Africa Tech News

Ceviant, a UK-based financial technology company delivering treasury and trade solutions to corporates, has received its Payment Solution Service Provider License from the Central Bank of Nigeria. The license permits Ceviant to offer a range of payment services to clients in Nigeria, including electronic fund transfers and payment processing. This license presents further opportunities to partner...

Kenya has dropped its charges of financial impropriety against Flutterwave. The court case began in July 2022, when Flutterwave was charged in court on suspicions of card fraud and money laundering. Kenya’s Assets Recovery Agency says 1st Respondent’s (Flutterwave) bank accounts received billions in a suspected scheme of money laundering and the same was deposited in different bank accounts in an...

Eazy Digital wants to give small insurance companies in Southeast Asia the same advantage as their larger competitors. Its SaaS platform lets insurers digitize many parts of their operations, enabling them to scale up more efficiently. The Bangkok-based startup announced it has raised $850,000 in an oversubscribed seed round led by Wavemaker Partners, with participation from Seedstars Internationa...

China’s smartphone market is hitting a speed bump as COVID-19 roils the world’s second-largest economy. The country’s smartphone shipments dropped 14% year-over-year in 2022, reaching a ten-year low. It was also the first time that China’s handset sales had slid below 300 million units in ten years, according to Canalys. The three-year-long stringent “zero-COVID” policy that disrupted businesses a...

PhonePe recorded a revenue of $234.3 million in the first nine months of 2022, the most valuable Indian fintech startup has disclosed in a filing. The nine-month financials marks a jump from the $201.6 million revenue that the Bengaluru-headquartered generated in the 12-month period ending in financial year March last year. PhonePe, which is valued at $12 billion, has projected a revenue of $325 m...

Kenya’s new administration presented its first budget last week and to fund the KES3.6 trillion budget, the government wants to ramp up its tax collections and cut down on borrowing. The National Treasury says President Willam Ruto’s administration plans to increase tax collection to KES3 trillion shillings to fund the government’s spending plans. Ruto’s administration wants its tax department, th...

The Cairo-born mass transit firm wants to undo its 2022 acquisition of Volt Lines for $40 million as it searches for a way to survive. In a notice filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last week, Swvl stated that it has entered into a definitive agreement with certain former shareholders (the “Former Volt Lines Shareholders”) of Volt Lines B.V. (“Volt Lines”), a pri...

Nigeria’s newest telecom operator, MAFAB Communications, has launched its 5G network services for Nigerians. Dr. Musbahu Bashir, chairman and founder of MAFAB, says as the second operator to launch 5G in Nigeria, Mcom expects more coverage for Nigerians and an acceleration of broadband services. He shared that the deployment will commence in six cities: Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, Enugu, Kano, an...

Nigeria’s central bank has launched a national domestic card scheme, AfriGo. The scheme, which was initially announced at a Bankers’ Committee press briefing in October 2022, introduces the central bank into the triopoly of card payment schemes in Nigeria’s card payments market. The CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele, says this move will drive financial inclusion and concentrate card financial data in...

Microsoft has announced a multi-year, multibillion-dollar investment in artificial intelligence as it extends its partnership with OpenAI. OpenAI is the creator of the popular image generation tool Dall-E and the chatbot ChatGPT. The Windows and Xbox maker plans up to 10,000 redundancies but said it would still hire in key strategic areas. Chief executive Satya Nadella says the next major wave of...

Egyptian e-sports platform GBarena announced that it has acquired the Tunisian gaming startup, Galactech. The acquisition is a share swap deal worth around $15 million. Share swap, otherwise called stock-for-stock, refers to a deal wherein the ownership of the shares in the target company are converted into the ownership of the shares in the acquiring company as per a predefined swap ratio. Though...

Africa is still poised to grow its digital economy. In recent times, the continent has seen steady and deliberate efforts from both the private and public sectors to actualize this charge. These efforts, however, have been limited to consumer-facing products and have neglected the infrastructure that powers them. Africa’s digital economy is approaching its S curve, and this growth has been driven...

