.
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