₦airaland Forum

Ten years in, and the numbers finally say what the ambition always promised. African fintech unicorn Flutterwave has surpassed one billion transactions and processed more than $40 billion in total payment value since its launch, a milestone that lands not just as a business update, but as a statement about where African fintech is heading and who is building the rails beneath it.

Founder and CEO Olugbenga Agboola disclosed this in a blog post reflecting on the company's performance and expansion over the past year, and the story he told was less about celebration and more about construction. Agboola, known inside the industry as "GB," has spent the better part of a decade arguing that Africa's payments problem is not a demand problem; it's a plumbing problem. The continent has buyers, sellers, and mobile-native consumers who have leapfrogged cash faster than any Western market predicted. What it lacked was reliable, interoperable infrastructure capable of handling that scale. Flutterwave's latest numbers suggest the plumbing is finally working.

The growth engine behind the milestone is telling. Wallet-based collections recorded a 289% increase in transaction volume over the last year, while the value of bank transfer transactions grew by 184%, reflecting the rising demand for digital financial services among businesses and consumers. These are not vanity metrics; they track behaviour change at street level. Mobile wallets and bank transfers have become the default, not the exception, for millions of African users who once operated entirely in cash. Flutterwave is riding that shift, but it has also helped cause it by building the infrastructure that makes those payments possible in the first place.

The company's regulatory posture has been equally aggressive. Flutterwave now supports payments in more than 50 global currencies across Africa, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and North America, and secured new operating licences in Senegal, Zambia, and Cameroon during the year. In a region where unlicensed fintechs have repeatedly hit walls, regulatory shutdowns, account freezes, forced exits, operating with clean licences in each market is not a bureaucratic footnote. It is a competitive moat.

The stablecoin move deserves attention too. Flutterwave deepened its partnerships with Circle and Polygon to integrate stablecoin capabilities into its payments infrastructure, aimed at improving cross-border settlement services. This is not a crypto bet; it is a settlement efficiency play. Cross-border payments across Africa have historically been expensive and slow, often routing through correspondent banks in London or New York before arriving in Lagos or Nairobi. Stablecoin rails can cut that latency and cost significantly. By baking this into its core infrastructure now, Flutterwave is positioning itself ahead of the curve.

Then there is the Mono acquisition. In January, Flutterwave acquired Nigerian open banking startup Mono in an all-stock transaction, enhancing its capabilities in open banking, financial data access, identity verification, and account-to-account payments. Mono continues to operate independently, but the deal cements Flutterwave's intent to own more of the financial data layer, not just the movement of money, but the verification, the identity, and the account access that makes that movement trusted. For enterprise clients, this kind of end-to-end capability is increasingly what separates a payments vendor from a payments partner.

Internally, Flutterwave promoted 25% of its global employees and issued a one-time economic relief payment for all staff worldwide, alongside cost-of-living adjustments and tax support for employees in Nigeria following recent regulatory changes. In a climate where African tech talent is being courted by remote-first global employers, retention investments like these matter. Agboola has consistently said his people are the company's differentiator; this move puts money behind that claim.

Looking ahead, Flutterwave says it remains focused on enabling cross-border commerce and supporting African businesses as they expand globally, describing itself as central to the continent's digital commerce transformation. At ten years old, with a billion transactions behind it and an infrastructure stack that keeps getting deeper, the company is no longer making a case for African fintech; it is the case.
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When Bloomberg published its second annual Africa Startups to Watch list on May 28, 2026, two countries stood above the rest. Kenya and Nigeria each secured four spots on the list of 25 companies, tying at the top while the remaining entries spread across twelve other African nations.

The list spotlights companies building solutions in environments where infrastructure or systems have failed to deliver, from accessing a doctor in Chad to moving goods in Kenya, securing a loan in South Africa, or safeguarding borders in Nigeria.

This is not a ranking of the richest or most hyped.

Bloomberg editors and analysts assessed companies based on the scale of the problem they address, the originality of their approach, and their traction with customers and investors. What came back was a portrait of a continent solving its own problems, on its own terms.

Kenya's Four: Transport, Logistics, and the Infrastructure of Work
Kenya's entries are not glamorous in the way that consumer apps tend to be. They are deeply structural, the kind of companies that don't make noise but quietly become load-bearing walls.

BuuPass, founded in 2016 by Sonia Kabra and Wyclife Omondi, is digitizing Africa's largely informal travel industry by enabling users to search and book bus, rail, and flight tickets across multiple operators, effectively creating transportation data infrastructure in markets where mobility systems often operate without integrated digital coordination. Backed by Founders Factory Africa and Google's Black Founders Fund, BuuPass is not just selling tickets, it is building the data layer underneath an entire industry.

Leta is addressing logistics inefficiencies by helping businesses optimise deliveries, assign drivers, and track supply chains in real time. Backed by Google's Africa Investment Fund, Leta entered Ghana after closing a $5 million seed round in July 2025, a signal that the company is done proving the model and ready to scale it.

Oye targets motorcycle taxi riders, linking accident insurance and credit access directly to fuel purchases. With Britam behind it and one million riders in its sights, Oye is extending financial services into an informal sector that traditional insurers have never found a way into.

WorkPay started as payroll software before expanding into HR, compliance, and financial services tools. Backed by Visa, Norrsken22, and Y Combinator, the company now serves businesses operating across more than 30 African countries. In a continent where cross-border hiring is becoming increasingly common, WorkPay is quietly becoming the administrative spine that makes it possible.

Nigeria's Four: Healthcare, Lending, and Defence
Nigeria's entries cut across sectors that share one thing in common, they are all operating in spaces where the state has either retreated or never fully arrived.

10mg Health, founded in 2022 by pharmacist Christian Nwachukwu, targets one of the most persistent bottlenecks in Nigeria's healthcare system, upfront payment for treatment. Its flagship product, 10mgCredit, provides financing to hospitals and pharmacies, enabling providers to deliver care even when patients cannot immediately pay.

Remedial Health, backed by both Y Combinator and Tencent, helps healthcare providers manage inventory, verify suppliers, and access financing. It has financed tens of millions of dollars worth of medicines through its platform, a number that reflects how broken pharmaceutical supply chains in Nigeria have historically been.

