Africa Tech News

Some cyber security experts have called for constant awareness and sensitisation of individuals and organisations to help protect their data. Sub Sahara Africa Infodata Professional Services, Eze Osiago regretted the increasing proliferation of targeted cyber-attacks in the financial services sector that ranges from insider threats to typical ransomware, phishing, web application and vulnerability...

Clickafix, an app built to pool together skilled artisans to render professional services in homes and offices, has been unveiled in Lagos State. The founder and Director of Clickafix, Mr Arun Goswami, says the app was created to address two problems; lack of access to skilled artisans and a lack of access to customers on the part of the artisans. Goswami says there are lots of skilled artisans wh...

Nigerian startups have raised about $3.6bn since 2019, a figure that is a little less than the $3.8bn that was raised by startups in northern and eastern Africa in the time under review. The firm The Big Deal’, stated that Western Africa was by far the region that attracted the most funding on the continent, thanks to Nigeria which has attracted about 86 per cent of the total funding into the regi...

India will give VPN providers and cloud service operators an additional three months to comply with new rules that require they maintain the names and addresses of their customers and their IP addresses, delivering some relief to firms as many scrambles to follow the new guidelines and others explore the option of leaving the South Asian market. The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, says it...

JourneyOne says it’s closed a $10 million fund and has started making its first few investments. The fund’s solo fund manager, Helene Servillon, says there’s only a specific amount of time until Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital and Sequoia Capital are starting to play in this industry. Servillon noted that there are other big players in this space, especially on the corporate side of thing...

Google announced a preview of Advanced API Security, a new product headed to Google Cloud that’s designed to detect security threats as they relate to APIs. APIs have documented connections between computers or between computer programs. API usage is on the rise, with one survey finding that more than 61.6% of developers relied on APIs more in 2021 than in 2020. But they’re also increasingly becom...

Elon Musk is unabashed about his obsession with manufacturing. Over the years, Tesla has gradually gained recognition in the manufacturing world by improving its production quality. Industrial Next, founded by Allen Pan, who was Tesla’s autonomous factory lead at Fremont, and Lukas Pankau, who was a lead electrical architect behind Model X, Y and 3, aims to bring the latest production technologies...

Kune, a Kenyan food-tech startup that delivered ready-to-eat meals at affordable prices, is closing down, CEO Robin Reecht cited a stifled economy and inflated food prices as circumstances that contributed to Kune’s closure. The announcement comes just 4 months after the startup began its commercial operations at established meal centres around Nairobi. Kenyans were aggrieved by his comments and d...

Telecommunications MTN has reportedly taken 18 Nigerian banks to court over a ₦22.3 billion mobile money fraud. MTN is alleging that its recently-licensed mobile money Payment Service Bank, MoMo, has suffered a fraudulent loss from its partner banks. MTN claims that the amount was transferred in error to 8,000 accounts maintained by the 18 banks’ customers. Chief Executive Officer of MoMo PSB, Ant...

Thepeer, a Nigerian tech infrastructure company that enables seamless wallet transfers between businesses, has raised a $2.1 million seed round. Thepeer is an API-based company that enables its customers, majorly small and medium-sized businesses and fintech, to allow their own customers to fund their accounts from other businesses, send money across their different wallets, and pay for items from...

The payment app, Abeg, has rebranded and will now be called PocketApp, a move that underlines its transition from a payment app to a social commerce app. Abeg, a subsidiary of Piggytech Global Limited, secured approval-in-principle for a mobile money operator license application from the Central Bank of Nigeria to expand the scope of its social commerce operations across the country. Piggytech Glo...

Singapore-based crypto exchange Bybit has joined a long list of companies that have laid off some of their employees. Crypto journalist James Wu says that the company is cutting a whopping 30% of its 2,000 people workforce however, the company didn’t give any indication about its workforce size or the number of people it has laid off. Bybit says it has 6 million registered users with more than 190...

LeadSquared, a SaaS startup that is helping sales teams become more efficient with its CRM platform, is the latest Indian startup to become a unicorn. LeadSquared says it has raised $153 million in a Series C funding round that valued it at $1 billion. Existing backers including Gaja Capital also participated in the new funding, which takes the startup’s all-time raise to $188 million. LeadSquared...

