Author: Staff Writer

MTN MoMo Payment Service Bank (PSB) officially kicked off its commercial operations in Nigeria today. This follows CBN’s final approval MTN’s fintech subsidiary in April 2020. The company carried out a successful pilot initiated on the 16th of May, 2020 aligning it with the launch of MTN’s GSM operations on…

Autochek has entered into the North African auto market with the acquisition of Morocco’s KIFAL Auto for an undisclosed fee. This comes within a year of entering the East African market with the acquisition of Cheki Kenya and Cheki Uganda from Ringier One Africa Media. Launched in 2020, Autochek combines…

Healthtech startup, Zuri Health, announced that it has closed a $1.3 million pre-seed funding round with investments from DOB Equity, Launch Africa and Founders Factory Africa. Other investors in this round include V8 Capital, Platform Capital, Villgro Africa, Asime Ventures, and the Salik Family Trust. Launched by Ikechukwu Arthur Anoke…

Nile, a South African agritech startup announced that it has raised $5.1 million in a funding round led by Naspers, a South African global consumer internet company and one of the largest technology investors in the world. Naspers invested ($2.5 million) through its early-stage tech investment vehicle, Naspers Foundry. Other…

Topship, a Nigerian digital freight forwarding startup announced that it has raised $2.5 million in a seed round led by Flexport. The recent YC-combinator alumnus has other investors in this round including Soma Capital, Starling Ventures, Olive Tree Capital, Capital X and True Capital. Individual investors such as Immad Akhund,…

Billionaire Elon Musk has temporarily put a hold on the $44 billion purchase of social media platform Twitter. He made this known on Friday stating that this was due to “pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.” Though he said he was…

Mobility as a service provider, Uber has started operations in three new Nigerian cities – Warri, Enugu and Kano. With the five previous cities, namely Lagos, Abuja, Benin City, Port Harcourt and Ibadan, Uber is now available in eight cities. Uber landed in Lagos in July 2014. “I am thrilled at what…

Tech giant Google announced that it has added 34 new languages to its translation service, Google Translate. This was announced at its ongoing I/O developer conference. There are ten new African languages included in the new set of languages released and there are spoken by about 159 million people across…

Nigerian identity verification startup, Identitypass, announced that it has raised $2.8 million seed funding in a round led by MaC Venture Capital and months after graduating from Y Combinator. Other investors include Soma Capital, True Capital Fund and Sherwani Capital. Combined with the $360,000 raised in a pre-seed round, this…

MARA, a pan-African crypto exchange platform, announced that it has raised $23 million in seed funding to increase the participation of Africans in the crypto economy. The investors in this round include Coinbase Ventures, Alameda Research (FTX) and Distributed Global. Other VCs in the round include TQ Ventures, DIGITAL, Nexo,…

On Tuesday, Tech giant Apple announced that it was discontinuing its music player, the iPod. Apple launched the iPod device in 2001 which could store up to 1,000 tracks and it was hailed as a device that revolutionised the way people listened to music. With the slogan “1,000 songs in your…

Ethio Telecom, Ethiopia state-owned mobile provider, launched its 5G network service on Monday, 9th May 2022. The service will first be available in the capital Addis Ababa, before eventually spreading to other parts of the country. It will be available in Addis Ababa and outside the capital in the coming…

Billionaire Elon Musk says that he would reverse former US President Donald Trump’s Twitter ban when he takes over the reigns at the social media company. He is currently putting together the funds required for the $44bn acquisition of Twitter. Donald Trump was banned from Twitter on the 8th of…

Instagram will start testing NFTs with select creators in the United States this week. According to Adam Mosseri, the head of the social media platform, there will be no fees associated with posting or sharing the digital collectibles on the platform. Mark Zuckerberg corroborated this in his talk with Tom…

Airtel Africa, one of the foremost mobile telecoms company operating in Nigeria, disclosed that its subsidiary, SMARTCASH Payment Service Bank limited (‘Smartcash’) has secured Central Bank of Nigeria’s approval to commence Payment Service Bank (PSB) operations. According to the Chief Executive, Airtel Africa, Mr. Segun Ogunsanya, “I am very pleased…

2021 was a truly transformative year for the mobile app industry. In light of multiple lockdowns as well as wholesale privacy changes affecting user acquisition on iOS, consumer habits and user behavior patterns have undergone immense change and impressive growth. But how have these challenges affected the app marketing ecosystem?…

Entrepreneurs claim that finance is one of the top three ingredients required for a successful business. So they have to find out ways of raising funds for their companies. Entrepreneurs have various avenues to raise funds for their businesses and one of the ways is through investments by Angel Investors…

Three tech giants Apple, Google and Microsoft are planning to kill off the use of passwords across mobile, desktop and browsers. They have announced plans to expand support for a common passwordless sign-in standard created by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium. Passwords have been a notorious…

WhatsApp, a meta messaging company has announced that it is slowly rolling new features to its user base. One of the new features is the increase in the group size from 256 to 512. This means you can now have 512 people in a group chat. According to the company…

South African based mobility startup, WhereIsMyTransport, has successfully completed the mapping of 50 cities in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Europe, and Asia, thus becoming the first company to provide full-coverage mobility and Point Of Interest data in all of these markets. WhereIsMyTransport is a leading technology company and central source…