Sycamore, founded by Babatunde Akin-Moses, is a digital lending platform serving individuals and businesses in Nigeria while expanding to reach Africans in the UK and beyond. Bloomberg noted the company's navigation of the familiar tension in digital lending, balancing aggressive growth with the underwriting discipline needed to survive long-term. In 2026, Sycamore obtained a microfinance bank licence in Nigeria through an acquisition, a move that plants it deeper in the regulatory soil.

Terra Industries, founded in 2024 by Nathan Nwachuku and Maxwell Maduka, is a Lagos-based defence-tech startup that builds mid-range drones and security systems to address the growing threat of jihadist groups in West Africa's Sahel region, which have begun deploying retrofitted commercial drones against military positions and critical infrastructure. The company has attracted investment from 8VC, controlled by Palantir Technologies co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and recently raised $34 million. It is also expanding manufacturing with a second facility in Ghana, the highest-funded single startup on Bloomberg's entire list.

The Rest of the List: 14 Countries, One Continent
South Africa, Nigeria, and Tanzania each had three companies on the list, while the remaining startups came from Botswana, Cameroon, Chad, Egypt, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Mauritius, and Somalia.

In healthcare, Botswana's Deaftronics builds solar-powered hearing aids for regions without reliable electricity. Chad's Telemedan connects patients with doctors through solar-powered telemedicine stations in areas with almost no physicians.

Cameroon's Waspito offers instant online doctor consultations with no appointment required. Tanzania's SafeSip uses AI-monitored solar purification systems to make contaminated water safe to drink.

In fintech, Ivory Coast's HUB2 connects mobile money wallets, bank accounts, cards, and digital wallets through a single platform with a particular focus on the CFA franc zone. Tanzania's Black Swan uses alternative data, utility payments, transaction histories, to extend credit to borrowers with no formal records. Cameroon's Nkwa builds savings tools for informal economies. South Africa's Omniscient uses AI and retail and telecom data to help banks assess creditworthiness, with TransUnion, Arise, and Shoprite Holdings among its backers. PawaPay processes millions of transactions daily across about 20 countries and has reported profitability since 2023, a distinction that still turns heads in African fintech.

On climate, Madagascar's Bôndy pursues forest restoration without external equity. Somalia's Ecosom converts agricultural waste into biochar and cleaner fuels. South Africa's Amesect turns organic waste into fertiliser and animal feed. South Africa's Aura raised a $14.5 million Series B to expand its app-based emergency response network. Egypt's Widebot rounds out the list with Arabic-language conversational AI built to handle hundreds of millions of automated interactions monthly.

Why This List Matters Now
Global shifts are reinforcing the pressure on African startups. The conflict in Iran and cuts to healthcare assistance under President Donald Trump's administration have highlighted the need for African governments and businesses to mobilise capital locally. Nearly half of the funding raised by companies on this year's list came from African investors. Startups across the continent almost doubled their debt fundraising in 2025, even as equity financing from venture capital firms declined.

That context reframes what this list actually is. It is not a celebration of the hottest names or the biggest rounds. It is a record of what happens when a continent stops waiting, and starts building.

When Zipline touched down in Kaduna in 2022, it looked like yet another health-tech experiment, drones ferrying vaccines over the savanna with the kind of optimism that African pilots attract and often disappear into. Nobody was calling it infrastructure. Four years later, that framing has completely changed.

Zipline now says Nigeria is its biggest strategic market on the continent, and the company is backing that claim with real capital commitments.

Anthonio Pinheiro, its newly appointed Nigeria Country Director, confirmed in an interview with TechCabal that the company intends to build 12 new distribution centres across the country, scaling from three operational hubs to 15 facilities nationwide by 2028. The target: connect 20,000 health facilities and put fast access to medical commodities within reach of roughly 100 million Nigerians.

That is not a pilot. That is a national infrastructure play.

The numbers behind the ambition are grounded in a real problem. Nigeria's healthcare supply chain has been broken for decades, not in the abstract, policy-paper sense, but in the way that kills people quietly. A 2026 study found that over half of rural health facilities experienced at least one contraceptive stockout within a three-month window. Anti-venom, blood supplies, malaria treatment, and maternal care products routinely run dry in communities where the nearest alternative facility might be a boat ride and three hours away.

Patients arrive at hospitals, travel sometimes the whole day, only to find the drug that could save them is not in stock.

Zipline model attacks this directly. Rather than pushing hospitals to maintain costly storage and inventories they can never fully predict, Zipline manages supply centrally across temperature-controlled, AI-managed hubs and delivers on demand, typically within 30 to 45 minutes. "If a hospital requests 20 vaccine doses and 25 patients show up, they can call us and we can deliver the additional five," Pinheiro said. The company already claims measurable proof: vaccine stockout in supported areas have dropped significantly, maternal mortality rates at supported facilities have reportedly fallen by more than 50% due in part to faster blood delivery, and emergency deliveries, including one involving anti-venom reaching a remote hospital within 47 minutes, have pulled people back from outcomes that would otherwise have been fatal.

The current footprint covers three states, Kaduna, Cross River, and Bayelsa, serving over 1,300 health facilities and around six million people. But the architecture of the expansion is no longer state-by-state negotiation. Zipline is now pursuing a federal-scale framework, supported by Nigeria's Federal Ministry of Health and a U.S. government grant initiative covering five African countries, one that allows states to plug into a national autonomous delivery network rather than negotiate isolated deployments.

That shift reflects something larger happening inside Zipline itself. The California-based company increasingly describes itself not as a drone startup but as an AI robotics infrastructure company. The drones are autonomous. The inventory systems are AI-powered. The hubs in Kaduna and Cross River are now fully solar-powered, with energy redundancy systems that have eliminated tens of thousands of liters of diesel consumption monthly at some sites, effectively turning each hub into a mini energy ecosystem for surrounding communities.

Pinheiro is also blunt about the economics: "We end up being more affordable because of the operational efficiencies we create." States cut storage costs. They reduce transportation overhead. They get real-time visibility into what's being used, what's running low, and where delivery is needed, the kind of utilization data that most Nigerian health systems have never had.

On regulation, the path is narrowing. As of May 2026, drone operators must obtain an End-User Certificate from ONSA before approaching the Civil Aviation Authority for a permit. Pinheiro calls this a national security question, not a barrier, and says Zipline's relationship with Nigerian regulators has grown increasingly collaborative. The company defines operational corridors, works within airspace restrictions, and treats compliance as part of the infrastructure build, not an obstacle to it.

