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After 6 months, the Nigerian government has lifted the suspension of Twitter operations in the country following approval by President Muhammadu Buhari. The removal of the suspension took effect from 12 AM Thursday, January 13, 2022.

The announcement was made on Wednesday by the Chairman Technical Committee Nigeria-Twitter Engagement and Director-General National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi.

Abdullahi stated that the approval was given following a memo written by the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Isa Ali Ibrahim to the President. In the memo, the minister updated and requested the President’s approval for the lifting of the suspension based on the Technical Committee Nigeria-Twitter Engagement’s recommendation.


Recall that the Nigerian government suspended Twitter’s operation on June 4, 2021, following the platform’s decision to remove a controversial tweet by the Nigerian President, which it said breached the site’s rules. The Nigerian government has insisted the suspension is a matter of national security and not related to the president’s tweet.

The government’s decision to ban Twitter triggered widespread criticism as online-based businesses recorded huge losses; lawsuits filed against the Nigerian government; and national assembly hearings held to probe the circumstances leading to the ban.



Mid-way through the suspension period, during his Nigeria’s 61st Independence Day anniversary presidential speech in October, President Buhari said the ban would only be lifted if the social media giant met certain conditions.

A number of notable conditions include Twitter setting up a local office or a legal entity in the country, paying taxes locally and cooperating with the Nigerian government to regulate content and harmful tweets.

The statement on the lifting of the suspension indicates that these conditions have been met—in the first quarter of this year Twitter is expected to establish a legal entity in Nigeria and in 2023 appoint a country representative to interface with Nigerian authorities. The execution timeline for the conditions begins from this week.

“Considering Twitter’s influence on our democracy, our economy, and the very fabric of our corporate existence as a nation, our priority is to adapt, not ban, Twitter,” the statement said.

In wake of removal of the suspension, Nigerians have come online to celebrate the end of an era of using VPNs to access Twitter. They’ve also pointed out that the suspension was unnecessary and wonder if the removal was incentivised by the desire to use the platform to campaign for the country’s upcoming elections next year.

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American startup accelerator Y Combinator on Monday, January 10, 2021 announced that it has updated its standard deal for investing in startups, bumping the investment sum from $125,000 to $500,000—still investing $125,000 for a 7% equity stake but now with an additional $375,000 on an uncapped SAFE with Most Favored Nation (MFN) terms.

Considering that in its 17 years of existence, this is the fourth time the accelerator—which has funded 3,306 startups and 66 African startups—is changing its standard deal, it’s worth looking into what the change means.

Investing with SAFEs
Introduced by Y Combinator in late 2013, the SAFE (simple agreement for future equity) is an agreement that gives an investor a future right to own a part of a company (equity).

For an investor, investing with a SAFE option means putting money into a startup without a set valuation. That is, the investor is providing funding without knowing how much their investment is worth. This is beneficial to founders as they are not pressured early on to give their startups a valuation.

To protect the investors, SAFEs tend to include a valuation cap—a maximum price at which an investor’s contribution will be converted into equity at the next funding round. This gives investors the right to better terms in a subsequent financing round.

In the case of YC’s new deal, the accelerator is investing $375,000 at an agreement that it’ll own a future part of a startup. Uncapped means that there’s no defined maximum price at which the $375,000 will be converted to equity. However, the MFN clause implies that instead of fixing a valuation cap, Y Combinator will automatically adopt the lowest cap (or other most favourable terms) issued by another investor the next time the startup raises money.

“It’s so straightforward, YC is saying that whenever you raise your next round, whatever best terms you get, they’ll match that as the terms for giving you the $375,000,” Zacharias George, Managing Partner at Launch Africa Ventures told TechCabal.

Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, General Partner at Future Africa explained that this new deal makes things simpler as before the $125,000 investment issued by Y Combinator was made up of $25,000 for 6% and 1% for a $10m cap i.e $100,000.

“The additional $375,000 is at no valuation, it’s at the valuation you get when you’re raising from other investors. Startups pick their next valuation, now there’s no expectation that you make it $10m,” Aboyeji said.

Notably, the new deal retains Y Combinator’s 4% pro-rata right—a right that is given to an investor allowing them to maintain their initial level of ownership percentage during later financing rounds. This means Y Combinator still has the right to defend 4% of their stake in companies by investing at a follow-up round.

More money for growth but potential dilution
“Now startups that get into YC have more money to take on serious growth endeavours,” Aboyeji said. “One of the issues I’ve had with YC is that $125,000 couldn’t help you in some cases achieve the kind of growth you need to be able to come up on demo day and put up an impressive pitch to get a higher valuation. But with $500,000, there’s a lot you can achieve.”

The positives are glaring and the announcement is a good move that’s been welcomed by the African startup community. While Hannah Subayi, a board member of the African Business Angel Investors Network (ABAN) agrees with this, she pointed out a potential downside that has been echoed by other investors.

The MFN clause compels startups to raise at a higher valuation in the next round in order not to give up too much of their ownership to Y Combinator. For instance, if a company raises its next round at a $1 million valuation, the $375,000 investment means that YC gets to own 37.5% of the company!

George believes this isn’t a one-sided affair as Y Combinator’s potential stake could also be heavily diluted if the startup’s next round is at a high valuation. “Imagine if the startup raises $10 million at a $100 million valuation, then YC’s $375,000 will be worth just 0.375%,” he said.

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Nigerian startup SeamlessHR, which provides payroll and HR software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions for medium to large-sized companies in several African countries, has closed a new $10 million Series A round.

Africa-focused VC firm, TLcom Capital led the round while some of SeamlessHR’s existing investors participated once again, such as Lateral Capital and Enza Capital. Other investors in this round include Capria, Ingressive Capital, and a number of strategic private investors. The new funding brings total investments secured by the startup to $12.2 million, having previously raised $2.2 million seed in October 2020.

With the funding, SeamlessHR plans to further grow its team of 130 as it eyes a pan-African expansion with new South Africa and Kenya offices being mulled. The company also plans to add new product functionalities around artificial intelligence and HR data analytics, it said, in addition to a new embedded finance product currently being piloted.

SeamlessHR started in 2013 as Insidify.com, a jobs aggregator with a recruitment management system that matched employers to job seekers. That was until its co-founders Emmanuel Okeleji and Deji Lana realised job sites could “do little to address the fundamental causes of unemployment in Africa,” the former told TechCabal in an interview.

After several iterations, the founders made a strategic pivot, relaunching in 2018 as an enterprise-grade, cloud-based HR and payroll management SaaS. SeamlessHR is currently used by hundreds of companies in Nigeria, Ghana, and Tunisia, including renowned brands like PwC, Flutterwave, Sterling Bank, TGI Group, Lagos Business School, AXA, and Chapel Hill Denham, according to the company. More than 100,000 employees from these organisations use SeamlessHR monthly.

“Thanks to our customers, we have become the leading cloud HR and Payroll SaaS in Africa in such a short time,” CEO Okeleji said. “We currently serve most of the medium to large-sized businesses [including ten Nigerian banks and five insurance companies] in countries where we’re concentrated, with Nigeria being our focus market.”

SeamlessHR is part of a cohort of startups that are reinventing the administrative stack in organisations. Others include YC-backed Workpay and Bento. But the company has some product advantages compared to other solutions and appears to be a market leader.

Firstly, companies in some cases typically install “core HR” software while they run payroll using another package or in-house. Switching from one siloed solution to the other can be incredibly hard. SeamlessHR’s holistic solutions prevent this as its cloud platform enables client organisations and their people to automate and optimise the entire HR process, from recruitment to retirement. In addition to the core HR management system, it offers different tools to track analytics as well as manage performance and competency, employee recruitment, leave, and payroll.

Okeleji also pointed out the user-friendliness of SeamlessHR, which has enabled it to capture some market share from other HR management SaaS providers, particularly foreign players Oracle and SAP. “Some systems are so complex to use that you need to be certified. For SeamlessHR, it’s user-friendly enough to understand with just one training during the onboarding,” he said.

Will Poole, Managing Partner at Capria notes that SeamlessHR is addressing the needs of African enterprises in “ways that the global giants can’t compete with by building customer-centric SaaS designed from the ground-up to address complexity unique to the continent.”

In Africa, SeamlessHR has a big market opportunity as every large company needs an HR and payroll solution. There’s also a growing appetite for cloud computing solutions by organisations that wish to digitise their workplaces. From an estimated market size of $14.2 billion in 2021, the Middle East and Africa’s cloud computing industry is expected to grow to $31.4 billion by 2026. “For a company that has 20 employees, HR software is a nice to have. But if you have 600 employees, then you have a pain that we solve,” the CEO said.

After capturing the Nigerian market to a significant extent and growing headline revenue 3x year-on-year (except in 2020 due to the pandemic-induced economic slowdown), the startup has now set its sights on companies in other African countries.

But finding the right talent remains a key problem. In addition, the size and readiness of the African economy for software services is relatively small and nascent, according to Okeleji. “If we were an American company, we’d probably be doing 6x growth for the efforts we put in because the economy is bigger and we’d have a lot more customers and can charge higher prices.”

To expand its client base, the CEO does not rule out expanding SeamlessHR to markets outside of Africa but notes that for now, the focus is on Africa and the team isn’t “distracted”.

“This is only the beginning. We are committed to customer success and this funding will enable us to invest in the continuous optimisation of customer experience across all touchpoints, adding new features and functionalities starting from Q2 this year,” Okeleji said.

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Femi Iromini has been active in the African tech ecosystem for the past 5 years. As a young student, he ran many businesses— at one point, he performed due diligence for foreign investors looking to invest in African startups. Now he’s focused on improving the Nigerian education system and the employability of Nigerian graduates.

To understand how he got here, let’s look at his life’s journey.

Reading Gifted Hands by Ben Carson at an early age sparked Iromini’s interest in medicine. This interest was also encouraged by his secondary school teachers. He was the best student in chemistry, physics and maths so naturally, they all thought he would do well to study medicine.

He secured admission into the university and had begun studying medicine for some months before his father pulled him out of school.

“He just told me that he didn’t think the school was meant for me,” Iromini told me.

Fortunately, Iromini got into university at a young age so taking an involuntary gap year wasn’t too big a deal.

Switching to Geophysics
Iromini’s switch to geophysics is a story that many may relate with. It involves a rich uncle and a desire to be as rich as the said uncle.

One day, while he was at home, this uncle came around. As they played chess, Iromini asked him what he did for a living. He worked with the oil company ExxonMobil and he had studied geophysics.

Iromini recalled, “When my uncle mentioned geophysics, I thought to myself, ‘This must be God speaking to me.’”

With the career prospects of geophysics looking promising, he decided to study geophysics.

A year into studying geophysics at Obafemi Awolowo University, he started questioning whether he had made the right choice.

The answer to that question came during a field trip to Ekiti. The students and lecturer had gone out to identify some rocks and minerals.

“During this field trip, a professor leading the delegates carried a boulder. I could see he was passionate about it. He then said if you really want to succeed as a geologist you need to fall in love with rocks. You need to romance rocks.”

“I was at the back, watching and listening. I didn’t find that appealing. I told myself there are better things in life to romance than rocks.”

None of his lecturers back at school were passionate about rocks and they didn’t answer field questions with certainty. By the end of the trip, he knew he wasn’t going to end up in a career related to geophysics.

That trip became a turning point for him and pushed him to attend a variety of non-academic events. He got into a number of social impact and entrepreneurial programs like the One Young World, Goldman Sachs Program, World Business Dialogue and Global University Initiative. These programs expanded his mind and opened him up to a world of possibilities.

Contributing to society through business
During one of these programs, his life took a turn after Nelson Mandela charged him and other participants to focus on changing Africa by looking for ways to contribute.

He returned from the program and started businesses in school. He opened a laundry business and restaurants on three campuses. He also started a social enterprise that helped students get internships.

As he built these businesses, other students supported him. Back then, he didn’t know anything about financing. He just wrote a letter soliciting contributions from his peers and they showed up. He bought his first washing machine after a ₦20,000 ($125 at the time) contribution came in from another student.

Despite the initial support he was fortunate enough to receive, he realised it was difficult to get the additional financial support he needed to build his businesses. The traditional funding channels weren’t a viable option because the business didn’t have a track record.

During this phase he stumbled on Kickstarter – a crowdfunding platform. At the time, it was a new idea that opened up his mind to the concept that people can leverage their social capital to raise funds. His businesses thrived because other people believed and supported him, so he wanted to build a similar platform for others around him to raise funds.

To build this platform he collaborated with some Indian engineers he met during a program he attended years before. Building the platform took longer than expected and he spent more money than he planned to.

