Author: Tapiwa Matthew Mutisi

Two-year-old Kenyan startup Wapi Pay which has offices in China and Singapore has joined the growing club of African startups to attract venture funding today announced that it has raised $2.2 million in what is termed as a non-equity round of pre-seed funding. The firm said its investors included EchoVC…

Ambani Africa, founded by Mukundi Lambani, is an interactive African-language-based early childhood edtech, that has recently been announced as the winner of the third cohort of the I’M IN accelerator, supported by IDF Capital. The winner and runners-up were announced at the virtual Demo Day held on 30 July 2021, where Ambani…

South Africa-based award-winning agritech startup Khula, launched in 2018, is finding its niche in the ever-growing industry as it announced the launch of their new app in a statement yesterday, after closing a $1.3-million (R20-million) seed round led by AECI and ESquared Investments, to scale operations across the country. The myriad challenges faced by farmers…

Salesforce-owned API-building company MuleSoft, the company it bought in 2018 for $6.5 billion, announced that it will purchase Robotic Process Automation (RPA) company Servicetrace for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition will complement MuleSoft’s application composition platform, explained executives.  Over the last couple of years, robotic process automation or RPA has been red hot…

Microsoft has announced appointing Olatomiwa Williams as the new Country Manager for Nigeria, taking over from Akin Banuso who is now the Enterprise Commercial Lead for the Middle East and Africa– Multi market region. Prior to her recent appointment, she was the Specialist Sales Leader working with an extended team…

YouTube on Sunday barred Sky News Australia, from uploading new content for one week, citing concerns about Covid-19 misinformation. The move comes after a review of posts uploaded by the Rupert Murdoch-owned TV channel, which has a substantial online presence. Former US President Donald Trump was temporarily banned under the policy.…

Zoom Video Communications Inc agreed to pay $85 million and bolster its security practices to settle a lawsuit claiming it violated users’ privacy rights by sharing personal data with Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn and letting hackers disrupt Zoom meetings in a practice called Zoombombing. Subscribers in the proposed class action would…

PayPal will be moving forward with its plans to transform its mobile payment app into a “super app” according to the company’s CEO. During a recent Q2 earnings call PayPal CEO Dan Schulman told investors that the initial version of its new consumer digital wallet app is now “code complete” and this means…

Square Inc, the payments firm of Twitter Inc co-founder Jack Dorsey, will buy Australian fintech company Afterpay Ltd for $29 billion, creating a global transactions giant in the biggest buyout of an Australian firm. Square’s decision to purchase the buy now, pay later (BNPL) pioneer is that it looks to expand further into…

Three tech giants namely Apple, Microsoft, and Google owner Alphabet have recently reported a combined profit of more than $50 billion in the April-June quarter, underscoring their unparalleled influence and success at reshaping the way we live. Although these companies make their money in different ways, the results served as…

Microsoft Teams has gained new Defender ‘Safe Links’ phishing protection to protect users against potentially dangerous phishing URLs. The additional phishing protection in Teams is available for organizations using Defender for Office 365 to guard against phishing attacks that use weaponized URLs. While email is the standard medium for delivering…

South African payments startup Yoco has raised US$83-million (about R1.2-billion) from top investors in series-C funding round as demand grows among small businesses for its digital payments tools. New investors include Dragoneer Investment Group, which is making its Africa investment debut, Breyer Capital, HOF Capital, The Raba Partnership, 4DX Ventures, TO…

Spotify is taking a cue from social networks like Facebook, which deliver a constant stream of notifications under a “bell” icon in the mobile app to keep users engaged with the latest content. As shared at Stream On in February, there are 50,000+ hours of content uploaded to Spotify every…

Jeff Bezos wants to spot NASA up to $2 billion in a bid to reignite the battle for space between his rocket company Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The world’s richest man appealed to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in an open letter Monday, offering to cover billions of dollars in the…

Netflix posted sluggish subscriber growth when it reported earnings Tuesday, and forecast bigger gains ahead. The streaming service said it has 209 million subscribers globally after adding a little more than a million subscribers in the second quarter of 2021. That beat the company’s own expectations for the quarter, even though it was…

Microsoft recently announced that it’s rolling out a Windows 11 update that includes its Chat feature for talking with friends and family members over Microsoft Teams. People who are already testing Windows 11 through the Windows Insider program will be able to try the Chat software before Windows 11 becomes generally available…

YouTube has launched a new way for video creators to earn money from fans through a feature called Super Thanks, as the Alphabet Inc streaming service looks to attract more content makers. The feature, a fourth way for YouTubers to earn money from their viewers, comes as competing platforms like short-form…

Riding his own rocket, the richest human in the world, Amazon.com and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos and three others landed safely after Blue Origin’s first flight to space with passengers aboard, a key milestone in the company’s effort to make space tourism viable. Bezos streaked into space Tuesday on a thrilling 10-minute…

The EU, the U.K., and NATO on Monday joined the US in condemning cyberattacks on Microsoft Exchange servers which affected at least 30,000 organizations globally by hackers based in China, though the EU stopped short of blaming the Chinese government. Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and Canada also joined the coalition,…

Just over a week after Richard Branson flew to the edge of space, fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos is set for a similarly high-stakes trip aboard his own rocket. After conquering Earth, Bezos eyes a new frontier in space tomorrow after building a massive business empire that has in many ways conquered…