What makes this moment different from 2022 is that Zipline is no longer asking whether drone logistics can work in Nigeria. It is asking how fast the infrastructure can be built before the window closes. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how many Nigerians, in riverine communities, in hard-to-reach northern states, in places that no Lagos-based health startup has ever prioritized, were effectively outside the reach of any functioning supply chain. Zipline is building toward them.
"Nigeria is more than the big cities," Pinheiro said. "There are people in remote areas who still cannot access healthcare quickly."

The 12 new hubs are a direct answer to

For millions of Nigerians who rely on borrowed airtime to make calls, send money, or stay connected through the month's lean days, the past six weeks have felt like a quiet punishment for something they didn't do. MTN Nigeria's Xtratime, the country's most widely used airtime lending service, went dark in April 2026, and the reason had nothing to do with the subscribers who depended on it daily. It had everything to do with a regulatory standoff that put Nigeria's largest telecom operator on a tightrope between legal caution and competitive pressure.

That standoff is now beginning to ease.
MTN Nigeria is working to restore its Xtratime airtime lending service after Nigeria's consumer protection regulator suspended enforcement of new digital lending rules. "The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) has suspended the enforcement of DEON. To that extent, we will reinstate the service," a company insider told TechCabal.

The move marks a significant shift. When MTN executives faced investors during the company's May 4 earnings call, the message was measured and careful. Chief Corporate Services Officer Tobechukwu Okigbo outlined two conditions for Xtratime's return: a court ruling that sets aside the regulations empowering the FCCPC to license, or a clear directive instructing the company to reinstate the service. Neither had happened at that point, and MTN held its ground. Airtel and Globacom had already restored airtime lending following the regulatory pause, a competitive pressure that MTN was visibly absorbing, but not yet bowing to.

Then came May 22.

The FCCPC, in deference to the rule of law, suspended the implementation and enforcement of the DEON Regulations 2025 following an April 15 interim order issued by the Federal High Court in Lagos. The court acted on a lawsuit by the Wireless Application Service Providers Association of Nigeria (WASPAN), which represents value-added service providers who argued the regulations overstepped into territory governed by the Nigerian Communications Commission. Industry analysts say the dispute reflects wider tensions between the FCCPC and the NCC over regulatory jurisdiction in Nigeria's telecom and digital finance sectors.

What started as a compliance exercise turned into a full-blown institutional turf war. The DEON Regulations, which officially took effect on July 21, 2025, with full enforcement kicking in from January 2026, required any entity involved in digital or non-traditional consumer lending, including airtime advances, to obtain a fresh licence from the FCCPC. The regulations introduced a compliance and licensing framework covering loan disclosures, debt recovery methods, and consumer data protection. The FCCPC framed it as consumer protection. Telcos framed it as regulatory overreach.

For MTN, the stakes were real but containable. Fees from Xtratime contribute roughly 3% of revenue, while airtime and data consumption linked to the product account for a low-20% share of total airtime distribution. On a company that generated ₦5.2 trillion ($3.77 billion) in revenue in 2025 and expects at least ₦6.24 trillion ($4.52 billion) in 2026, 3% is not existential, but it is not trivial either. Airtime and data lending has historically driven about 80% of non-core fintech revenue (VAS), and MTN's fintech revenue surged 77.9% to ₦64.188 billion in Q1 2026, a number that carries Xtratime's fingerprints even in its absence.

CEO Karl Toriola made the public case to investors that customers simply adapted. "There was a short-term impact on consumption patterns, which lasted only a few days," he said. "Customers adapted.

They either shifted to self-funded usage or found alternative ways to manage short-term needs." The argument was that Xtratime changed how people paid for airtime, not whether they consumed it. But the speed with which MTN is now moving to restore the service tells a more honest story, the product matters, and losing ground to Airtel and Glo in a market with 89.5 million subscribers is not a position any telecom CEO wants to hold longer than necessary.

Nigerian banks have also moved aggressively into the gap, with GTBank, Access Bank, UBA, Zenith Bank, FirstBank, and FCMB using USSD platforms to provide instant airtime and data loans directly to customers, a structural shift that could outlast the regulatory dispute if MTN takes too long to return.

The broader question hovering over all of this is what happens when the court case reaches its conclusion. The future of airtime lending services will ultimately depend on the outcome of the ongoing court proceedings and the final determination of the legality of the FCCPC's 2025 digital lending regulations. The FCCPC's suspension is temporary obedience to a court order, not a retreat. If the court eventually validates the DEON framework, telcos will face the licensing requirements all over again, but this time without the option of saying they were waiting for clarity.

For now, Nigeria's subscribers are getting their service back. What the regulatory landscape looks like on the other side of this legal fight is still being written.

NALA, the Tanzanian-founded stablecoin payments company led by Benjamin Fernandes, has secured up to $50 million in credit financing from Liquidity through Mars Growth Capital, a joint venture with MUFG Bank. Starting with an initial $25 million tranche, the facility is designed to pre-fund enterprise transactions, expand payment corridors, and onboard large clients going live in 2026, without diluting existing shareholders. It marks a major inflection point for a company that scaled its Rafiki B2B platform from zero to $1 billion in transaction volume in 18 months.
Benjamin Fernandes was a national television presenter in Tanzania at 17. By 21, he was the youngest African ever accepted to Stanford's Graduate School of Business. He worked at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He had every credential that should make investors open doors without hesitation. And yet, he applied to Y Combinator six times before getting in, was rejected by every startup accelerator in Tanzania, and when he finally got the green light from YC in 2019, Tanzania's central bank ordered him to shut down. His co-founder quit the week before Demo Day. He ran out of money and started over.

That backstory matters now more than ever, because the company he rebuilt from scratch just secured up to $50 million in credit financing, and it is no longer a scrappy remittance app fighting for survival. NALA, the Tanzanian-founded fintech building stablecoin-powered cross-border payment rails, has secured the facility from private credit firm Liquidity, as demand rises for faster business payments between emerging markets, Europe, and the United States.

The structure of the deal is deliberate. The initial $25 million facility offers a scale-up option of at least $50 million, arranged through Mars Growth Capital, a joint venture between Liquidity and MUFG Bank Ltd., to provide working capital supporting NALA's continued global expansion, product development, and operational scaling. And crucially, this is not a distress signal. The company still holds more than 50 percent of the capital from its 2024 $40 million equity round, allowing Liquidity's financing to be used strategically to accelerate growth and expand payment corridors without additional shareholder dilution.