To increase the pace of development, he learnt a bit of coding and joined in building the platform.

Eventually, Crowdy, a platform that helped people in his community raise funds from family and friends, was launched. Its fundraising process was similar to the rolling fund investment model.

In 2014, fresh out of school and still running the Crowdy platform, he was approached by AXA Venture Partners, they needed help in deal analysis and sourcing for African startups.

“They were looking to invest in Africa, but they weren’t sure about the numbers. With Crowdy we were able to aggregate startups, especially in East Africa for them. We were more like deal aggregators.”

Iromini and his team at Crowdy helped conduct due diligence on the startups they referred to AXA Venture Partners, they were paid for the consulting services they offered.

While at Crowdy, Iromini also partnered with the cofounding team for the first few months of the formation of agritech company Farmcrowdy.

Preparing students for employment
In 2013, while still running Crowdy he enrolled in an post graduate program in innovation and entrepreneurship at Stanford University. During the program, he spent a lot of time around the Stanford campus and other neighbouring universities. He noticed a common denominator that was missing back home. In every university, there was a career center. The schools were intentional about preparing students for the world of employment.

Comparing this approach with his undergraduate days where there was no structure around preparing students for employment, he decided to do something about this problem.

“Universities should be thinking about career outcomes. How many [of their] graduates are employed, unemployed or furthering their education. Career outcomes are a selling proposition for universities,” Iromini said.

This led to the creation of Lead360, an education technology company. The company has worked with a number of public and private universities like Covenant University and Afe Babalola.

Based on the few engagements Lead360 had with these universities, they learned that it’s more than just establishing a career centre in these schools. Making students more employable requires a step by step approach.

“What’s typically found is that in many of these schools, in the final year, a one-week seminar on employability will be organised. You’re meant to have a career advisor whose performance is based on the successful employment of students. Someone who helps with internships, reviewing CVs and evaluating the interests of students,” Iromini said.

As opposed to engaging with governments and universities directly, Lead360 has adjusted its model to focus on working with institutions like the World Bank and the International Labour Organisation first, then using them to engage with the governments and universities. It has proven to be more effective.

They’ve successfully collaboration with the state governments and corporate organisations to develop over 40 digital centres like one in Makoko, Yaba, Lagos.

Lead360 is working on a few projects right now. Top on the list is a labour market information system. A system that informs the government and universities on what skillsets employers are looking for and how many students have these skillsets in real time. This project is funded by international agencies.

It also has other solutions for students like career services, a learning management system, a transcript management system, and an education financing product.

As someone who has always sought to solve problems around him, Iromini is taking the Nigerian education system heads on.

By 2050, Africa is going to have a large population with Nigeria at the forefront, he is constantly asking himself, “what are we going to do with this population?”

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At the end of October, social media giant, Facebook, changed its company to Meta. The announcement was made in an hour-long video that explained the company’s decision to shift gears away from being known as just a social media company and focus on building the metaverse.

Leading that work in Africa is Derya Matras, Vice President (VP), Middle East, Africa (MEA) and Turkey, Meta.

Prior to her appointment as VP in August, Matras was the Managing Director for the MEA and Turkey region. Before that, she was Country Director for Facebook in Turkey for four years. Derya holds a BSc in electronics engineering from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey, and an MBA from Columbia Business School.

Over email, Matras talked to TechCabal about Facebook’s rebrand to Meta and how it plans to make money from the metaverse and deal with the challenges that come with building it.

How is the Metaverse better than Facebook in its current form?
When Facebook launched in 2004, it changed the way people connect. Apps like Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp further empowered billions around the world—and we are not turning away from these existing products. Those experiences are going to form a crucial part of the future metaverse ecosystem. The Facebook app is still going to be called Facebook.

The name Meta is a clear link to our vision for the metaverse. However, the metaverse will exist, whether Meta is there or not. So, Meta means us moving beyond 2D screens towards immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality, to help build the next evolution in social technology. This is a natural evolution for our company as social media and technology evolves.

What demographic is the metaverse targeting in Africa?
Given all that the metaverse has to offer, there’s a lot at stake in making sure its possibilities are open to everyone and not just people from traditionally underrepresented groups. An inclusive metaverse benefits everyone.

Is Facebook building the metaverse because it’s best positioned to build something that’s inevitable?
In recent decades, technology has given people the power to connect and express themselves more naturally. We started with websites, then we got phones with cameras, and then the internet became more visual and mobile. As connections got faster, video became a richer way to share experiences. If you look back over time, we’ve gone from desktop to web to mobile; from text to photos to video. Now we are looking at what comes next. The metaverse will feel like a hybrid of today’s online social experiences, sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world. It’s the next evolution in a long line of social technologies, and it’s ushering in a new chapter for our company.

In Mark Zuckerberg’s letter, he mentioned that the “metaverse will not be created by one company”. Does this mean there’ll be other metaverses outside of Facebook’s metaverse and that they can all exist side by side without Facebook trying to be the only metaverse out there?

The metaverse isn’t a single product that one company can build. Its success depends on building robust interoperability across services, so different companies’ experiences can work together. And it won’t be built overnight. Many of these products will only be fully realised in the next 10-15 years. While that’s frustrating for those of us eager to dive right in, it gives us time to ask difficult questions about how they should be built. We’ll work with experts in government, industry and academia to think through issues and opportunities in the metaverse.

We also need to involve human and civil rights communities from the start to ensure these technologies are built in a way that’s inclusive and empowering.

Across Africa, we’re supporting Africa No Filter, Electric South and Imisi 3D to support creators who have been pushing the boundaries of digital storytelling using immersive technology to amplify African voices.

Is there the potential for other applications and programmes to be built in the metaverse—similar to the blockchain.
We are at the very start of this. A lot of the technology and infrastructure still needs to be built. It will take at least 5 to 10 years for this vision of the metaverse to come to life. This pace is going to be dictated less by business interests and more by technological realities. Infrastructure needs to be transformed with new technologies, hardware and cooling specifications to be able to support a robust service. And new hardware still needs to be built, including things like hologram displays, projectors, batteries, radios, custom silicon chips, cameras, speakers, and sensors to map the world around you and more.

Why should Facebook build this? Why not another company?
This was an important step for us to take on our journey, and as we evolve to Meta, we hope this will better reflect where we are going as a company. Like all businesses, we continue to innovate so that we can bring value to people’s lives.

We are a social company with investments in technology, like VR; and the metaverse is the next frontier of virtual digital connection—so it’s a natural evolution for our business. But it’s important to reiterate that Meta is neither going to build, own, or run the metaverse on its own. This isn’t going to be a Meta product.

Building this will be more like how the internet came about rather than how one app was launched. That’s why we will be collaborating at every stage with other companies, developers, experts, and policymakers. Principles of privacy, safety, and security need to be built in from the start. If we have the principles right, then as a society, we will be better at tackling new challenges with these technologies as they arise.

The transition to communication via the metaverse will face some challenges considering that it’s not just another app on the mobile phone. What challenges does Facebook expect to encounter in rolling out the metaverse in Africa?

New innovations bring new challenges, and there’s lots we need to figure out. But that’s why we’re starting this conversation early. We have to be responsible in our approach, and we intend to do that in a number of ways:

No surprises: In the past, the speed with which new technologies have emerged has sometimes left policymakers and regulators playing catch-up. We don’t want this to happen this time around. A core principle is going to be “don’t surprise people”. That’s why we are having this conversation out in the open, way in advance of all these technologies being launched.

Collaboration: Partnering with independent experts and organisations will be a crucial part of how we navigate future challenges. We have already launched a two-year $50 million investment in programmes and external research, collaborating with industry partners, civil rights groups, governments, non-profits, and academic institutions to get input as we build these technologies responsibly. This is alongside being a founding member of the XR Association (XRA), which is committed to helping build responsible XR, which includes virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, and future immersive technology.

Built-in: While we will need to continue to get better at anticipating risks, we won’t be able to see around every corner. That’s why the principles of privacy, safety, and security need to be built in from the start.

Facebook plans to spend ~$10 billion this year on the metaverse project—and even more in the coming years. How will the company make money from this?

It’s very early, and our focus today is more around building the foundational pieces for the metaverse, like VR, and bringing more people into those experiences. We outlined a few areas during Connect where we think there is an opportunity around commerce. We want to help provide tools for creators and developers so they can build a meaningful business in the metaverse because we think digital commerce will become increasingly important.

It’s also worth noting that investing in the metaverse also means additional resources invested in issues like safety and security. For example, the $10 billion investment in Reality Labs that we have already announced will include spending on research to better understand how we can responsibly tackle safety and integrity challenges in the metaverse.

And, just like the rest of the internet, we expect that free things in the metaverse would likely be powered by ads while there would also be paid experiences that are ad-free.

This is a very long-term vision. It’s going to take investment over many years before the metaverse reaches scale.

Lately, fingers have been pointed at Facebook for inciting civil unrest in Africa and being ill-equipped to staff its Africa offices to properly regulate posts. How does Facebook plan to build the metaverse responsibly?

Every day, our teams have to balance protecting the ability of billions of people to express themselves openly with the need to keep our platform a safe and positive place. We continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content. To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true.

We are on track to spend over $5 billion on safety and security in 2021 alone and have 40,000 people working on these issues, including 15,000 people who review content in more than 70 languages.

How we build is as important as what we build. And we will be collaborating at every stage—with other companies, developers, experts and policymakers—to make sure that what we build is good for the world.

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Ebuka Anyaeji thought he had seen it all, so when he first received a threat message about being a guarantor to a debtor on the run, he dismissed it as a joke, a message sent by an angry creditor to the wrong phone number. But the messages (WhatsApp and text) kept coming in; then Anyaeji found out his friends were also getting the same.

Later on, the harassment moved from messages to phone calls—real-time and pre-recorded calls. The content of the messages transitioned from just informing him that someone was owing the creditor money to threatening to embarrass him if he didn’t get the defaulting debtor in question to pay.

“The messages typically went along this line: ‘This person is owing us money, and you’re one of his guarantors. Tell him to pay or else we’ll embarrass both of you’,” Anyaeji told TechCabal. “In some instances, they mentioned the amount of money owed, which was surprisingly low—about ₦10,000 ($17. or ₦30,000 ($53.6)—or in other cases they just referred to the debtor as a chronic debtor or fraudulent individual.”

Out of the numerous messages he’s gotten, there’s been only one occasion where he knew the debtor being referred to—a university mate. What did he do about this case? He didn’t bother informing the person, because they weren’t close.

For Anyaeji, who now occasionally dishes out witty responses to the senders of these messages just for fun, he wonders why the debt collection practices of digital lenders like Soko Loan, LCash, 9Jacash among others use shaming tactics and, more importantly, whether this new trend would continue unchecked.

It wasn’t always like this
There is no doubt that Africans have embraced taking loans through digital-lending apps. They are discreet, quick to access, and require no collateral. But this also means lenders who use the repayment habits of users to gauge their creditworthiness—and never physically meet their customers—often struggle with loan repayment.

But it hasn’t always been like this in Nigeria. Loans were primarily issued out by traditional banks, who rarely ever gave out loans without the backing of collateral or guarantors.

In the case of a loan default, before it ever gets to the point where a defaulting debtor’s collateral is seized, there are a number of checks put in place. First, loans are given only after credit checks have been run and the account relationship manager can vouch for a potential borrower. When a borrower defaults, the account relationship manager first reaches out to the lender to find out the reason, and even visits to confirm. Guarantors and referees are also contacted, if need be.

“As long as both parties are open and transparent, penalty charges don’t come in yet. Until when they’re past due obligations, which is typically over 90 days,” an employee of a Nigerian bank, who spoke under anonymity, told TechCabal.

Oftentimes, while the account officer is following up with the defaulting customer, the monitoring team and even bank directors can also check up on the defaulting customer. The conversations typically revolve around ascertaining the repayment ability of the customer, restructuring the loan to extend the tenure and possibly waiving off penalty charges.

If all efforts to reach a reasonable agreement or recover the debt fail, the bank reverts to possessing the item—usually a house or car—used as collateral. This is a last resort that the bank isn’t keen on exercising, another banker told TechCabal. “We detest having to possess people’s lands or houses, which serve as collateral; the bank is not into real estate,” he said.

How did lending apps come into the picture?
For a long time, Nigerian banks preferred to lend to businesses and not individuals. This led to the rise of new lenders like Carbon (formerly Paylater), Renmoney, and Branch that have filled the gap by offering quick loans through smartphone apps.

Temi Sodipo, a credit risk analyst recalls the early days when there were only a few prominent Nigerian digital lenders like Renmoney and Paylater. But, as the years went by, new digital lenders popped up at different corners. People were at first skeptical but, over time, consumer confidence grew.