Digital lenders say that the Central Bank of Kenya is taking too long to issue operational licences and that the delay is putting them in a precarious economic situation. The CBK earlier mandated that all digital lenders register for a new licence under a newly enacted regulation that seeks to rein in the predatory lending and consumer privacy violations that had permeated the space. Other 278 dig...

Nigeria-born digital banking platform, Kuda, is on its way to power digital banking services in Pakistan, as the fintech is set to acquire a digital banking licence from the State Bank of Pakistan. This licence will be issued to KT Bank”, a joint venture between Kuda and two leading Pakistani companies, positioning the fintech as one of the five companies to receive the highly coveted digital bank...

In July 2021, Chinese authorities ordered the country’s app stores to remove Didi, citing reasons that the platform was “illegally collecting user data. Didi at the time, failed to assure the government that its cross-border data practices were secure before going public in the U.S., where the data of hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens could allegedly be subject to scrutiny. The misstep led...

Ghana’s tax authority says the fine is for unpaid tax obligations for 2014–2018. During these years, GRA claims that MTN underreported its revenue in Ghana by about 30%. The $773 million tag also comprises penalties for non-disclosure and interest charges. The MTN Group, says MTN Ghana believes that the taxes due have been paid during the period under assessment and has resolved to defend MTN Ghan...

Elon Musk’s satellite internet firm, Starlink, has announced plans to set up shop in Kenya. The internet service is awaiting regulatory approval and is on course to be accessible in a number of cities, including Nairobi, Kisumu, Mombasa, and Nakuru, by June 2023. In May, last year, SpaceX received the licence to operate in Nigeria and Mozambique. Several Nigerians who pre-ordered it have reportedl...

The Bank of Tanzania gave an update on the East African country’s progress, stating that it was taking a phased, cautious and risk-based” approach in the adoption of a CBDC. The BoT says it’s taking this approach after discovering that six countries across the world abandoned their CBDC plans after encountering technical and structural challenges. The Bank of Tanzania will continue to monitor, res...

TeamApt, a Nigerian fintech company, has shed its name and adopted the name of its flagship product—Moniepoint. The company says the move is a testament to the success of Moniepoint and a desire to bring the company closer to its customers. Moniepoint will also relocate its headquarters to London, a move the company says is inspired by its ambition to be “an employer of choice, not just in Africa,...

BioNTech, the German biotech company that became a medical powerhouse in 2020 after creating one of the world’s most effective COVID-19 vaccines, will pay a total sum of £582 million to acquire 100% shares of InstaDeep, the Tunisian London-headquartered artificial intelligence startup. The transaction involves an upfront payment of cash and unspecified BioNTech shares worth £362 million, and a bal...

Meta has denied harmful posts will escape review, after the contractor running Facebook's main moderation hub for east Africa, Sama, announced it would stop providing content-review services to social-media platforms. Meta says it had been Sama's decision and Sama blamed the "economic climate". In May, a former moderator who claims the work harmed his mental health sued both firms. Sama says it wo...

Reports suggested that Microsoft had acquired Fungible, a startup fabricating a type of data center hardware known as a data processing unit, for around $190 million. Microsoft confirmed the acquisition but not the purchase price, saying that it plans to use Fungible’s tech and team to deliver multiple DPU solutions, network innovation and hardware systems advancements. Girish Bablani, the CVP of...

Uganda's Constitutional Court has quashed a section of a communications law that had been used to prosecute journalists and critics of the government. The judges ruled that prohibiting people from using electronic communication to disturb the peace of others curtailed freedom of speech. Punishments for offenders ranged from a fine to a jail term. Writer Kakwenza Rukirababashaija and the academic S...

The Federal Communications Commission regulates lots of industries and practices relating to telecommunications and the internet, but it is now cementing its role as a space regulator by voting to create a brand-new bureau specializing in the topic. The newly minted Space Bureau will handle all business relating to satellite approval, orbital communications, and space debris, among other things. T...

Releaf ,an agritech startup disrupting Africa’s oil production industry, has secured $3.3 million pre-Series A funding. The funding round, which the startup says was oversubscribed, will support the roll-out of key technologies that could further drive the development and sophistication of Africa’s crude oil processing techniques, and possibly lead to the much-needed increase in vegetable oil prod...