Fernandes has been candid about what triggered the move. "At some point our business was more than doubling every other quarter, we grew faster than we could handle pre-funding for single direction payments and everything broke," he said. That is the kind of problem founders dream about, until it becomes real. When payment volumes double quarterly, the cash required to pre-fund those transfers has to move ahead of revenue. Without it, the rails seize up. The credit facility from Liquidity is the lubricant.

At the centre of this growth story is Rafiki, NALA's B2B payments platform. The Tanzanian-founded fintech began in 2017 as a remittance app for the African diaspora before expanding into business payments through Rafiki, its enterprise infrastructure platform, which now connects more than 249 banks and 26 mobile money services across 16 countries. Enterprise partners including MoneyGram and TransferGo plug into Rafiki through a single API to reach markets where legacy banking infrastructure simply cannot move fast enough.

The timing of this deal lands squarely inside a broader market transformation. B2B stablecoin payments have grown sixfold in eighteen months, with monthly volumes now exceeding $30 billion.

Businesses are no longer experimenting with stablecoins, they are routing significant transaction volumes through them because the speed and cost advantages over traditional settlement are too large to ignore. The global stablecoin payment infrastructure market stood at $7.6 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $89.4 billion by 2034, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 32.1 percent. NALA is not chasing this wave, it built the rails before the wave arrived.

Paul Brodie, Global Head of Investments at Liquidity, noted that the facility was structured to account for NALA's compliant stablecoin rails, real-time cross-border payments, and rapid growth in emerging market corridors. That framing, compliant rails, is significant. Regulatory friction across Africa and Asia remains one of the sharpest competitive moats in this space. Companies that have built within local frameworks, rather than around them, hold an advantage that pure-tech competitors cannot easily replicate.

The new capital will be deployed to pre-fund larger customer accounts and onboard enterprise contracts set to go live in the second half of 2026.

Earlier this year, NALA also announced partnerships enabling businesses to collect US dollars globally and settle instantly in local currencies through regulated payment rails. The infrastructure is expanding in every direction simultaneously.

What Fernandes has built is not an app. It is financial plumbing for an era in which moving money between Lagos and London, Nairobi and New York, should be as fast and cheap as sending an email. Total equity funding to date stands at $50 million, following a $40 million Series A in July 2024 led by Acrew Capital, with participation from DST Global, Norrsken22, HOF Capital, Amplo, and angel investors including Vlad Tenev of Robinhood and Ryan King of Chime. The people who have backed it are not betting on Africa's potential as a talking point. They are betting on infrastructure that is already moving.

The man who got shut down, ran out of money, lost his co-founder, and rebuilt anyway just secured $50 million to scale the rails he laid. The stablecoin era is not coming. It is here, and NALA intends to carry it.

Egypt's real estate sector has long been a paradox, one of Africa's most active property markets, yet one of its most manually operated. That tension is precisely what PropTech Hub is built to resolve.

Coldwell Banker Commercial Advantage, Edafa Venture, and Prime Group Egypt have officially announced the establishment of PropTech Hub, the first specialized investment and development company dedicated to supporting and accelerating real estate technology companies in Egypt and the region. The announcement, made in late May 2026, marks a significant institutional step, not just another accelerator program with a flashy name, but a fully structured company with capital, networks, and a mandate to scale.

The timing is deliberate. Egypt's real estate PropTech platforms market is valued at $1.2 billion, driven by urbanization, rising tech adoption, and growing demand for digital solutions across Cairo and Alexandria. But valuation alone doesn't tell the full story. The infrastructure powering that market, the tools developers, brokers, and investors rely on daily, remains fractured and underpowered. That's the gap PropTech Hub is stepping into.

PropTech Hub evolves from the PropTech Program introduced in October, which was established to encourage innovation in the real estate sector. By transitioning the program into a fully-fledged company, the founding partners aim to create a structured institutional ecosystem capable of identifying, financing, and scaling promising startups. This evolution matters. Programs come and go. Companies have board rooms, investment mandates, and accountability. The decision to formalize signals that the three founding entities are not just testing an idea, they are committing to it.

The platform operates on three pillars: Connect, Innovate, and Elevate. Connect links founders with investors and real estate decision-makers. Innovate pushes new solutions for development, management, and operations. Elevate is designed to help companies expand their market reach and strengthen their business models. Together, the three pillars describe something more than a typical startup accelerator, they describe a pipeline, from idea to institutionally viable company.

Selected startups are expected to receive investment and operating support with a view to expanding regionally to the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Oman. That regional ambition is backed by the geography of the partnership itself. Edafa Venture brings Gulf experience and capital. Prime Group Egypt is a leading multi-sector investment group recognized for delivering smart, sustainable solutions, while Coldwell Banker Commercial Advantage serves as the commercial arm of the global Coldwell Banker network across Egypt and the MENA region, specializing in development, management, strategic advisory, and marketing of commercial and investment properties. Between the three, PropTech Hub has access to market intelligence, deal flow, and operational know-how that most accelerators simply cannot offer.

The macro conditions reinforce the urgency. AI-powered platforms like Nawy are already transforming property transactions, with the company processing $1.4 billion in property deals by the end of 2024, a 50x increase from $38 million in 2020. This kind of momentum signals that Egypt's real estate buyers and developers are ready for digital-first solutions. The question has never been about demand. It has always been about whether the institutional support exists to scale those solutions fast enough.

Egypt's real estate sector is entering a new era of large-scale digital integration, with the government preparing to offer more than 400,000 housing units through a unified digital system, one of the region's most ambitious coordinated digital real estate efforts. PropTech Hub enters this environment as a private-sector counterweight: where government drives standardization, PropTech Hub is positioned to drive innovation.

The three leaders behind the company have been clear about their intent. Mahmoud Farag of Prime Group Egypt described the venture as a structured investment platform for scalable real estate technology. Essam Ali, CEO of Edafa Venture, said real estate technology is among the most promising sectors over the coming decade, regionally and globally, and that PropTech Hub aims to identify and support companies capable of delivering transformative solutions that reshape the real estate industry. Sherif Hassan of Coldwell Banker Commercial Advantage added that the platform is built to connect innovation with real-world market implementation, bringing developers, investors, entrepreneurs, and technology providers under one roof.