“I remember in late 2017 when we disbursed ₦1 billion ($1.8m) in loans at Renmoney, we had a party to celebrate. In early 2019, when we issued ₦4 billion ($7.3m) loans, it was just a normal month,” he said.

With more digital lenders coming into the space, Sodipo believes that, despite the fact that many claim they’re getting more people financially included, most digital lenders serve the same set of people because the terms for accessing the loans are similar. The terms include a six-month-long bank statement, verifiable government ID, employment letter, or work email verification.

He believes this has created an avenue for a few ambitious players who wanted a slice of the market to become lax with their rules. Some digital lenders even started giving out loans to people with bad ratings on credit bureau—an obvious red flag.

“It’s no wonder why they turn to desperate debt collection measures as they contend with a high rate of default. It’s simply bad underwriting and not paying attention to basic credit risk principles,” Sodipo said.

Commercial banks also started dishing out instant loans
In 2020, at least half of the 22 existing Nigerian commercial banks started offering instant loan products without collaterals, something that was unheard of years ago. What was the driver of this move? A new directive by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).

In July 2019, the CBN announced an increase in the required minimum Loan-Deposit Ratio (LDR) of commercial banks to 60% from 57.64%. At the end of September, it further increased the LDR to 65%. LDR stipulates the volume of loans a bank must give out as a percentage of its total deposit. In the case of 65% LDR, it meant that if, for instance, a bank has ₦100 billion of customer deposits, it must have at least ₦65 billion issued as loans. The increase was done to encourage commercial banks to issue more loans to individuals and businesses in order to stimulate the economy.

To avoid the sanctions that came with not meeting the LDR, these commercial banks began offering instant loan products without collaterals at risk of high repayment default rate. When debtors defaulted, the banks, however, unlike digital lenders, responded differently to the defaults.

A source familiar with this incident told TechCabal that, unlike the digital lenders, these big commercial banks can afford to introduce these types of loans and make a loss on them, considering that they make tens and hundreds of billions of naira in profit.

In addition to being able to absorb the loss, the CBN issued a directive—the Global Standing Instructions (GSI) policy—that gave banks the right to deduct the amount owed from the bank account of the loan defaulters in other banks, in order to reduce the amount of non-performing loans—a move that reduced the chances of defaulting customers owing while having money with other banks.

Options available to digital lenders
Currently, digital lenders don’t have the right to debit the accounts of loan defaulters in other banks via GSI, so they rely on automated card debits, repayment reminders, and reporting customers to the credit bureau as a last resort. But do these methods work?

Julian Flosbach, CEO of BFree, an ethical debt recovery company, believes they do if they consider the reasons customers default as well as their current financial situation. According to flosbach a majority of borrowers default because they lose their jobs, their business fails, or due to health emergencies that change the financial affordability of customers. He believes that assessing the new financial abilities of a customer and offering new repayments plans via convenient communication channels can then increase the repayment rates from these customers significantly.

An employee at a digital lending company explained that reporting to the credit bureau could be effective at times. She cited a case of a defaulting debtor whose application visa was denied because he failed to repay his loan for over a year. Credit checks are a prerequisite for issuing visas in some countries.

She also affirms Sodipo’s point about an influx of lenders with lax rules by saying, “It’s typically companies not registered with the credit bureau that use unethical debt collection practices.”

Slow and steady doesn’t win this race
It’s clear that digital lenders involved in unethical debt collection practices do so because of their unchecked ambition and the convenience of operating outside the law.

Fortunately, a number of governing bodies are beginning to do something about these digital lenders. In August 2021, the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) imposed a ₦10 million naira ($18,000) fine (a questionable small amount) on Soko Lending Company, one of the digital lenders which repeatedly contacted Anyaeji.

A few months later, in October, Google took down a number of predatory loan apps from its Play Store for violating its policies. Despite these actions, the pace of the response from Nigerian regulators is slow when compared to Kenya, where in December a new law was put in place to curtail the excesses of digital lenders.

If victims like Anyaeji and his friends would ever be free from the disturbance and intimidation from these predatory digital lenders, Nigeria’s regulators would have to increase the pace of their response.

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Bitcoin technology is powered by software developers or contributors that work on a pro bono basis. So, the Bitcoin infrastructure would be threatened if these highly skilled developers refuse to work or are not skilled enough to maintain the code that sustains the entire Bitcoin ecosystem.

In recent times, there have been efforts to prevent this from happening by supporting Bitcoin software developers to make Bitcoin more private, resilient, and decentralised. In May, popular crypto derivatives exchange, BitMEX, partnered with global non-profit, Human Rights Foundation (HRF), to provide a $150,000 grant for Calvin Kim, a Korea-based Bitcoin scaling researcher, and a $50,000 grant for Abubakar Nur Khalil, a Nigeria-based Bitcoin wallet developer.

In February this year, Twitter co-founder and former CEO, Jack Dorsey, had also taken a similar path when he announced that he was launching a new endowment called “₿trust”, in partnership with rapper Jay-Z, to fund Bitcoin development in India and Africa.

He promised to donate 500 bitcoins ($23 million) to the endowment fund and give its board complete autonomy to use the funds as they deemed fit. But he has one ask: “Make Bitcoin the Internet’s currency.”

Last week, he unveiled the members of the board—four of them—to the world: Nigeria’s Abubakar Nur Khalil, Obi Nwosu, and Ojoma Ochai; and South Africa’s Carla Kirk-Cohen.

Board members with a game plan

Abubakar Nur Khalil, 22, does not have a traditional bank account. He became a contributor to Bitcoin Core—there are less than 40 of them in the world—when he was just 19. But the journey began in late 2017 when he heard about Bitcoin’s price and started reading about it. The following year, he got into programming and built a blockchain-based app, before becoming a contributor to Bitcoin Core in 2019.

In 2020, he co-founded Recursive Capital, a venture capital that provides crypto-focused startups with seed and early-stage investments, with the aim of contributing to the development of the Web 3.0 ecosystem. Recursive Capital is on a mission to facilitate online sovereignty—tools, protocols, and ventures that democratise data ownership and promote privacy, encryption, and financial sovereignty—all driven by Bitcoin. Despite being founded before the Web 3.0 buzz, Recursive Capital had decided that it wanted to enhance financial freedom by decentralising the financial monetary system.

Khalil, who was recently named Recursive Capital’s CEO—after serving as its Chief Technology Officer (CTO)—explained that Recursive Capital realised that Africa’s financial infrastructure is underdeveloped and cannot handle the amount of load being put on it.

He explained that this is why it is hard to send and receive money across two African countries, and even more difficult across continents. But he believes that Bitcoin will level the playing field since the requirements for participating are low. All you need is a phone and internet access, and a bitcoin address or lightning address—think email address but for Bitcoin.

“Bitcoin is democratising financial freedom on a global scale. It is also providing a unified monetary network where individuals from any part of the globe can transact instantly and have settlement across the global ecosystem cheaply,” he told TechCabal in a call.

Talking about the barrier to entry for Bitcoin, Khalil believes a misconception lies in the way people approach it. He explained that Bitcoin should be seen as an investment over a long time. This way, investors don’t bother about how high its current price is. He also believes that an easy-to-use interface on mobile and web-based wallets should be created, so that non-technical individuals can use Bitcoin. This would help in lowering the barriers to entry.

Earlier this year, after realising there is a dearth of Bitcoin developers in Nigeria and Africa, Khalil also founded Qala, to begin a revolutionary campaign of expanding the pool of Bitcoin and lightning developers on the continent.

Ojoma Ochai, one of the newly appointed board members to ₿trust, explained that her selection was based on a combination of her experience in Africa’s creative and digital economy and demonstrated interest in writing and talking about emerging technologies on the continent. Ochai has vast experience in non-profit management and governance across Africa and has run creative and digital economy projects across policy and practice in these sectors, on the continent and beyond. She also has board experience, being the board chair of the British Council Nigeria Programmes entity for two years. She was also involved in initiatives like the African Tech and Creative Group, which aims to capture value for African creatives and the tech sector.

Ochai also started a company with CcHub, The Creative Economy Practice, to capture more value for the African creative economy through projects that stimulate innovation and technology and enhance value chains and business models.

What will Bitcoin do for Africa?

Khalil believes in educating and enlightening individuals about Bitcoin’s long-term benefits: economic freedom for the entire continent. Khalil believes Africa needs Bitcoin more because the currency of most of its countries are volatile, making it pointless for people to save long term in their native currencies.

He said that the reason many people see Bitcoin as volatile is that they approach it as a short-term asset: ”Bitcoin is only volatile in a short timescale— a week, three months. But if you look at the asset across, for example, an entire year, it is quite stable, compared to some national currencies.”

On fraud claims around Bitcoin, Khalil argues that Bitcoin is one of the most open monetary systems because the majority of fraudulent transactions still pass through the traditional financial system, where it is relatively easy to track parties involved.

Ochai believes that bitcoin will eventually become a viable medium for Africans to do business without restrictions. She added that it would also help the creative industries easily monetise content.

“This is an opportunity for Africans to be more involved in building solutions that work for us so that we move away from the paradigm of things being done to us and for us to a paradigm where we contribute our skills, worldview, and capabilities towards solving our own problems and being part of a global seismic shift,” Ochai said.

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By the age of ten, Adam Molai had learnt that the only way to have his own money was to engage in trading.

He grew up spending his holidays working in his father’s supermarket in Zimbabwe. It was through this experience that he learnt the fundamental principle of business: demand and supply. Selling items he bought from his father’s supermarket at a higher price in a different part of the town meant he always had money.

Years later after obtaining a degree in business from Lakehead University in Canada he returned to Zimbabwe to start the Pacific Cigarette company (formerly Savannah Tobacco). His company went on to break the monopoly that British American Tobacco had in Southern Africa. So far the Pacific Cigarette company has directly created over 250 jobs and contributed to about $100m worth of tobacco exports from Zimbabwe, Africa’s largest producer and exporter of tobacco.

In 2000, Molai started investing in other African companies through TRT Investments. Last year, he started the $2-million Jua Fund to provide African entrepreneurs with much-needed access to capital, mentoring, advice and networks.

Over the past 20 years, he has been investing in African startups and through Jua Fund, he has backed Kenya’s GrowAgric, Madagascar’s Jirogasy, Zimbabwe’s BRYT, Nigeria’s PowerStove and many others.

This edition of Ask an Investor is an adaptation of a TechCabal Live conversation between TechCabal’s Managing Editor Koromone Koroye and Adam Molai.

Seed funding makes up a significant portion of VC funding in Africa, between 2014 – 2020 they accounted for a third of VC funding in Africa. However, when you look at the investment size they’re mostly small cheque size deals because interest in the space is still growing amidst many challenges like lack of context about investing in African startups and poor fund management on the part of startups.

In this conversation, Adam Molai answered different questions about dealing with the challenges of early-stage investment in startups both from an investor and startup perspective.

Koromone Koroye: What do you look for when deciding who to invest in?

Adam Molai: Most importantly we look at the passion of the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship is a tough journey that tests you in ways you never imagined. Unless you’re truly passionate about the project, the likelihood of staying through the project is little.

We look at their knowledge of the business, from a macro and micro perspective. Do they know who the current players are? How can their product come in and create a blue ocean in this industry? Ultimately, if you’re not differentiated you’re not competitive.

How deeply have they thought through their implementation because every idea is a great idea but it’s how you implement it. Have they gone beyond the what and gotten into answering how they ensure they see this project through? They need to know who is going to do what and what skills they need to see this project through, also when and how they plan to get the skills.

KK: How can policy makers improve the landscape for entrepreneurs?

AM: Our landscape on the continent hasn’t yet evolved to embrace us as Africans and our ideas. Rather it has developed to support foreign direct investments — foreigners coming to invest in our environment, not enough is being done to develop a framework that’s aligned with local investors. My advice is to start looking at what the needs of local investors and foreign investors are. They need to lower the bar for local investors in terms of taxation and other incentives.

We need to have more confidence in our own people. One of the challenges local investors have is that regulators are familiar with them. They look at them and say, ‘look at this young lad, I know him, he grew up in my village or town,’ so already they’ve minimized what you’re presenting and already they’re not taking you seriously. I think we need to take out some of the prejudices and stop seeing investors from a different environment or background as better.

I think we need to start with the right mindset, then level the playing field for local and foreign investors. We should do this first before working on a framework that favours all.

KK: What are some common misconceptions around early-stage investing in Africa and how they limit the opportunities available to startups

AM: We don’t look too far as entrepreneurs. Often we go conventional for example in the type of funding available. There’s not enough work being done by entrepreneurs to look for alternative sources of funding. VC is still developing in Africa, if you look at 2020 alone, there was a 44% increase in tech rounds on the continent and there was a reduction in the total funding (from $2.2b in 2019 to $1.43b). That’s $1.43b that very few of our local entrepreneurs are aware of.

