east africa
Nigeria’s Grey raises $2M for cross-border payments play and regional expansion
The provision of virtual foreign bank accounts has become a common strategy for fintechs to enable Nigerians and Africans to facilitate international transfers. In the latest development, Grey, a fintech…
Featured Article
VCs set sights on African countries beyond the ‘Big Four’
Outside the Big Four, investments ballooned to $1.4 billion, up 382% year on year, according to Partech’s 2021 report.
Kenyan B2B e-commerce platform Marketforce cut about 9% of staff in reorganization strategy
Kenyan retail B2B and end-to-end distribution platform Marketforce laid off a chunk of its workforce in July, according to sources familiar with the matter. In an email sent from Marketforce…
Disney+ rolls out to 16 more markets across the Middle East and North Africa
This week, the Walt Disney Company continues to gain ground in the global streaming market as it launches Disney+ in 16 markets across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).…
Uber today announced a significant milestone — it has completed 1 billion rides across all its markets in Africa. This feat translates to over 10 billion kilometres in terms…
CarePoint, a technology-driven healthcare startup, has raised a $10 million bridge round to accelerate its growth across Africa as it seeks to make healthcare accessible to the masses. The startup…
Featured Article
The 26 crypto startups that Y Combinator is backing in its W22 batch
Crypto was big at YC this batch. Y Combinator Demo Days returned yet again with another ballooning heap of startups. In the old days, a gaggle of TechCrunch reporters would go to the Demo Day in person, write up the presentations of each startup and hobnob with VCs during the breaks, but in a post-pandemic…
Kenya-based agritech Apollo raises $40 million in Softbank-led round, joined by Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, CDC
Kenya-based agritech Apollo Agriculture, which helps farmers access high-quality farm inputs, financing and markets, plans to double the number of farmers it is serving by the end 2022 and to…
Daily Crunch: 2 months after launching, São Paulo-based payments startup Yuno raises $10M
Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.
Antler East Africa closes $13.5M fund to invest in early-stage startups
Antler East Africa, the Nairobi office of VC firm and venture builder Antler, has closed a $13.5 million fund to invest in early-stage tech startups in the region. The oversubscribed…
Sudan’s first YC-backed startup is helping consumers protect and grow their wealth
Anglophone East Africa is home to over 400 million people, with half under 25. The region happens to be one of the fastest-growing globally; nevertheless, over 200 million people in…
M-KOPA raises $75M as it clocks 2 million customers across four African markets
A 2019 World Bank report says 85% of Africans live on less than $5.50 per day. A large percentage of these adults are unbanked and underbanked; thus, they don’t have…
MoneyHash gets $3M to build a super-API for payment operations in Africa, Mideast
Large merchants, particularly those that operate in more than one geography, have to support an array of payments methods. Each payment integration requires in-house technical work and the remodeling of…
Tanzanian fintech NALA raises $10M seed to build Revolut for Africa
NALA, a Tanzanian cross-border payments company that recently pivoted from local to international money transfers, said Thursday it has raised $10 million in a new fundraising round. The seed round…
TLcom Capital targets $150M for its second fund to invest in 20 African startups
TLcom Capital, the Africa-focused venture capital firm known to have made bets on Andela and Twiga, is raising $150 million for its second fund targeted at making early- and late-stage…
Kenyan e-commerce company Copia Global raises $50M to ramp up African expansion
Kenyan B2C e-commerce company Copia Global has raised $50 million in a Series C equity round led by Goodwell Investments. The new financing round welcomed new investors such as Zebu…
Kenyan low-cost ISP Poa Internet secures $28 million in round led by AfDB-backed Africa50, plans to link region with cheap, limit-free connectivity
In 2020, Africa50, an infrastructure financier backed by the Africa Development Bank (AfDB) Group and a good number of African governments, hosted an innovation challenge that sought affordable and reliable…
Ugandan fintech Asaak raises $30million to support acquisition of motorbikes, smartphones by taxi operators
Asaak, a Ugandan asset financing startup, has secured $30 million in pre-Series A equity and debt funding. The round saw the participation of new and existing investors including Resolute Ventures,…
MTN Uganda introduces overdraft facility as it steps up competition in digital lending space
Africa’s mobile-money sector remains the most active of any region in the world, according to GSM Association (GSMA), an umbrella body representing the interests of players in the telecommunications industry.…
Goldfinch raises $25M from a16z to power its DeFi lending protocol for borrowers in developing countries
For all of the excitement pulsing through the so-called web3 space in the past year, most of the heartiest sums of investor dollars have seemed to find their way toward…
Nigeria’s Teesas secures $1.6M, to expand across Africa and launch tutor marketplace
After seven years in the production of electronic gadgets, under his company Imose Technologies, Osayi Izedonmwen took leave to explore an idea that he had toyed with for some time…
Nigerian mobility-tech startup MAX bags $31 million in Series B round, set to expand across Africa, build EV infrastructure
Nigerian mobility tech startup Metro Africa Xpress Inc. (MAX) is planning to enter more markets across Africa as it races toward formalizing the continent’s transportation sector after securing $31 million…
Google’s Africa Investment Fund makes first investment in Uganda’s SafeBoda
Internet giant Google announced today that it has made the first investment from its Africa Investment Fund in Ugandan super app SafeBoda. The undisclosed investment comes two months after Alphabet…
Norrsken Foundation’s hub opens in Rwanda, to house 1,000 entrepreneurs by next year
In 2019, Swedish coworking space and investment fund Norrsken Foundation announced the launch of its first entrepreneurship hub outside the Scandinavian nation in Rwanda. The center, located in Kigali, has…
Meta’s NPE team takes a global focus with seed-stage investments, offices in emerging markets
Meta’s (formerly, Facebook’s) experimental app division, the NPE team, is shifting gears. The group, which first launched in mid-2019, has been focused on building consumer-facing apps that would allow the…
Kenyan fintech Asilimia raises $2 million in a pre-seed round, plans to extend loans to MSMEs and expand in East Africa
Kenya’s economy is powered by informal businesses, which contribute 33.8% to the country’s GDP and provide 83.4% of the total employment outside of small-scale agriculture, data from the country’s bureau…
MFS Africa collects $100M to expand its digital payments gateway across the region
Investor interest in African fintech continues to grab headlines with large fundraises. Today, Africa’s largest digital payments network MFS Africa joins the fray. The company confirmed to TechCrunch that it…
EV startup BasiGo debuts in Nairobi after $1 million pre-seed funding
Electric vehicle startup BasiGo has today announced the launch of its operations in Nairobi, bringing clean energy options to Kenya’s public transport industry, currently dominated by fossil-fuel buses. The startup…
Kenya’s Twiga raises $50M to scale food solutions across Africa
Years ago, Americans spent most of their disposable income on food, but consistent investment in retail infrastructure has changed that. Now, they only spend 6% of their household income on…
TLcom and 4DX drive $13.1M seed round to scale Autochek’s platform across Africa
African automotive company Autochek has secured a $13.1 million seed round almost a year after raising $3.4 million pre-seed in November 2020. The company, led by CEO Etop Ikpe, has…