What makes PropTech Hub credible is not the ambition behind it, ambition is cheap. It is the architecture. A dedicated company structure, three distinct founding partners with complementary capabilities, a regional expansion roadmap, and a launch event on the horizon where the first cohort will be publicly introduced. These details suggest a team that has thought past the press release.

Egypt's PropTech market is seeing increasing demand for property management platforms, virtual property viewings, online rental and sales transactions, and smart building technologies, with AI, data analytics, and blockchain driving new efficiencies across the sector. Startups solving any one of these problems now have a cleaner path to funding, mentorship, and regional scale, if PropTech Hub delivers on what it has set out to build.

Egypt's real estate industry is large enough to produce significant returns and fragmented enough to reward the right technology. The companies that figure out how to move faster, price more accurately, and operate more efficiently within this market will not just win locally, they will have a template for every major property market across the Middle East and Africa. PropTech Hub is betting it can produce those companies. The infrastructure is now in place. The proof will come from the startups that build on it.

Nigeria's generator economy is enormous, invisible, and quietly brutal. Walk through any Lagos neighborhood before sunrise and you'll hear it, that low mechanical growl from a thousand small machines burning through petrol to keep a few lights on, a fan turning, a fridge cold. It is the sound of a country paying a daily tax for electricity that the grid has never reliably delivered. According to World Bank data, 43% of Nigeria's population has no grid access at all. For those who do, frequent outages have made generators less of a backup and more of a primary energy source.

That is the market bPOWERd has walked into, and it arrived with a disarmingly simple answer.

The South African clean energy startup, developed under bp and officially launched in 2025, has set up operations across seven Lagos sites in partnership with 11plc, the operator of Mobil service stations in Nigeria. The model strips away every barrier that has historically kept clean energy out of reach for ordinary households and small businesses: no upfront installation cost, no technical knowledge required, no long-term commitment. Customers complete a verification process using their National Identification Number, pay a refundable ₦15,000 deposit, and walk away with a portable, solar-charged battery. When it runs out, they return it to the nearest Mobil hub and swap it for a fully charged one.

The economics are the headline. Running a small generator, the entry-level 0.9kVA to 1.2kVA type that powers a few lights, a fan, and a television, costs Nigerian households roughly ₦10,000 per day in fuel. bPOWERd's larger 1,000Wh battery, which delivers up to 12 hours of comparable power for lighting, fans, TVs, refrigerators, and small business equipment, rents from ₦3,000 per day.

That is a 70% reduction. The smaller 300Wh unit starts at ₦1,500 and covers basic electronics. No exhaust fumes. No noise. No jerry cans.

What makes bPOWERd's timing interesting is that it is not arriving on climate messaging alone, it is arriving on price. The generator lobby in Nigeria is not ideological; it is purely economic. People use generators because they have no choice and no cheaper option. bPOWERd is betting that once a cheaper, cleaner option exists and is physically accessible through a familiar network like Mobil stations, the math does the convincing. Early numbers suggest the bet is landing. The company says it reached 60% of its six-month rental target within the first seven weeks of going live in Lagos, a signal of demand that was clearly waiting for the right vehicle.

The South Africa proof of concept matters here. bPOWERd's 2025 launch there produced 125,000 rentals in its first twelve months of operation, strong enough validation to justify the Nigerian push. But as the company itself recognises, the two markets are not the same. South Africa's grid is troubled and politically contentious; Nigeria's grid simply does not exist for tens of millions of people. The product has to work for users who may have never had stable electricity to begin with, not just those exhausted by outages. That is a harder test, and the early results suggest it is passing.

Beyond power access, bPOWERd is building deliberately into Nigeria's local economy. Oluwole Ogidan, Head of bp Global West Africa, has pointed to the creation of on-site sales roles and partnerships with Nigerian solar technicians as a core part of the rollout, essentially a cleaner, quieter version of the informal ecosystem that already exists around generator repair shops and roadside fuel vendors. Jonathan Lule, the Managing Director, put it plainly: small businesses sit at the centre of everyday economic activity in Nigeria, yet they absorb a disproportionate share of the country's energy burden. A dependable, affordable power option changes their math fundamentally.

Nigeria's solar market is growing, the Africa Solar Outlook 2026 report puts solar at 1.5% of the country's overall energy mix, but adoption has been held back by installation costs and the assumption that clean energy requires a significant upfront investment. bPOWERd's rental model is a direct challenge to that assumption. It turns energy into a daily consumer decision rather than a capital expenditure, and routes access through infrastructure, petrol stations, that already exists in every urban neighborhood.

Seven sites is a start. The question the next twelve months will answer is whether this model can scale across Lagos and eventually into Abuja, Port Harcourt, and beyond. If Nigeria's first seven weeks are any indication, the demand was never the problem.

The math has never added up. Over £4 billion flows from the UK to Sub-Saharan Africa every year, yet sending that money still costs an average of 8.5%, more than double the UN's 3% target. Behind that number is a familiar story: compliance systems built for Wall Street and the City of London trying to make sense of BVN numbers, mobile money flows, and West African transaction patterns they were never designed to read. The result is a flood of false positives, expensive manual reviews, and a quiet exodus of correspondent banking relationships from the continent, down more than 25% over the last decade.

Smartcomply, a Nigerian compliance and cybersecurity startup, is now stepping into that gap with its UK expansion, bringing Adhere, its AI-powered AML, KYC, and fraud-detection platform, directly to electronic money institutions, remittance firms, neobanks, and cross-border payment fintechs operating African corridors.

The Lagos-born company isn't pitching a generic compliance upgrade. It's selling something far more specific: an infrastructure layer that actually understands how money moves in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa. Adhere integrates into the backend systems of financial institutions through an API, connecting directly to local identity infrastructure like Nigeria's Bank Verification Number database, with machine learning models trained on regional payment behaviours. The difference between that and a standard European compliance stack isn't cosmetic, it's the difference between flagging a legitimate mobile money transfer and letting it through.

Smartcomply currently monitors over $1 billion in monthly transactions across more than 100 financial institutions in Africa. The platform reportedly cuts manual compliance workloads by 70% and reduces false positives by 40%, numbers that matter enormously for firms weighing whether African corridors are worth the operational burden.