When we launched the Jua fund, within a month we had 700 applicants that came from the continent. Yes, 700 sounds significant, but compared to the number of people in need of funding, it doesn’t look like people are out there hunting for funding. We need to move away from convention and encourage entrepreneurs and look at who is coming in with new sources of capital and how do we access these sources of capital.

KK: How can African companies on the radar increase their prospects of attracting funding?

AM: It starts with initiatives like the Jua fund, remember foreigners would take a cue from locals, so if foreigners see us as local investors showing confidence in our people then they’ll come along as co-investors. One of the common issues foreign investors face is that they don’t understand the African landscape. So if they see me as Adam, an African investing fellow Africans, they’re more willing to come alongside me, knowing that I have a better understanding and knowledge of the African landscape.

So the more Africans we can get investing in the continent and entrepreneurs the more foreigners we’re going to start attracting.

KK: What has been your experience in funding early-stage startups and what are the best practices startups should adopt?

AM: Let’s start from the end. When startups start the application process they should be looking at what the due diligence requirements are. They should be thinking of the requirements that they need to fulfil upon successfully obtaining the fund.

What I’ve seen is that there’s often a lack of belief that they’ll get the fund, so they go in, try to get the funds, then look for what’s required of them to comply. I think they should be looking at it in totality. Startups should think like this: I’m going to get the fund and because I’ll get the fund what should I put in place to enable me get the fund. What happens when they don’t think like this is that for some it takes months before accessing the funds. They need the funds, the funds are there for them, but they can’t access the funds because they’ve not fulfilled the due diligence process.

It’s important that when pitches are being done, there’s truthfulness in the submission. What you don’t want is to go through a tough competition and then suddenly you can’t raise funds because you’ve been flagged as not being credible. I think it’s important to state the difference between what’s available in the present and what’ll be available in the future.

KK: What are some common mistakes investors make in selecting which startups to fund?

AM: All that glitters is not gold. Investors often fall for presentation bias, some people are fantastic at presenting, others are not great at presenting but have a solid business. Over time investors have to be able to differentiate the substance from the hot air. Often because you’re looking for passion, it’s very easy to confuse passion for great presentation skills. We’ve got to be able to separate the two. Investors need to develop a lens to differentiate the presentation and substance. Most times investors only note the lack of substance when they start going into deeper interrogation of the project, this is something that they could have picked up early on without the presentation bias.

KK: For early-stage entrepreneurs what other challenges do you think they face outside funding?[i]

AM: We need to start walking the entrepreneurs from the stage of developing the ideas to turning it into a business. Also educating entrepreneurs to look at the problems they’re solving using multiple lenses and thinking of different use cases for their solutions.

For example, there was an entrepreneur who sold computers that are solar powered but what we saw that was bigger than the solar panel computers was that each of these panels could serve as a base station for a very rudimentary cell network that has long distances.

In another scenario, there was a company that was producing Soy milk, which had no idea of how to increase its sales volumes. They then did some research and found that it helps reduce the strong pungent smells that come from some of the African food we eat. With this alternative use, they were better able to market their product and increased their sales volume.

Early-stage entrepreneurs should be thinking of how they can find alternative use cases so that as they’re marketing their product they’re finding multiple use cases and revenue streams.

Audience: [i]How can upcoming businesses thrive in an environment where the only lenders are short term lenders?[i]

AM: I’m always reticent when it comes to short term funding because one of the most basic tenets of finance is what we call the matching principle. In this case, it has to do with matching the tenure of your requirements with the tenure of the financing that you seek. To seek short term funding for a long term project is like seeking short term funding to buy a house. If you get a short term funding how do you meet repayments? It means you’re damned before you start.

I believe for short term financing to work you need to have already negotiated that upon hitting some milestones,once you meet the short term condition you’ll have access to long term funding.

Only in that case will I advise people to use short term funding, because their next level of funding has been fully assured, not promised or probable.

Audience: [i]How does a company balance timing between the transition from proof of concept to fundraising?[i]

AM: I think the right time is when you’ve stress-tested your concept so that when you’re approaching those people, you won’t be approaching them as if you’re coming to present a half baked product.

There are fewer things investors frown upon like someone who has walked two steps for a ten-step journey. There are certain minimums that should be there. You need to be sure that you’ve stress-tested it from multiple angles and that it’s robust enough.

Audience: [i]What is needed to change the landscape to accommodate bleeding edge technologies like quantum biotech and cleantech?

AM: Right now, we invested $1m through the Jua fund into a big data supply chain entity. What did I know about big data and supply chains? What did our peers know about it? Very little. We took the leap because of the way the project was fully researched, thought through. They were very clear about the next steps they’ll take to see it through. We took that leap of faith because the work has been done. As an investor, we don’t need to fully understand. I remember telling them, I don’t understand your business but I love it.

The concept and solution being presented were so clear that it was meeting a pain point that was in the market.

Audience: Are investors keen and willing to embrace impact entrepreneurs?

AM: Yes they are, what we’re looking for are businesses that offer maximum impact for the continent. It can start in one industry but scale-out for other industries.

Recently, I was speaking to an impact entrepreneur we’ve backed with about $250k in. They built zero-emission cooking pallets and are selling carbon credits. Their solution solves the pollution and deforestation because people are cutting down trees to get wood for cooking

Audience: What’s the roadmap for the due diligence process for startups registered in different countries ?

AM: We see this a lot in tech, a lot of people go register in Delaware, then when they come and pitch to investors they come as a Nigerian company. Now expect that that company’s due diligence would be done like that of a Nigerian company. Often only after further investigation do we notice that it’s actually registered in Delaware, so we start asking for due diligence requirements for Delaware entities.

I’m just giving you a basic example of some due diligence issues that come up. There have been instances where the location of the founders is different from the location of the business. We’re looking at the fact that you as the founder have to be on the ground running that business. How would you do that? There has to be some congruence with all your facts stated about your business?

Now granted, sometimes companies need to have dual locations, for example, you’re a fintech Nigerian company that’s also registered in the United States.

Here’s what you need to do. you need to give a schematic that shows your company’s architecture explaining why it’s the way it is. What we don’t want to do as investors is to invest in one entity not knowing that there are four entities. In some cases, the one you’re investing in does all the spending, while the ones you haven’t invested in generate all the profit. We need to be sure that the entire architecture is tied together.

Audience: What’s a startup you invested in but initially doubted in, how were you able to overcome this?

AM: The ones that I can talk about aren’t within the Jua Fund, because we only started dispersing funds two months ago. There was one instance where we couldn’t fully understand a founder who approached us with an idea for a restaurant business. It was one of those moments where you say it’s not a big investment, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. I’ve never been in the food industry and we said let’s go for it.

What we saw after investing and the evolution of the business was that, had it not been for COVID I believe they would have been able to roll it out as a franchise,

Audience: How many milestones should a startup cross before approaching startups?

AM: I’ve always said the more data points that are available and presented, the stronger the picture you present. So my advice is to get as much done as is feasible without having to invest significant resources.

Watch the full interview here

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Three years ago, during a roadshow that lasted three days, Nigeria’s Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo visited San Francisco’s Silicon Valley to meet with the executives of top tech companies, in order to attract investments to Nigeria’s thriving tech space. The VP, with newly inaugurated members of his Advisory Group on Technology and Creativity, met with Google CEO Sundar Pichai and LinkedIn co-founder Allen Blue before ending the trip at the entertainment centre of the world, Hollywood, where he met with representatives from Sony, Disney, 20th Century, and Imax.

During talks in the roadshow, some investors hinted that even though they are willing to invest in Nigeria, they want the government to have some skin in the tech ecosystem game. When they got back from the trip, the office of the Vice President contacted the African Development Bank (AfDB) to support Nigeria with funding.

The dividends of these efforts did not materialise until this year when the AfDB approved a loan of $170 million to finance the Digital and Creative Enterprises Programme (i-DICE), an initiative by the federal government of Nigeria to promote digital and creative industries in the country. The programme is co-financed by the Agence Française de Développement (AFD) and the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB)

“Governments have a much greater role than just policy making. They need to be innovative and create an enabling environment that includes infrastructure and de-risking to harness private sector investments in key growth sectors,” said African Development Bank President Akinwumi A. Adesina, speaking on AfDB’s investment.

The i-DICE programme is a first-of-its-kind programme that intends to boost innovation, encourage entrepreneurship, enhance social development, boost innovation, and achieve economic transformation by fostering growth in the technology and creative ecosystem. From 2022 to 2026, the programme seeks to attract approximately US$695.80 million to finance various programmatic interventions (US$227.80m) and ground-breaking investment in businesses in the technology and creative sector (US$468m).

This investment will stimulate 226 technology and creative startups and provide non-financial benefits to 451 digital technology and small and medium enterprises. The programme is also expected to help reduce the country’s growing unemployment rate by creating 6.1 million direct and indirect jobs. AfDB’s recent investment alone will support the creation of about 850,000 jobs. It is estimated that the entire added value of the programme to the Nigerian economy would be $6.4 billion.

The programme will support the digital and creative space across four pillars: human capital, enabling environment, finance, and infrastructure. i-DICE will engage in skill development to equip Nigerians from ages 15 to 34 with technology and creative skills to increase their employability, foster innovation in both ecosystems, and widen the pool of entrepreneurs in the country. One of the ways it aims to do this is by upgrading the physical infrastructure of selected tertiary institutions—universities and polytechnics—to satellite labs and innovation centres of excellence and digital entrepreneurship (ICEDE); and online infrastructure—by upgrading the selected online platform to host digital training content and other modules/features.

It will also support technology and creative enterprises by organising Hackathons, providing mentorship, launching a startup voucher programme that will support early-stage startups and entrepreneurs with access to workspace and hubs. It will also help these organisations cut cost by providing them with infrastructure like off-grid power solutions.

Through the Nigeria Entrepreneurship and Innovation Investment Fund, with an initial closing of $468 million, the programme will provide funding for early- and growth-stage businesses in the technology and creative industries in Nigeria. The Fund will invest in these businesses through three funding routes. It will do this by direct investments or debt financing of up to 85% in the Series A rounds of growth-stage startups and about 15-30% in the funding rounds of early-stage startups. Other ways it will also invest in these businesses is by subscribing to closed-end private funds as a Limited Partner of micro-venture capital firms and well-established venture capital firms and investing in listed private equity companies, funds, or other vehicles.

Need for a government-led fund for startups
The federal government discovered that while it has gotten relatively easier for Nigerian founders to raise money after series A, those in the early stage trying to raise some money to build an MVP or wanting to test their product and market find it much more difficult to raise money. So, the federal government is coming into the space to support investments in these early-stage startups.

In the process that led to the creation of this programme, a report Catalysing Growth through Innovation, funded by the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), was published by the federal government to map out the innovation going on in the country.

Ife Adebayo, Special Assistant to the Vice President on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, one of the brains behind the programme, explained that the government is involved in funding startups because it will help the ecosystem engage more confidently with investors, since the government is also actively involved in the ecosystem.

This is against the backdrop of the Nigerian Startup Bill (NSB), a bill that promises to create an enabling environment for Nigerian startups to thrive by resolving standing issues like the unfavourable regulatory environment, weak infrastructure, and lack of innovation incentives like tax breaks. The bill moved closer to being enacted into law when it was approved by the Federal Executive Council (FEC) just last week. This programme hopes to ensure the localisation of the bill when it is passed into law, across all the states of the country. It will serve as a framework to test how effective the bill will be in the ecosystem.

Another important reason for the government’s foray into the tech ecosystem is to invest outside the Lagos and Abuja bubble. The programme will be targeting states like Enugu and Kaduna where innovation activities are increasing, and some other parts of the country where it is at beginner level.

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The African tech ecosystem mourns the passing of Nnena Nkongho, an African investor who championed diversity and excellence. Nkongho died on December 18th, 2021.

Nkongho had over 15 years of experience in identifying, building, and capturing value for corporations and funds in Africa is the founding partner of Otundi Ventures, a pan-African early-stage fund. She was also a founding investor at Digital Growth Africa (DiGAME), one of Africa’s earliest (2016) institutional venture investing organisations, which has deployed about $35 million in the series A/B rounds of high-growth, tech-enabled businesses including Getsmarter (exited to 2U, Inc.), SWVL, 10X Investments, and Rhino Safaris Africa.

Prior to that, she was a founding team member at Nubuke Investments, a $75 million multi-strategy pan-African fund.