Swedish telecommunications equipment maker Ericsson says it expects global 5G mobile subscriptions to surpass a billion in 2022, helped by higher adoption in China and North America. A weaker global economy and the uncertainties caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine lowered its estimate for 2022 by around 100 million. Ericsson, which competes with China’s Huawei and Finland’s Nokia, is a leading...

Telkom has launched two new mobile plans it hopes will energise interest among consumers. Telkom Infinite offers unlimited data from R299/month. Telkom revealed that it grew subscribers by 10.5% to 16.9 million at the end of March 2022, helping solidify its position as the number-three player in the market behind Vodacom and MTN and ahead of fourth-placed Cell C. However, mobile revenue growth was...

Amazom.com plans to launch online shopping services in South Africa and four other countries by early 2023. The five markets that Amazon will expand to over the next year are South Africa, Nigeria, Belgium, Chile and Colombia. South Africans will also reportedly get access to Amazon’s Prime membership programme soon after the launch of Amazon online shopping in the country. Amazon has long had a p...

Afropolitan, a startup that wants to build a digital nation for Africans, has raised pre-seed funding of $2.1 million, according to its co-founder, Eche Emole. Afropolitan started out as an organisation that organised parties, events, and festivals for the African diaspora. The former CTO of Coinbase, Balaji Srinivasan conceives a network state as a digital nation built without the historical cons...

Ghana-based fintech Fido is now in search of additional growth avenues for its expansion across Africa. Fido says that it is planning to add savings and payment products to its portfolio later this year, and to enter Uganda, its second market, as it prepares to expand to more regions across the continent. The fintech is also set to open its second research and development centre in Ghana’s capital...

Diagnostics is at the centre of healthcare; without it, doctors and physicians cannot offer treatment. But in emerging markets like Africa, where infrastructure is lacking and the doctor-to-patient ratio stands at staggering regular checkups are often considered an afterthought. Healthtracka, Lagos-based health tech has raised $1.5 million in seed funding. Dare-Johnson worked several years in the...

Germany’s competition regulator is looking into possible abuses related to how Google operates its Maps product. Andreas Mundt, president of the FCO, says they have information to suggest that Google may be restricting the combination of its own map services with third-party map services, for example when it comes to embedding Google Maps location data, the search function or Google Street View in...

Platform9 announced that it closed a $26 million funding round led by Celesta Capital with participation from Cota Capital, NGP Capital and other investors. CEO Bhaskar Gorti says that the new cash will be used to drive Platform9’s go-to-market strategy and product research and development, particularly as the company seeks out larger-scale enterprise deployments. A recent McKinsey report suggests...

Binance. US, the American company associated with the world’s largest crypto exchange, isn’t worried about the market turmoil that has pushed some of its competitors to tighten their belts. CEO Brian Shroder says that the company is in the strongest position possible to not only successfully weather this downturn but also emerge as the leading crypto platform in the U.S. He says their funding roun...

The construction industry in Kenya is so big that it is among the few globally that expanded amidst the Covid lockdowns of 2020. The Kenya National Bureau of Statistics projected the construction industry will grow at an average rate of 6.1% over the next three years. Jumba, a b2b construction technology platform launched in April this year, is out to bridge this gap through an online platform tha...

On-demand grocery retail business Appetito, announced the acquisition of Lamma, a similar startup which operates in Rabat, and the Greater Tunis area of Morocco and Tunisia respectively. Co-founder Shehab Mokhtar, says the deal is expected to close by the third quarter of 2022, but the two companies have reached an agreement to operate under Appetito as a single entity. Lamma co-founder and CEO Ya...

Kenya’s 12th parliament passed the controversial 2020 proposal that seeks to regulate anyone who employs technologies to collect, process, store or transfer information for a fee. The wide-sweeping and vague ICT Practitioners Bill mandated the registration and licensing of vaguely defined ICT practitioners by a council. Cabinet Secretary in Kenya’s Ministry of Information and Computer Technology,...