The timing is deliberate. UK payment firms are already navigating heightened compliance pressure from the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act's failure-to-prevent-fraud offence, in force since September 2025, and the Payment Systems Regulator's mandatory reimbursement scheme for authorised push payment fraud. In that environment, the cost of getting African transaction monitoring wrong isn't just regulatory, it's reputational.

CEO Gbemisola Osunrinde has been direct about the company's positioning: "African payment corridors should be a growth opportunity for the global financial system, not a liability. Adhere exists to make that growth possible without compromising on compliance. Smartcomply's UK presence means that for the first time, UK fintechs and banks have direct access to an AML platform that understands African data the way it should be understood: from the inside out."

CTO Anita Ajalla framed it even more bluntly. "Compliance technology designed in New York or London cannot read Nigerian Bank Verification Numbers, cannot understand mobile money flows in Kenya, and cannot make sense of West African mule networks. The companies that get to participate in African growth are the ones with infrastructure built for African reality."

That argument is gaining traction not just in boardrooms but in regulatory circles. In March, the Central Bank of Nigeria introduced baseline standards for automated AML solutions, formally recognizing artificial intelligence and machine learning as tools for monitoring financial crime, a shift that signals African regulators are moving to tighten controls, not loosen them. For UK firms already invested in African corridors, the compliance bar is only going up.

Smartcomply's UK expansion focuses on Nigerian, Kenyan, Ghanaian, South African, and Rwandan payment corridors, with plans to deepen its presence in Rwanda and Côte d'Ivoire in 2026. The roadmap signals a company that isn't just chasing a market, it's methodically building the connective tissue between two financial ecosystems that have long struggled to speak the same language.

Founded in 2021, the company has evolved into a group structure with distinct products: Adhere for AML and fraud detection, Secure for GRC automation, Intel for threat intelligence, and Academy for cybersecurity training. The UK move brings the most internationally deployable of those products, Adhere, to the market where the demand is most acute.

Africa's financial systems are growing faster than the infrastructure meant to govern them. Smartcomply is betting that whoever builds that governance layer first will be indispensable. In London, it's now making that case in person.

Most investment stories from Africa lead with the headline number and stop there. This one deserves more than that.

When AHL Venture Partners announced the first close of its AHL Africa Credit Fund I at $30.5 million, it wasn't just a fundraising milestone, it was the culmination of nearly two decades of quiet, deliberate work that most of the continent's fintech and startup noise tends to drown out. Since 2007, AHL has served as advisor to the AHL Charitable Foundation, building exposure across debt, equity, and fund investments in African businesses. That's not a pivot story. That's a long game being played by people who understood something early that the market is only now beginning to accept.

Here's what they understood: equity isn't always the answer.
Over the years, AHL increasingly shifted its attention toward private credit, arguing that debt financing offers a more sustainable and scalable model for both investors and businesses operating on the continent. In markets where exits are slow, valuations are volatile, and the traditional venture capital playbook often misfires, debt, structured, flexible, and patient, starts to look a lot more attractive. AHL began sharpening its credit strategy in 2020, following a conviction that debt offered a more scalable and risk-managed pathway for investors than equity in many African market contexts.

That conviction wasn't theoretical. Since then, via the AHL Foundation and AHL-led syndications, AHL has deployed over $120 million in debt investments across the continent, with a focus on businesses operating in financial inclusion, climate action, and sustainable food and agriculture. Those aren't vanity sectors chosen for optics, they are the structural fault lines of African economies, the places where capital scarcity causes the most damage and where well-deployed debt can generate both yield and lasting change.

The new fund institutionalized that track record.

Anchored by the AHL Foundation alongside three family offices, the AHL Africa Credit Fund I will offer senior secured, mezzanine, and bridge loans to African companies. The design is deliberate. The fund will provide working capital, bridge loans and mezzanine debt to companies addressing financial inclusion, climate change, and agriculture and food systems. These aren't the kinds of deals that generate Twitter threads, they're the kind that keep supply chains running, extend mobile credit to farmers in the dry season, and help a mid-sized enterprise bridge the gap between where it is and where a bank might eventually agree to take it.

That gap is enormous. Africa's mid-market remains chronically underserved, squeezed between microfinance instruments that are too small and commercial banks that demand collateral most growing businesses cannot provide. The launch of the new fund comes at a time when more investors are exploring alternative financing structures in Africa amid growing concerns about the performance of traditional venture capital models across emerging markets. And while broader African private equity fundraising has declined sharply in recent years, the first close signals that institutional and family office appetite for structured African credit is beginning to firm up.

Rosanne Whalley, CEO of AHL Venture Partners, is clear-eyed about what this moment means. "This first close is an important milestone for AHL and reflects growing conviction that African businesses need more flexible, long-term debt capital. After nearly two decades investing alongside entrepreneurs across the continent, we believe there is a significant opportunity to build a scaled private credit platform that supports strong businesses solving real challenges across African markets."

She also framed the fund's broader function with precision: "We see ourselves as an on-ramp for private capital looking to allocate for impact and returns in the African market." That framing matters. The fund isn't positioning itself as the entire highway, it's the entry point, the credible, de-risked structure that makes it easier for family offices, high-net-worth individuals, and foundations to get exposure to African credit markets without having to build origination capability from scratch.

What AHL is doing, quietly and methodically, is infrastructure work, not the infrastructure of cables and data centres, but the financial kind. The rails that help capital actually reach the businesses that need it, at the right cost, in the right form, at the right time. Since 2020, AHL says it has deployed more than $120 million in debt financing through the AHL Foundation and syndicated investment structures. The Africa Credit Fund I is where that experience gets packaged into something replicable and scalable.

The full target size of the fund hasn't been disclosed, but the direction is clear: AHL is building a private credit platform for Africa, and this first close is proof the market is ready to follow.

Tosin Eniolorunda has never been one to speak quietly. Weeks before this announcement, the co-founder and Group CEO of Moniepoint stood before an audience at The Platform Nigeria in Lagos and said something that set the internet on fire. Despite the company's commitment to hiring Nigerians, Moniepoint had 500 open vacancies it could not fill, and the candidates it found were not up to the global quality standards the company needed. The backlash was swift and visceral. Many Nigerians didn't hear a narrow concern about recruitment standards, they heard a broader suggestion that Nigerian professionals themselves were inadequate.