Outside investing, she briefly worked as an African c-suite executive via her roles as the Head of Business Development, SOLO Phone Nigeria, and Head of Strategy & Business Development, Etisalat Nigeria.

Earlier in her career, she spent seven years working at global financial services companies, Morgan Stanley (New York and Hong Kong) and at Merrill Lynch (London).

Nkongho was a Kauffman fellow, with an MBA from Columbia Business School and a B.A. from Princeton University.

As a Nigerian-American, Nkongho spent her formative years in the US, with occasional visits to Nigeria, especially to see her grandmother in eastern Nigeria. It was these visits that opened her eyes to the transformation that was taking place in Africa, making her shift her focus to working in the African investment space.

An ardent believer in the power of technology, she explained why she eagerly supports the African tech ecosystem, in this interview.

“My grandmother was a farmer in eastern Nigeria, but not a very [successful] one. She would wake up at the crack of dawn to fetch water. She would then carry large containers of water on her head to the rocky soil of her small plot of land. Over the past five years, I’ve seen technology change the lives of smallholder farmers like my grandmother. I’ve seen businesses use the mobile platform to offer value-added services—provide loans for better seeds, automatically irrigate land, and find better markets (and pricing) for harvested goods. Technology-enabled investing can transform lives. To me, that’s the most impactful thing that you can do.”

The African and global technology ecosystem mourns the loss of their colleague, friend, peer, and mentor. As a way of remembering Nkongho’s greatness and contribution to technology communities at home and abroad, TechCabal has been granted the opportunity to publish tributes sent to us by people who knew and worked with Nkongho during her lifetime. May her soul rest in eternal peace.

Eghosa Omoigui, founder, EchoVC Partners
Absolutely devastated to hear of the passing of @NnenaP, an amazing woman, friend, investor, & long-time believer in & contributor to the African tech ecosystem.

As one of the few Black female @KauffmanFellows, she was a shining light to many.

My condolences to her family.#RIP

— Eghosa Omoigui (@EghosaO) December 26, 2021

Idris Bello, founder, LoftyInc
Very early on as we were figuring out our Fund journey at LoftyInc Capital, a mutual friend introduced me to Nnena who was then at Digame Investment. We met up and by the time we were done, she had shortened my VC journey, while sharing great insights from her own journey. Over the last year, I have kept tabs on her as she set up Otundi and worked harder than anyone I have seen to build her new fund. Hence, her death comes as a rude shock, especially at this opportune moment for venture capital on the African continent. On behalf of LoftyInc Capital, I offer my heartfelt condolences to Nnena’s family and friends and the folks at Otundi. She will be missed.

Tomiwa Aladekomo, Big Cabal Media
Nnenna was a wonderful person, generous, cheerful and helpful to a fault. She was a close friend and supporter of our work at TechCabal, ready to offer advice, connections and knowledge whenever we asked it of her. She checked in on us and offered encouragement at those times when it was most needed. She will be greatly missed by us all. May she rest her peace and God comfort her family and loved ones.

Emilian Popa, Ilara Health
You started out as a colleague and became a friend over the years. Your thoughtful advice and friendship will be missed. Rest in peace.

Dotun Olowoporoku, Novastar Ventures
I first met Nnena at a conference in Kigali in 2020. The last time we met was over dinner a few weeks ago at another conference in Abu Dhabi. I’m always grateful for the time we spent discussing and debating. Nnena was super thoughtful, willing to help and deeply insightful. She was one of a rare breed of institutional VCs in Africa who had been active for a long time in the region, and yet remained genuinely curious about what came next. It’s devastating that we’re losing her when we really need more African VC fund managers like her. She will be greatly missed.

Karim Shariff, Managing Partner, Majlis Investments
Nnena. What beautiful energy and willingness to listen to perspective. Her memory attached her to Africa. Her imagination will bring her back. A sense of culture, geography, and technology. Always tirelessly moving. We met, over the years, in New York, London, Dubai, and Nairobi. She knew these places intimately. I know I will miss her and her lens on everything.

Iyin Aboyeji, founder, Future Africa
Nnenna was a force of nature, a real one. She always had the courage to say what everyone was thinking but dreading to say. This was where we found a common cause. No one was ever in doubt of where they stood with her. Her impact in our industry was silent but potent. The Get Smarter deal is one for the ages. Our industry will miss her. May her soul Rest In Peace and may GOD give her family and friends the fortitude to bear the loss.

Steven Grin, managing partner, Lateral Capital.
Nnena was a friend, colleague, and an intellectual sparring partner with no BS, in a world filled with so much fakery. She was relentlessly curious and had that rare combination of being strong and vulnerable at the same time. She was a trailblazer and deeply committed to the African tech ecosystem, especially at a time when most LPs did not believe in the asset clas. I know she was particularly excited about the work she was doing with Kauffman, her new fund, Otundi, and her support to emerging female managers. Being one of a few female general partners in our space, we have lost a real lion. I can only trust, somehow, that we will all continue in her honour, doing our part, to keep up the work.

Marième Diop – Orange Ventures.
It’s been a few days since I heard the devastating news of Nnena’s passing. I have been processing it since then…, and after the tears, questions, sorrow, remembrance, and acceptance…, it still hurts to know that she’s gone forever.

I liked Nnena very much. I met her almost five years ago. We hit it off straight away and have stayed in touch ever since. She was always supportive, enthusiastic, empathetic, and so hard-working. These past six months after she started Otundi Ventures, we had wonderful conversations once or twice a week, and she always had great insights on how to address the root cause of gender inequality and biases in our industry.

She fought hard not only to get a seat at the table but to build her own and hence forge a path for women investors in Africa.

Nnena cared about people. She loved the arts and creative minds. Even when she was very busy, we sent each other encouraging messages, and she was always advising me to take care of myself. I am glad that she knew how much I valued her, which I told her for the umpteenth time in our last conversation, a few days before she left this world. Nnena, you will be really missed, and I will continue to hold you warmly in my heart. Rest in peace, my friend. My deepest condolences to her family and friends.

Wale Ayeni – IFC | World Bank Group
This is difficult to write. Nnena was a giant. She was ebullient, extremely dedicated, and cared deeply about Africa. Her passion for the ecosystem and for founders was palpable, and I will miss our hour-long conversations on the ecosystem. I, and we, have lost a colleague and trusted friend. Her energy is irreplaceable. We will miss you Nnena, and we won’t forget.

IK Kanu, founding partner, Atlantica Ventures
Nnena was always real to me and everyone that met her. She was always positive, smiling, and quick to lend an ear or hand. We met years ago, and strengthened our friendship during our Kauffman Fellowship. She was strong, confident, yet humble and kind. Always laughing and looking forward to better days ahead. Rest well with God my dear friend.

Romain Diaz – Founder & CEO, Satgana
I am deeply saddened that my mentor, Nnena P. Nkongho, has left this world. I met Nnena five years ago in Cape Town, and she has been one of the most important people in my professional development ever since. From a mentor, she became a friend, advisor, and confidant.

I am profoundly grateful for all the countless hours that she selflessly spent to help me figure things out, solve problems, strategise, and grow.

Every hour I spent with her equated to months of accelerated development, thanks to the right blend that she always brought between validating me and challenging me. She is the one who pushed me to pursue a vision that later gave birth to Satgana. She believed in me when I sometimes didn’t. I wish all entrepreneurs out there find their own Nnena.

If anything, as I have been told by another dear friend and business partner, I should honour her by making this company as successful as she believed it would become. Thank you for everything, Nnena. You’ll leave a hole in my life and those around you.

Rest in peace. Much love.

Arun Iyer – Alpha Direct Insurance
Nnena was an incredibly astute individual and investor. In the brief time in which I got to know her and the interactions we had, she became a friend and partner, giving me advice and being open, honest, and straightforward about everything she did, every interaction we had. She gave me the inspiration to aim higher and push harder because she believed in us founders as much as we believed in ourselves. She understood our business so quickly and well, and she had an incredible ability to be forthright and candid while staying supportive and encouraging. She thought like a founder, and her optimism and enthusiasm were infectious.

We lost a true gem of a human being. It’s a big loss for the entire African technology ecosystem and the world at large. May her soul rest in eternal peace, and I pray for her family and loved ones to find the strength and courage to deal with her loss.

Craig McLeod – Box Commerce
Nnena Nkongho was one of the greatest champions of the African tech ecosystem as a VC, leader, pioneer and, hands down, one of its smartest players. She was a great mentor, friend and peer. In an ecosystem of only a handful of giants, she stood tall. She will be missed.

Leonard Stiegeler – Founder, Pulse Africa
I was deeply saddened to hear of Nnenna’s passing.

She was a kind, joyous, and thoughtful person that I was lucky to meet in different places around Africa & in the UAE, over the years. Every time we met, we had great discussions and I left smarter than I had come.

Nnenna’s impact in the African technology and venture capital space will live on. Her support for entrepreneurs, businesses, and industries will facilitate opportunities for young people and economies for generations to come.

My thoughts are with her loved ones and friends.

Ibrahim Sagna – AFREXIMBANK
Some people show up in your life and leave without notice, not realising how they have impacted you. Such individuals are so consumed by their mission to share what they know that they are not counting or keeping tabs of their impact. Instead, they remain busy improving other people’s lives. Rumi—Persian poet and philosopher—reminds us that, “a candle never loses any of its light while lighting up another candle”.

Nnena Nkongho is such a candle. She is that sister who comes into your life without notice; that missionary who enlightens you with the breadth of her knowledge and network in African tech investment and leaves you forever impacted. I had just moved to Cairo, and in one small trip, she had managed to plug me into the local ecosystem and left me at first curious, then ultimately full of passion for the sector and its players.

The reality is that Nnena was not just remarkable because of her knowledge, network, or dedication to startups. She was remarkable because her fundamental character combined humility and ingenuity on the one hand, and calmness and a zest for life on the other. She gave and gave. She was selfless. We will all miss a phenomenal human.

Her departure leaves many of us in shock. May she rest in perfect peace. Hereby extending our most sincere condolences to her family.

Samer Salty, Managing Partner, Zouk Capital
You could always tell you are in the presence of a gentle soul when you are speaking with Nnena. She always cared about people, regardless of their walk of life. For her, doing good is good business. It was a great pleasure to have worked with her and known her. We will miss you, Nnena.

Ido Sum, Andreata, and the TLcom team
We met Nnena first in 2013, through a mutual friend at Kuramo, one of Africa’s very first fund of funds. She was just out of Columbia Business School, helping Africa founders in the very early days of the African tech ecosystem, and keen to play a role in its formation. Our first chat was a sign for the years to come. She was a super open, honest, smart, nice, deliberate, and driven person.

We remained friends, and over the years after she joined DiGAME, started sharing investment opportunities and insights with each other. Nnena was a voice we listened to. Grounded, rounded, thoughtful, and most importantly, in the early days of African tech, a true optimist.

In the coming years, our paths crossed many more times. Drinks in Cape Town, dinners in Kigali, Zooms, WhatsApp messages… She was always keen to collaborate. She was full of good humour and lightened the load of life with a good laugh. When Nnena decided to launch her own fund, we couldn’t have been happier. A women-led team, with a great perspective of the scene’s evolvement and exits expertise, nothing could stand in her way.

Our last catch up was just a few weeks back. As always, future-looking, with her eyes set to conquer the next summit ahead. Little did we know at that time…

We stand broken-hearted at the loss of one of our true friends in this journey. Nnena will forever be in our hearts. A true leader, early visionary and, above all, a mensch. You will forever be in our hearts.

Raj Kulasingam, Senior Counsel, Dentons
I met Nnena many years ago when venture in Africa was a desert. Since then, whenever we met, I was always struck by her warmth, genuineness, and willingness to share her experience and knowledge.

Her passing will be felt by many I know. I hope we can remember her not only for the contributions she made but also for her warmth and humanity.

Stephan Breban, CEO, Giants’ Shoulders Capital Limited
The first thing to say is that this has hit me far more than I expected. Maybe because she was always so full of life. I’ve lost people closer to me, and in the current environment, it should not be too shocking. But this is. I know many people know her and remember her fondly. There will be many tributes to her intelligence and general investment and tech brilliance, and so I’m going for another angle. I’m going to share my favourite memory of Nnena. We met many times in many different cities, and she would always know the best spot for coffee. She was a proper authority. The first time I met her in London, I knew I had to do something special. No coffee was ever going to impress her, so I took her here, a Victorian urinal that had been converted to a coffee shop. Not sure I can say she loved it, but I made an impression! If you ever get to London, please visit Fitzrovia, have a coffee there, and try to imagine Nnena’s reaction.