Then, just weeks later, Eniolorunda stood at the Oduduwa Hall of his alma mater, Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, and put ₦3 billion on the table.
Moniepoint Inc. has announced a ₦3 billion commitment to establish innovation hubs at three federal universities, OAU in Ile-Ife, the University of Nigeria Nsukka, and Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, to be built over the next three years. The announcement was made in the presence of vice chancellors, industry leaders, traditional rulers, students, and alumni. It was deliberate in its symbolism and pointed in its geography.

The three institutions represent Nigeria's major regions: OAU for the South-West, UNN for the South-East, and ABU Zaria for the North. That's not a coincidence. It's a statement. For too long, Nigeria's tech opportunity has orbited Lagos. Moniepoint is choosing to break that orbit.

Each hub will be far more than a computer lab with good branding. They will function as permanent centres for hands-on training in software engineering, data science, artificial intelligence, design, robotics, product development, and entrepreneurship. The programmes are open to students from every faculty, engineering, arts, social sciences, law. The idea is that a history student curious about product management deserves the same shot as a computer science undergraduate. The model could produce hundreds of technology talents annually, scaling a university-based developer training model that has already shown results elsewhere.

That precedent already exists within Moniepoint's own ecosystem. The HatchDev Programme at the University of Lagos, a joint venture led by Moniepoint CTO Felix Ike and NITHub, currently trains roughly 500 software developers annually. The ₦3 billion initiative is essentially a national expansion of what already works.

Eniolorunda's tone at the launch was notably different from his Platform appearance. He came home, literally. He acknowledged that Moniepoint's foundations were rooted in Nigerian universities, calling the hubs a way of paying that trust forward. "Nigeria's digital economy cannot run on potential alone; it requires immense, localised talent density," he said. His co-founder Felix Ike, who also trained in a Nigerian university, stood beside him. The point landed without needing to be spelled out: the same system they were now investing in had, at one point, produced them.

The university leaders received the news with visible enthusiasm. OAU Vice-Chancellor Professor Adebayo Simeon Bamire described the move as a major boost that would reduce youth unemployment and accelerate startup incubation on campuses. Land has already been allocated for the OAU facility. At UNN and ABU, the sentiment was the same, this is the kind of private-sector alignment Nigerian higher education has been waiting for.

What Moniepoint is building here is a pipeline that doesn't depend on luck or geography. Curriculum input from internal teams, mentorship from product engineers, structured internship pathways that can convert into full employment, the programme is built around cohort-based, practical training designed to get graduates into industry-ready roles. The company isn't just funding buildings; it's funding outcomes.

Eniolorunda himself is proof that talent is built, not found. He worked at Interswitch before founding what eventually became Moniepoint, and that exposure shaped everything. The criticism levelled at him after his Platform comments argued precisely this: that the ladder that produced him should be the ladder he builds for others. With this ₦3 billion investment, that argument has been answered in concrete and steel.

Nigeria's tech ecosystem does not lack raw intelligence. What it has historically lacked is structured, industry-connected pathways to convert potential into professional output. Moniepoint isn't solving that problem by complaining about it from a podium. It's solving it by writing the cheque.

Sending money across Africa should not be this hard. Yet it is. A transfer between two African countries still routes through a chain of correspondent banks, each one charging a fee, adding a delay, and creating another point of failure. This is not a glitch. It is the design.

The numbers make it embarrassing. According to the World Bank, remittances to Africa hit $92.2 billion in 2024. In the same year, Sub-Saharan Africa remained the most expensive region on earth to send money, averaging 8.45% to transfer just $200. The UN's stated target is 3%. The global average is 6.4%. In some corridors, costs balloon to 12.7%. When you have to pay nearly 13 cents on every dollar just to move money, the system is not broken; it was never properly built.

That gap is what Obinna Chukwujioke kept staring at. The co-founder and CEO of Maplerad understood early that Africa's payment problem was not a product problem. It was a structural one. "Payment systems across Africa are fragmented and don't talk to each other," he said. You cannot fix that by building a better app. You have to go deeper.

In 2020, Chukwujioke and his co-founder, Miracle Anyanwu, launched Wirepay, a consumer payments product. By 2022, they had seen enough of the surface layer to know the real work was underneath it. They pivoted, rebranded to Maplerad, and opened their infrastructure to developers, startups, and enterprises as a Banking-as-a-Service platform, compliance, card issuance, multi-currency wallets, foreign exchange, automated payouts, all through a single API suite. A business can now launch a fully compliant fintech product on Maplerad in under five minutes.

Since the 2022 relaunch, Maplerad says it has processed over $500 million in transactions, serves more than 3,000 businesses, and reaches over five million end users across Africa. Chipper, Remitly, and Nombank are among the names on the platform. The company operates in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Côte d'Ivoire, Benin, and Cameroon, and works with MTN and Orange across the region.

Now consider what they are building into. Africa has 54 countries, each with its own central bank, regulatory framework, and banking network. There is no unified settlement system. The cross-border B2B payments market is estimated at between $300 billion and $500 billion annually, and researchers describe it as "vastly underserved." As of 2024, only 11 of Africa's 36 live instant payment systems supported cross-border transactions at all. Every single corridor in Sub-Saharan Africa had average transaction costs above 3%. Not most corridors. Everyone.

Harvard Business School research has found that reducing payment friction by 50% could create between 900,000 and 1.1 million remote jobs across the continent and add $3 billion to remote-work exports. For every 10% increase in transaction costs, remote-work exports contract by 4.7%. The relationship between payment infrastructure and economic opportunity is not theoretical; it is direct and measurable.

This is also the context in which the African Continental Free Trade Area has to be understood. AfCFTA is one of the most consequential economic agreements in the continent's history. But trade agreements on paper require payment infrastructure in practice. Without reliable, affordable cross-border payments, AfCFTA is an aspiration, not an architecture.

Maplerad is not alone in this space. It operates in the Banking-as-a-Service vertical alongside players like Anchor. Fintech analyst and Condia publisher Benjamin Dada draws a sharp line between Maplerad and companies like Mono. "Think of Maplerad as the infrastructure that lets a company launch a financial product quickly," Dada explains. If a lender like Fairmoney wanted to expand into Kenya, it would ordinarily face a long, expensive process of securing licences and building bank partnerships from scratch.

Maplerad removes that friction. "Instead of going through all the time and stress, they would just use a banking as a service provider like Maplerad to get up and running quickly."

Mono occupies different territory. "Mono's core is not banking as a service," Dada says. "Mono is more of an open banking player." Maplerad builds the banking product. Mono moves money between existing accounts. Same starting point, entirely different destination.

The challenges ahead are real. Regulatory environments across the continent remain complex and inconsistent. High FX margins continue to inflate costs in corridors where correspondent banking still dominates. The G20 aims to bring the global average cost of remittances down to 3% by 2027. For Sub-Saharan Africa, averaging 8.45% in 2024, that requires sustained infrastructure investment, policy reform, and the kind of unglamorous technical work that does not trend online but does make systems function.

Building the rails is one thing. Getting every train to run on them is another. But the rails have to come first, and someone has to lay them.

You can call their customer care

Amen to that
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Paystack has rebuilt its merchant Dashboard for the first time in ten years, launching an AI-powered Command Centre that lets businesses query their own payment data using plain language. The redesign also includes full mobile parity, dark mode, and a cleaner product architecture built on Paystack's internal design system, Pax.

Read the full article on technaija.com

Moniepoint Group means business in the UK, and it just proved it.

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Read the full article on technaija.com

Nigeria's real estate sector is the third largest contributor to the country's GDP, and yet people are still finding properties through WhatsApp messages, unverified agents, and word of mouth. Nigerent is building what this industry has needed for decades: a digital home for real estate in Nigeria. Virtual tours that let you walk through properties without leaving your house. Free listings with professional photography handled for you. Shortlets you can book directly. Legal protection for property purchases. Lagos. Then Abuja. Then everywhere. They launch June 1st, 2026, and they are just getting started.

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Every day in Nigeria, skilled people go undiscovered, and businesses waste hours finding the right hire, yet Nigeria has some of the most talented people on the planet. The problem has never been the skill. It's been visibility, trust, and getting paid without drama. Vauchly solves all three.

Your skill is your business, and it deserves to be found. Vauchly is Nigeria's first map-based marketplace where workers, freelancers, and service providers get discovered by proximity, verified by identity, and paid safely through escrow. Whether you're a plumber, coder, makeup artist, or mechanic, Vauchly puts you on the map, literally.

Over 5,000 people are already on the waitlist. The question is: are you on it?

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African startups are generating 128x returns. The continent has nine unicorns. And yet, most of the money funding it all still comes from abroad. AFC just dropped $100 million to fix that, and if it works, it won't just be $100 million. It'll be the catalyst that unlocks billions in African pension and insurance capital that's been sitting out the biggest wealth-creation story on the continent.

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The New York-based startup wants to be the single API that plugs every bank, neobank, and remittance provider across emerging markets into global stablecoin liquidity, and it just found the investors who believe it.

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Tesh Mbaabu didn't build a bank to compete with banks. He built one to live where people already are, and Cloud9's $773,000 acquisition of Kenyan ticketing giant Mtickets is proof. With over one million tickets processed since 2014, Mtickets isn't just a transaction platform, it's a direct line into the lives of young Africans heading to concerts, sports events, and travel. Cloud9 is now embedding credit, payments, and business banking right into that moment, before the gig, at checkout, and for the organisers who need capital to make it happen. This is what African fintech looks like when it stops asking users to come to the bank and starts showing up where life is.

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44,000 Nigerians played a game. 740 made it in. Now they're building software and getting paid to do it. Iyin Aboyeji's Learn2Earn is not a bootcamp, not a scholarship fund, and not another course with no application. It's a full two-year fellowship with zero fees, a stipend, and a selection process that starts with a memory game, because CVs, Aboyeji argues, are exactly the wrong filter for the talent Nigeria is sitting on. With Moniepoint's 500 unfilled roles shining a spotlight on how broken the pipeline is, here's the programme quietly building the next generation from the ground up.

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Africa is building its own cybersecurity backbone, and it just got a major upgrade. Smart Africa and RealTyme deepened their alliance at Geneva Cyber Week with a concrete plan: get national cyber authorities across the continent to live, sovereign deployment in 180 days. From AI-driven defence to post-quantum encryption, this is what protecting Africa's digital future actually looks like.

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GoTyme Bank has made all 2,000 of its global employees shareholders, linking its workforce directly to the company's financial future as it targets a public listing within three to four years. Africa's first profitable standalone digital bank, valued at $1.5 billion, is signaling that its next phase of growth will be built as much on culture as on capital.

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Digital Africa just launched a €50 million seed fund to back the startups that every other investor walked past. 30 companies. 20 countries. A direct shot at the funding gap that has quietly buried hundreds of promising African founders. This is what closing the loop actually looks like.

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FairMoney has been quietly hunting for a way into Kenya, and Shara, a profitable merchant neobank with a rare Kenyan microfinance banking licence, may be exactly the door it's been looking for. With revenue up 62% and profit growing sevenfold in 2024, FairMoney isn't just window shopping. This is a company with the numbers to back up its ambition, moving toward what could be its most transformative deal yet.

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Knit Health just raised $11.6 million to build AI that doesn't read textbooks; it watches how doctors actually make decisions. Trained on 130 million patient records across 30 U.S. health systems, their Large Clinical Behavior Model learns the patterns clinicians develop through years of experience navigating complex hospitals. This is what clinical AI looks like when it stops guessing and starts learning.

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Waymo's robotaxi drove straight into a flooded road in San Antonio, detected the water, slowed down, and kept going anyway. The car ended up in a creek. Now nearly 3,800 self-driving vehicles across the U.S. are getting emergency software updates because of one incident in Texas, and Waymo's expansion plans have hit a very real, very wet wall.

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A Nigerian founder in an unmarked Abuja office has moved $4.5 billion across 110 countries, quietly building the crypto rails the global financial system didn't know it needed. Bitnob started with two engineers, a hostel, and a $30,000 loss. What it became is a case study in how Africa's most brutal financial conditions produced the world's most resilient payment infrastructure. This is an interesting story of Bernard Parah and why the gravity of global fintech has reversed.

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Jiji Africa just did in 13 months what most companies take years to pull off: it entered Bangladesh, competed with the biggest player in the room, and then bought it. Africa's dominant classifieds marketplace has acquired Bikroy, Bangladesh's largest online classifieds platform, in its first deal outside the continent. This isn't luck. It's a playbook Jiji has run before, against OLX, against Tonaton, and it's now exporting that same model to Asia.

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