Source

At one point or the other, every startup founder or CEO was a newbie in navigating the murky waters of institutional investment. They maybe even got burnt because they didn’t know the right questions to ask, or what to look out for.

So, we started the Ask an Investor series to help explain why and how investments in companies happen in Africa from the people who make them happen.

In the past year, I’ve interviewed over 20 investors who’ve shared their thoughts on what investors look out for in founders and startups before investing, the lessons learnt and mistakes made, key trends, and other relevant nuggets.

I’ll be highlighting a few insights from the published interviews here and think you should read the full version of the interviews.

Founders Factory: A hands-on approach
If there’s one thing that I learnt early on from my conversations with different investors, it’s that all investors are not the same. Their approach to investing is often influenced by their background and experiences. While most people easily associate investors with just money, Founders Factory Africa (FFA) would rather have you think of more.

In a conversation with Sam Sturm, one of the founding partners of FFA, he explains why:

“We believe that capital isn’t the only way to support a business. You need it so that you can execute but at the end of the day, capital isn’t what solves problems. We believe that the challenges of product-market fit, customer acquisition, or retention are not the kind of challenges that capital alone can solve. Those are the challenges that you’re looking to entrepreneurs to solve, that you’re looking to the team to solve. If you can supplement them with experienced and talented people, you’d be successful.”

Alongside providing capital, FFA is a venture building studio, this means that a portfolio startup can expect to get support from private coaches, product managers, product designers, etc.

Microtraction: A novel approach
Five years ago, Yele Bademosi saw that it was difficult for people to raise funds if they didn’t have a wealthy relative or network, so he set out to make it easier for founders to raise money.

But first, the Microtraction team had to do away with the status quo. This meant no batches, no programmes, and no demo days. Microtraction invested on the go.

Another different thing about Microtraction’s approach is its bias for investing in startups with technical founders/co-founders. Why?

“If we give you money, and you’re using it to outsource development, you’ll probably get it wrong. The first version of your product is almost always wrong. So that’s what caused our bias for tech founders.” Bademosi explained. “We’re also biased towards having a co-founder because for the most part, we genuinely believe that it is incredibly difficult to start a company yourself. However, there’s always an exception to every rule.”

Acumen: Patient capital
The original idea for Acumen was to bring the best of philanthropy to focus on solving problems for the poor. So Acumen goes a step further beyond providing donations and grants to startups. It’s a non-profit that uses donations received to invest in startups working on socially relevant issues.

Meghan Curran, West African Director of Acumen, explained this: “In our model, nothing goes back to the investors because the investors in the first place are donors. Instead that money comes back to Acumen, and we redeploy and reinvest it. We may use it to make follow-on investments in our existing portfolio, or we may use it to make new investments and to continue to grow our portfolio.”

Acumen is able to invest at an early stage and wait a little longer than other traditional venture capital firms because they don’t have to return the money back to donors.

Sawari Ventures: North Africa’s leading VC firm
2021 was an exciting year for North Africa as it garnered a lot of attention and funding. Before the boom, Sawari Ventures, which was founded over a decade ago, has been backing North African startups. The founders of Sawari Ventures also founded Flat6Labs—the MENA region’s largest accelerator.

In our conversation, Tamer Azer explained the difference between raising money as a VC fund and a startup.

“VC funds are different. They have a limited lifetime. They have a 10-year lifetime. You’ll spend the first third of your time investing, the second third growing, and the last third exiting your investments. You need to give the money back to your investors. It’s really the only way for many of us to actually make money off of this business. And it takes time.

“Just like startups, we go out into the market and raise money. Startups get the money a little bit at a time and have to prove themselves every 12 to 18 months.

“We have to raise all the money at once. So you come with a bit of a track record, and then you go out into the market and try to raise capital. It’s not like you’re raising a million or two million dollars in rounds. You’re raising 50 to 100 million dollars from a market and institutional investors that haven’t really gotten comfortable with the asset class yet. You’re reaching out to international investors, asking people in the United States and Europe to invest in Africa. It’s not just about writing cheques, we have to get the money to be able to write these cheques first. “

It’s a very different dynamic and we have to work really hard to be able to write these cheques. We work really hard to make the decisions on who we should give this money to.”

Unconventional Capital: Removing gut feelings and bias in startup investment
Within the first 10 minutes of my conversation with Franziska Reh, CEO of Unconventional Capital, I understood why the word “unconventional” was befitting.

Here’s how early-stage investment mostly happens: An investor and an ambitious entrepreneur get talking. After a few background checks and business plan conversations, the investor decides whether to invest. But not before checking their gut feeling. Along the way the investor is constantly asking, “Does this feel right?”

At Uncap, the team decided to flip this approach upside down by relying on algorithms to make these decisions.

Reh explained, “At Uncap, in our investment process, no one in our team makes investment decisions. The selection process is based on an algorithm that focuses very much on the potential of the entrepreneur. It’s a model that measures entrepreneurial potential as a predictor of future success. Afterwards, we invest through a standardised model.”

This model allows Uncap to invest in thousands of entrepreneurs. Interestingly, Uncap exits the portfolio companies gradually over a period of time—an unconventional exit strategy.

“These companies we invest in buy back their equity through 5% of their quarterly revenues. They transfer 5% of their quarterly revenues to us. By this act, over time, they buy back the whole investment, plus the price that we’ve paid before. It’s a fixed multiple on the investment, it’s basically the same for everyone.”

Tomi Davies: Tales of an African angel Investor
The conversation with Tomi Davies, or TD as he’s fondly called, started off with him explaining how he was able to partner with some of the brightest minds on the continent to build the angel investment space in Africa. He was part of the team that started the Lagos Angel Network and the African Business Angel Network (ABAN).

While many know TD for his role in the African Angel community, but he’s more than that.

“I wear many hats: I’m chief investment officer at Greentech, President of ABAN, co-founder of Lagos Angel Network, and sit on the board of the Global Business Angel Network. I’m a founding member of the World Business Angel Forum,“ Davies said.

He also shared his proprietary framework for investing in startups.

“Over the past 10 years, I’ve interacted with entrepreneurs all over Africa and refined the POEM model. So it’s essentially vision, proposition, organisation, economics and milestones. If you take those, what you want to understand around the vision when you meet the founder is, ‘Is the founder capable? What drives them?’

“The second one is how significant the problem they’re tackling is. What’s the problem? How many people are bothered by this? Because you’re thinking about economic value.

“Finally, you ask: is the solution innovative? Is the offer compelling and unique? Also, is the business model sustainable? Those are things I look out for when I meet a founder.”

Ato Bentsi-Enchill: Angel investor and startup advisor
When I visited Ghana in July, Ato Bentsi-Enchill was one of the people I met. One thing that stood out to me was that he moved from a liberal arts background to business and investing in startups. How did he learn all these?

“In the early days, when people asked me to do valuation reports, I got initial guidance on YouTube, read as many books as I could on the topic and spoke to people in my network.” Bentsi-Enchill explained. “It’s been more of self-education, and I believe that works best for me, although an MBA will be necessary for the future.”

As a startup advisor, he helps African startups raise capital and protects them from difficult investors. In our conversation, he cites some instances where he’s helped.

“For example, investors often offer startups convertible debts—a loan that could be repaid or converted to equity at a later date. Now I’ve seen some term sheets where the investors ask that if the founder opts to pay back the investment, the investor gets some amount of free equity in the company. For quite a high-interest rate and no additional value, the investor wants more equity in the company? Make it make sense.”

Adam Molai: African industrialist
Zimbabwe is known more for the Victoria Falls (the largest waterfall in the world) than its tech ecosystem, but still, Adam Molai is one of the few investors looking to change that.

In 2000, Molai started investing in other African companies through TRT Investments. Last year, he started the $2-million Jua Fund to provide African entrepreneurs with much-needed access to capital, mentoring, advice, and networks.

Over the past 20 years, he has been investing in African startups and, through the Jua Fund, has backed Kenya’s GrowAgric, Madagascar’s Jirogasy, Zimbabwe’s BRYT, Nigeria’s PowerStove, and many others.

In a conversation with TechCabal’s Managing Editor Koromone Koroye, he shared one of the best practices startups should adopt in getting funded.

“What I’ve seen is that there’s often a lack of belief that they’ll get the fund, so they go in, try to get the funds, then look for what’s required of them to comply. I think they should be looking at it in totality. Startups should think like this: I’m going to get the fund and because I’ll get the fund, this is what I must put in place to enable me get the fund. What happens when they don’t think like this is that for some it takes months before accessing the funds. They need the funds, the funds are there for them, but they can’t access the funds because they’ve not fulfilled the due diligence process.”

Sunu Capital: A pan-African fund with a solo general partner
Since Benjamin Schmerler left the United States at the age of 18, he’s lived and worked in nearly every corner of the globe. Interestingly, he stumbled on the name for his firm—SUNU Capital— while in Senegal.

He heard the word sunu in a song, and when he found out that it meant “our”, it resonated with him. “I used it as the name of my firm because it’s a simple word and, more importantly, because I believe in collective effort; working together to build more wealth for everyone and leave this planet a better place for our children,” Schmerler said.

One thing he’s been thinking about recently is how to aggregate African markets.

“What I’m really interested in is how to break the borders between countries so we can get a larger aggregated market that can be efficiently served. I believe if we can do this, we would see exits on a scale beyond anything we have seen to date.

“I talk to entrepreneurs all the time and they show me the total addressable market (TAM) of Africa, a map of 54 countries. They hint at the possibility of expansion, and I’m thinking, how do we unlock Gabon? What does it take to be a part of Cameroon as well? There is so much untapped potential all over the continent that I am absolutely excited by infrastructure that turns the 4 or 5 markets where all the activity is happening into 10, 20, 30 countries over the next handful of years.”

Kepple Africa: Creating new industries
A few minutes into our conversation, Satoshi Shinada reminded me that I need to visit more African countries. At the age of 18, he left Japan to visit 40 African countries in the space of almost two years.

For Kepple Africa Ventures, the big vision is to create clusters of businesses that become new industries in Africa.

In our conversation, Shinada shared some mistakes he’s made.

“I’ve made a number of mistakes. One that stands out is investing in some startups that are trying to solve too many problems at the same time. It looks beautiful because the startup is solving everything, and it involves different stakeholders in that sector. But a downside to this is that the startup struggles with monetisation for lack of understanding about their customer’s biggest pain point.

“Another mistake that I made is caring too much about how we can connect startups with Japanese companies. A while back, some of the startups we brought to Japan got lots of attention from Japanese companies, but because the startups are at an early stage, the Japanese companies couldn’t invest. So we decided to be the first investor with these startups. But, as you know, when your investment decision is driven by excitement and not purely commercial criteria, it distorts healthy decision-making.”

LoftyInc: Not playing by the rules of VC investing
In 2012, Idris Bello and his partners, then in their early 30s, left their lucrative jobs and raided their savings to create the LoftyInc Afropreneurs Fund. Over the years, through trials and errors, they’ve seen some level of success. Today, LoftyInc operates three funds that have deployed over $12 million into over 75 African startups like Flutterwave, Andela and Trella.

Bello, who believes in sharing a full picture of his investor journey, shared some notable deals missed or mistakes made along the way.

“Those are the aspects of investing that people don’t say much about. I remember when we wanted to start our Fund 2, we decided to register in Mauritius because we were told it was better. It turned out to be a bad decision because of the tedious registration and documentation process there. The KYC (identity verification) was unnecessarily complicated as they wanted to know ‘everything’ about everyone who was investing, and it got expensive and complicated very fast. In hindsight, it was a bad decision. We ended up cutting our losses and registering in Delaware, US.

“Most of the mistakes we made were as a result of wrong judgment calls. Here’s another that probably cost me a few million. In 2013, I remember committing to invest $20,000 in Fora, which later became Andela. Unfortunately, on that same day, someone else came to me with another idea. So I told Iyin to bring back the $20,000 cheque. I split it into two and gave both start-ups $10,000 each. Today it is clear I shouldn’t have gone back on my initial investment.”

Capria ventures: Backing local funds and startups
Five years ago, Jack Knellinger, Dave Richards and Will Poole formed Capria ventures, an investment firm that started out investing in local funds (VC firms) across the global south—Africa, Latin America, and South Asia. Recently, Capria Ventures has begun investing directly in startups, providing the much needed growth stage capital for them.

Today, Capria Ventures has investment activity in about 50 countries with $650 million worth of current assets under management.

In my conversation with Jack Knellinger, he enlightened me on how they support VC firms—a subject rarely spoken about.

“Obviously, the main thing top of mind is fundraising—helping them close their fundraising. Here, it involves everything from introductions to reviewing pitch materials. We look at how the funds are being positioned as well as the terms and negotiations with limited partners to ensure there’s alignment between the fund managers, general partners, and limited partners.

“As soon as the fundraising is done, we move to portfolio management. How are they putting in place the right systems and processes to grow, scale, and institutionalise the firm? Here, there’s a wide range of things to be done in that regard, from team development to appropriately conducting due diligence before investing. When the fund managers have built up their portfolio of companies, we move to how they think about exits. What’s the right time to exit? Do they want to look at partial exits?

When a firm has mastered these aspects and gone on to raise multiple funds. We look at how they’re telling the story of the firm and the funds you’ve managed.”

And that’s all for this year! Thank you to all the investors who took their time to talk to me and help others learn more about investing in startups.

Which investors/firms will you like me to talk to in 2022?

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Globally, the COVID-19 disease has infected more than 290 million people, claimed well over 5 million lives, and plunged millions into extreme poverty. The pandemic has been devastating in every sense of the word, and its impact felt in Africa, too, where over 9.7 million cases and 228,000 deaths have been recorded.

But, within the continent, the magnitude of the crisis has been uneven by country. One of the lesser affected countries is Togo. The French-speaking country has, so far, recorded 31,500 infections and 250 deaths from COVID, per data from the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC)—relatively lenient nominal figures compared to Nigeria’s or South Africa’s.

In the small West African country of about 8 million people and a gross domestic product of around $7.5 billion, locally-led digital solutions have been crucial to authorities’ efforts to curb the pandemic’s reach.

Last month, Togo’s Ministry of Digital Economy and Transformation, led by Havard graduate and former World Bank analyst Cina Lawson, unveiled the latest in an expanding list of mobile-based solutions to help Togolese tide over the pandemic.

A new mobile application, PassCovid19TG, allows the population to easily upload, access, and present their COVID-19-related health information. Documents such as vaccination certificates, PCR tests, and the Togolese or European Union COVID Pass, whether in digital or paper format, can be uploaded on the app via scanning their QR codes.

By using smartphones to present COVID digital certificates, the new application is expected to facilitate and improve the control and checking of health passes in Togo, where people have to present passes before they’re allowed into public spaces, from airports and worship centres to restaurants and bars.

“The PassCovid19TG can also be used when travelling, to check in advance the validity of the Pass in the country of destination, particularly in the European Union area,” said Lawson, who’s overseen the creation of several technological solutions that have helped Togo effectively handle the COVID-19 crisis better than its wealthier, larger, and supposedly more tech-savvy regional neighbours, Nigeria and Ghana.

Like much of the rest of Africa, COVID lockdowns and restrictions threatened livelihoods in Togo, a country where pre-pandemic per capita GDP was less than $700 in 2019 and average income below $2 a day. Per World Bank estimates, about 62% of jobs in the country were affected by the crisis, particularly in the informal sector, which employs the majority of Togo’s labour force outside of the agricultural sector.

Faced with the threat of worsened poverty amid rising unemployment and dwindling income, the government in April 2020 launched a program called Novissi (meaning “solidarity” in the local Ewe language)—a mobile money-based cash transfer scheme to help those most economically affected by the pandemic.

More than 1.6 million Togolese registered for the monetary support through their mobile phones, according to data on the Novissi website. Led by Lawson, the digital ministry then used voter identification data to select beneficiaries by targeting some 600,000 people who listed themselves as “informal workers” in urban areas, an indication they were likely to be poor.

But with the government unable to support every one of the millions of informal workers, identifying the poorest citizens in the rural parts of the country required more sophisticated solutions. Togo turned to satellite imagery and artificial intelligence.

With the help of researchers at the University of California and the US-based NGO GiveDirectly, the government was able to identify the poorest 100 cantons in the country through satellite imagery data. It then analysed mobile phone data from primary network providers to identify users in those areas with patterns that suggested they were living under the poverty line.

“We chose a fully digital approach, which makes it possible to directly reach beneficiaries through mobile payments while guaranteeing traceability and transparency,” Lawson’s statement on the Novissi website reads. “The solution represents a real methodological break with the past and foreshadows the way in which social safety nets and cash transfer programs will henceforth be implemented in our country.”

Lomé has so far distributed around CFA13.3 billion (over $22 million) directly into the mobile wallets of more than 800,000 people in different communities suffering from the crisis, according to official data. Women make up the majority of beneficiaries—over 500,000—and received more ($22) in single 3–5 monthly cash transfers than men ($20).

“People should not have to choose between death by COVID-19 or by hunger,” President Faure Gnassingbe said on the Novissi programme. “Other African leaders could also use a similar mobile-based, cash transfer scheme.” Anit Mukherjee, a policy fellow at the Centre for Global Development, in this Bloomberg article claims Novissi makes even America’s COVID cash transfer programme look like a “dinosaur”.

Around three months after launching the Novissi scheme and as reported COVID cases surged in Togo with the emergence of the more contentious and deadly Delta variant, the government launched a COVID contact-tracing application, Togo Safe, to initiate, in real-time, the health protocol needed to contain the virus’s spread.

The web and mobile-based platform relies on digital geolocation to track infected individuals and immediately issues notifications to others whenever they come in contact with those who’d tested positive for the virus.

On the app, Togolese can also view the number of COVID cases in their area as well as get access to health advice and a directory of useful pandemic-related hotlines.

In a month, more than 50,000 people registered for COVID-19 vaccination through Togo’s digital platforms.
Togo’s tech-savvy approach to handling the pandemic extends to vaccination efforts. Within a week of receiving 156,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines from the COVAX facility last March, the country was able to vaccinate 98% of its health workers with the help of a system that relied on digital channels to reach people across the country.

Authorities launched a mobile and web-based service that allows Togolese to register for vaccination using their phones. An individual just has to dial the shortcode *844# from a local number and complete necessary steps, after which they receive a 14-digit code to be shown at the health centre for vaccination.

In a month, more than 50,000 people had registered for vaccination through SMS and the website. Togo currently has the second-highest vaccination rate in West Africa, after Cape Verde.

The digital-driven response appears to be effective, keeping COVID infection rates in Togo at low levels so far while the poverty rate only rose marginally in 2020. It’s also attracted international attention and recognition. On the COVID Performance Index developed by the Australian think tank, Lowy Institute, the West African country was ranked the 2nd to best handle the crisis in Africa, and the 15th globally. Many African countries have shown interest in replicating Novissi, Lawson told Bloomberg.

Togo may not be known for tech startups with global appeal and recognition or billions in venture funding, but the country has ambitions to become a digital hub by 2025, riding on the penetration of mobile connections. As of January 2021, more than 80% of the population had a mobile phone.

Considering the manner in which the government has been able to leverage ICTs in its COVID response, Damien Mama, who was United Nations Resident Coordinator in Togo until September 2021, believes the small West African nation is on track to improving its economy with digital technologies.

“The digital sector is without a doubt one of the most promising means to achieve the sustainable development goals in a small country with big ambitions like Togo,” the UN official said in a post.

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Five North African countries—Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania and Libya—make up the Maghreb region, a historic island between seas of water and sand at the far end of the Arab world.

Leaving out Libya, which continues to battle with consistent civil unrest and hasn’t really broken ground in the startup world, and Mauritania, which is relatively small and mostly underdeveloped, startups across the other three nations raised an estimated $72 million in 2021. Algerian startups raised $30 million; Morocco recorded an all-time high of $29 million; and Tunisia closed north of $23 million.

This is a landmark growth from the $20.1 million raised across 19 deals in 2020. But when you break these numbers down into deals and compare them to Egypt’s over $600 million funding in 2021, the conversation on how disturbingly small the funding is comes up. When it comes to venture funding, Egypt has always been North Africa’s leader, capturing up to 80% of investment flows into the region from 2015 to 2021, per Baobab.

However, this is not a question of why Egypt dominates with such a huge margin but why the combined startup funding secured by five nations couldn’t match up with at least a quarter of what their neighbour did. What’s the problem of the Maghreb region, and how can the ecosystem rise to its full potential?

To set the context, the region has several problems that, if not resolved soon, may not only continue to shrink the potential of its burgeoning startup sector but could bury it completely. But here are five reasons funding is low in this region.

Intra-regional conflict
The Maghreb countries don’t see eye-to-eye; they are archenemies or, as they are popularly called, “enemy brothers”. It’s gradually becoming clearer that these nations are incapable of cooperatively forgoing their cat-and-rat history and assembling their social and cultural similarities to achieve greater economic progress.

This enmity continues to subdue the economic potential of the region because each of the countries practices a closed-border policy, which hinders seamless intra-regional trade, especially between Morocco and Algeria. These two nations arguably hold the key to the region’s prosperity but have instead contributed the most to its misfortune.

Due to the hostile intra-regional trade culture, it’s difficult for startups to project growth in terms of expansion across the Maghreb. That means it’ll be difficult for a Moroccan company to expand into the Algerian market.

A 100-kilometer fence along the Morocco-Algeria border built by the Moroccan government
For example, when Chari, a Moroccan startup that helps retailers access consumer products faster and cheaper, wanted to expand into Tunisia, it had to set up an entirely new company that has no ties with the mother company apart from the name and business model.

“We had to start another company in Tunisia, with all the paperwork. We had to also hire a new general manager and local team, and basically duplicate the company in Tunisia,” said Ismael Belkhayat, co-founder and CEO at Chari. “So we don’t handle Tunisia from Morocco; our Tunisia operation is independent.”

This shows that there is no business exchange between the countries; there is no unified environment, which means there are no real regional markets. How do you then pitch an investor to back a venture that operates in a broken market like the Maghreb?

Hostile bureaucracy
Surprisingly, countries in the Maghreb region aren’t completely in disagreement with one other. They all have something in common: a heavy and killer administrative process. Across the region, there’s an administrative office called Office des Changes, a bureau that regulates all monetary transactions. The body monitors money that comes in and goes out of each country.

Here’s how it works: as a startup, you can’t do as little as spend on Google or Facebook Ads without consulting the bureau. If you want to advertise on Google or Facebook, you either need to pay a local tax or get special authorisation to spend money outside Morocco or Algeria or Tunisia. This isn’t only applicable outside of the Maghreb but also within it.

Hence, local companies mostly consume local services and not foreign. Therefore, it is more difficult to leverage sophisticated tools to drive growth or even maintain operations across the board—the bureau has made sure of that. Imagine not being able to use Trello or Slack because your country won’t allow you to subscribe to them without charging your purse dry.

This same principle is applicable to investors. It’s a tad difficult and expensive to pull out your funds after investing in the Maghreb region; you must pay a great chunk of tax to the bureau. All of this rigid bureaucracy makes it difficult for startups in the region to pull foreign investment.

The big don’t trust the small
The Maghreb tech ecosystem is an unusual one, and startups are literally on their own. In Nigeria, for instance, big conventional banks back fintech startups, and FMCGs invest in e-commerce and logistic upstarts.

It’s not like that in the North African region.

Big local companies mistrust startups, mostly because of how easy it is for startups to shut down in the region. For them to trust, back and also, maybe, provide seed “market” (goods supplies), you must have at least a two-years track record.

The irony is, if nobody is ready to back a green early-stage company, how will it survive and be around for the two-year mark? It’s a vicious cycle that puts startups in a very tight corner because it seems everything is designed to kill them. How can foreign investors trust a brand or product that potential local investors won’t back?

Lack of fintech innovation
This wouldn’t have been a reason if Africa had not experienced the power of fintech. Startups that play in this space attract big-cheque investors. Across the four biggest African tech hubs—Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and Egypt—fintech attracts the biggest funding. Even in Egypt, where logistics and e-commerce attracted more funding, the $120 million investment secured by MNT-Halan, a fintech company, remains its biggest single deal till today.

When you move up west, the absence of fintech starts to show. Noureddine Tayebi, founder and CEO of Yassir, an Algeria-originated Maghreb-focused logistic company that raised all the $30 million for Algeria, confirmed to TechCabal over a call that — even though his company is active towards building a fintech product that will support their business— there are currently no fintech solutions in Algeria. Belkhayat also said the same about Morocco, though he mentioned that Tunisia has a few like Paymee, which he was sure will likely survive because of the supportive startup act the country enacted in 2018.

Both local and foreign investors are bullish on fintech startups, especially in Africa, and going by trends from the last five years, it’s expected that entrepreneurs in the Maghreb countries will double down on fintech and court investors for more investments.

However, Belkhayat thinks for a fintech to actually scale, it needs enough capital that is mostly not available to their startups at the early stage. This may be another reason why these countries will be stuck with cash going forward.

Language barrier
The Maghreb region speaks French and that makes it a francophone region. According to Belkhayat, most of the available foreign investors communicate in English, so a founder who can’t speak English talking to an investor who doesn’t understand nor speaks French is already disadvantaged.

“Most VC funds are based in countries where people speak English, compared to French-speaking countries. Therefore, it’s more complicated for us to raise money than the anglophones,” said Belkhayat.

Before 2021, venture funding in francophone African countries was extremely low, with Morocco and Tunisia being the leaders per investment. But this year, Senegal took the lead after fintech startup Wave raised a record $200 million Series A. Apart from this deal, VC funding activity remained pretty much subdued in the region last year.

Also, both Belkhayat, his co-founder Sophia Alj and Tayebi are American-trained businessmen who have worked with top American organisations and understand the languages of the investors. Niama El Bassunie—the founder/CEO at Waystocap, another Morrocan e-commerce business that was acquired by Egypt-based Fawry—is also a UK-trained and based expert. So when you zoom in, it becomes clearer why their companies were able to raise enough capital, unlike others.

These are the struggles every Maghrebian startup faces while trying to raise foreign investment. Most importantly, the intra-region conflict that has led to lack of business exchange has to be fixed. Once that’s solved, just like a domino effect, every other thing should gradually fall in place.

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Learn more about startup/tech funding in Africa here

2021 has been a noteworthy year that has seen the African tech sector bounce back from the difficulties it faced in 2020. Here’s a list of 21 things that happened for the first time in the African tech scene this year.

African artists raked in thousands of dollars from selling NFTs (digital art)
The growing popularity of NFTs has puzzled many, yet it has opened the door for artists and creators from Africa to sell their content to a global audience. With global sales of NFTs topping $2.5 billion in the first half of 2021, we saw African artists like Niyi Okeowo and Nyahan Tachie-Menson sell thousands of dollars worth of NFT; Osinachi sell $75,000 worth of crypto art in 10 days; and Nyasha Warambwa’s work got featured on the New York Times Square billboard.

The world’s first 3D printed school opened in Malawi.
The world’s first 3D printed school opened its doors in July, in Malawi. The school was built by 14Trees, a joint venture between a British development firm and a Swiss company that specialises in building materials. The school’s walls were printed in just 18 hours, compared to the several days it takes to build with conventional building materials. The process in general significantly minimises the time, cost, and materials used for building houses and schools. Hopefully, this technology can help address the severe shortage of schools in the country.

The African startup ecosystem raised a record $4 billion+ in venture capital funding
2021 year was a landmark year for the African tech ecosystem, raising over $4 billion via 754 deals in venture capital funding. The Big Four—Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Egypt—accounted for 80% of the total amount raised and 76% of the deals.

An autonomous drone was deployed to attack humans in Libya, the UN says
A report published in March 2021 by the United Nations (UN) Panel of Experts on Libya stated that a drone had been used to “hunt down and remotely engage” soldiers who are believed to have been loyal to Libya’s General Khalifa Haftar. This case revisits the conversation on the ethics of using drones in military attacks. How reliable is the technology behind drones, and what could be the implication of a malfunction or error?

Apple appointed its first-ever country leader for Nigeria
Apple has sold over a billion smartphones (iPhones), yet they account for less than 10% of the smartphone market in Nigeria. In March, the announcement of the appointment of Teju Ajani as Apple’s first-ever managing director for Nigeria is an indication of the tech giant’s interest in Nigeria.

African regulators began responding to the unethical practices of digital lenders
After many years of complaints about the predatory tactics of digital lenders, regulators in Nigeria and Kenya began taking steps to curtail it. A Nigerian regulator imposed a ₦10 million naira ($18,000) fine on Soko Lending company and the Kenyan government recently put a law in place to curtail the excesses of digital lenders.

Apple Pay launched in Africa
Eight years after Apple launched Apple Pay, its payment and digital wallet system, the tech giant finally brought it to Africa, with its launch in South Africa this year. This launch came three years after Samsung launched its Samsung Pay in South Africa. This move speaks of Apple’s intention to increase its penetration in sub-Saharan Africa where the adoption of digital payments has increased since the start of the pandemic.

Ghana kicked off its first fully digital census in West Africa
In June, Ghana started its first fully digital national census—the first ever in West Africa. The country’s last census was in 2010, and it put the population at 24.6 million. The country has, every 10 years since 1981, conducted the Population and Housing Census (PHC) but was forced to postpone the 2020 census due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic

Nigeria became the first African country to roll out a digital currency
On October 25, Nigeria became the first country in Africa, and one of the first in the world, to introduce a digital currency. Developed by Barbados-based fintech company Bitt Inc., the eNaira is a legal tender just like the naira. According to the country’s central bank, it must be accepted by all merchants and business outlets as a form of payment in Nigeria. The digital currency is expected to boost cross-border trade and financial inclusion, make transactions more efficient as well as improve monetary policy.

Senegalese TikTok megastar Khaby Lame hit a 100 million followers milestone without saying a word
In August, Senegalese-born Khaby Lame became the second person ever to hit and cross the 100-million-followers mark on TikTok. Lame, a 21-year-old former factory worker living in Italy on a Senegalese passport, has crafted a comedic brand that has resonated around the world by putting so-called life hacks or complicated manoeuvres through the lens of intuitive everyday options.

Google announced its plan to invest $1 billion in Africa
At the first virtual Google for Africa event, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the company’s plan to invest $1billion over five years to support digital transformation in Africa.

The investment focuses on enabling fast, affordable internet access for more Africans; building helpful products; supporting entrepreneurship and small business; and helping nonprofits to improve lives across Africa.

eCommerce giant Amazon stepped up its presence in Africa
For a long while, there have been questions about when Amazon will kick off operations in Africa. Well, Amazon answered that question this year. First, it affirmed its commitment to Egypt by replacing Souq.com as Amazon’s selling platform in the country with Amazon.eg. This announcement also came with the inauguration of an Amazon fulfilment centre in Egypt. There was also the announcement of Amazon’s controversial African headquarters in South Africa.

There was an acquisitions spree across Africa
This year saw a number of companies being acquired, most of them for undisclosed amounts. MainOne, a West African data centre and connectivity solutions provider, was acquired by Equinix for $320 million.

MFS Africa acquired Baxi. MaxAB, an Egyptian B2B marketplace, acquired WaystoCap. Ghanaian fintech startup, Zeepay, acquired 51% of Zambian counterpart Mangwee. Plentywaka acquired Stabus Ghana after $1.2m seed funding. Other notable acquisitions include JIji acquiring Cars45, and Ourpass acquiring Storemia.

The Ethiopian government launched its own mobile money service
In May 2021, Ethio telecom launched its own mobile money service, TeleBirr, to cater for the 115 million people in Africa’s third most populous country. Two months after its launch, TeleBirr reported that it has gained six million users. The new service is expected to make a difference in Ethiopia where the banking system is seen as inefficient, with only 19 commercial banks serving the entire population.

Francophone Africa got its first unicorn in Wave
Wave, a spinoff from Asia- and Africa-focused remittance company Sendwave, raised $200 million in a Series A round to become the first unicorn from the French-speaking region of Africa. Why Wave? The startup’s low-cost transaction service has helped it take on incumbents, eat into their market share, and turn the entire mobile money industry on its head.

Six months and counting: Nigerian Twitter ban
The Nigerian government suspended Twitter’s operations in June, following the social media platform’s decision to delete a tweet by Buhari, which it said breached the site’s rules. The state’s decision to ban Twitter has since then triggered widespread criticism as online-based businesses recorded huge losses; lawsuits; and national assembly hearings meant to probe the circumstances leading to the ban.

Sudanese tech got its first foreign funding in 30 years
alsoug, the largest digital marketplace in Sudan, raised a $5 million investment round co-led by Egyptian fintech unicorn, Fawry, and a “wider consortium of Western venture capital firms”. This investment marked the first foreign venture capital investment into the Sudanese tech ecosystem since international sanctions on the country were lifted in 2020, following a 30-year isolation period.

Somalia got its first Visa card payment service
Visa partnered with the International Bank of Somalia (IBS Bank) to launch Somalia’s first Visa card payment service. This came six years after Mastercard became the first international payment network to enter the Somalia market. This partnership is an important indicator that Somalia, a country that had no formal banking or financial system since the collapse of its government in 1991, has been making serious headway towards reawakening the pulse of its financial entities.

Ethiopia awarded its first telecom license
In May, Ethiopia awarded its first telecom licence to a consortium made up of Vodafone, Nairobi-based Safaricom Ltd, CDC Group Plc, and Sumitomo Corp. The next month, Ethiopia launched a tendering process for the proposed sell-off of a 40% stake in the state-owned Ethio Telecom to private investors. These actions are all parts of the government’s broader plan to open up the economy.

Twitter opened its first Africa office in Ghana
In April 2021 social media giant Twitter announced Ghana as its choice for an African headquarters. The move came as a surprise to some who expected it to be Nigeria, a country with more Twitter users and a larger population overall. Twitter cleared the air by stating that its reasons for choosing Ghana were because the country was a “supporter of free speech, online freedom, and the Open Internet”.

The continent produced a record number of new unicorns in a year
There are a total of eight tech unicorns in Africa right now, with five of them—Flutterwave, Andela, ChipperCash, Wave, and Opay—attaining this status in 2021. Notably, fintech is having its moment as the majority of the unicorns are fintechs. The other companies that attained unicorn status before this year are Interswitch, Jumia, and Fawry.

That’s all for 2021! What events did we miss out on, and what first-time surprises do you think await us in 2022?

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This article was first published in TechCabal Daily and has been slightly altered.

Nigeria’s National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA) has teamed up with Gricd—a cold chain technology company—to use the Internet of Things (IoT) to deliver 4.2 million doses of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to all 36 states of the country and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja.

This news comes on the heels of last month’s announcement when the West African country was reported to have lost about 1 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. According to a spokesperson for the World Health Organization (WHO), the doses were lost due to their short shelf life—about four-to-six weeks—and Nigeria’s lack of adequate storage facilities.

Vaccine storage or wastage, however, is a global problem. And as the world struggles to understand the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus—sequestering Africa in the process—it’s becoming increasingly evident just how unvaccinated African countries are, and the factors contributing to the low numbers.

As of October, only 7.5% of the continent’s population has been fully vaccinated against COVID—a sad figure compared to the EU’s 62% and US’s 55%. While the largest barrier to vaccination in Africa is the purchasing power of most countries, another is the lack of storage and delivery infrastructure.

Over the course of the year, countries like Malawi, Congo, and South Sudan destroyed thousands of COVID vaccine doses because they couldn’t store them properly or deliver them before their expiry dates. Across Europe, some countries, including Germany and Switzerland have also struggled with administering the vaccine before their expiry dates, with France reportedly destroying 25% of the AstraZeneca and 20% of the Moderna vaccines in April.

Vaccines are temperature-sensitive and must be kept below certain levels in order to maximise their shelf life. Every year, WHO estimates that 50% of vaccines worldwide are wasted because of inefficient cold storage and cold chain management, and in Africa, the percentage could be higher since about 60% of the population live in rural areas with limited infrastructure.

There are, however, companies that use tech to aid the storage process and Gricd is one. Gricd is a cold chain technology company that provides IoT solutions to enable last-mile delivery of temperature-sensitive products such as vaccines, insulin, and food. Gricd helps reduce this number through a number of ways including automated real-time monitoring of temperature and data logging during storage, transit and distribution of temperature-sensitive products. The company does this using MOTE, a data logger that transmits information about location, humidity, and temperature in real-time.

The MOTE comes with a built-in GSM antenna to track its location and can last up to 30 days on a single charge. It can be monitored and controlled from anywhere in the world with a mobile phone. Alerts can also be sent via SMS, email, or push notification to relevant parties to inform them and advise on the best next step if the tracked product deviates from their intended route or exceeds the preset temperature range.

With Gricd’s MOTE, Nigeria’s NPHCDA tracked its latest batch of dosages—about 4.2 million doses of Moderna donated by USAID through the COVAX scheme—across all its 36 states and the FCT. NPHCDA also had access to Gricd’s enterprise monitoring dashboard which enabled it to track all the devices in one place, ensuring the vaccines arrived where and as they were intended.

The vaccines required storage conditions between -15 degrees and -25 degrees and the NPHCDA, using MOTE, was able to monitor the temperature levels. All vaccines were safely delivered and no cases of ineffectiveness were recorded, claimed the NPHCDA.

Commenting on the partnership, Oghenetega Iortim, CEO and co-founder of Gricd, said, “With 36 states and a landmass of more than 900,000 square kilometres to cover, the NPHDCA had its work cut out for it to ensure that the vaccines got to each state in the best condition. There is still a lot of work to be done to protect Nigeria from COVID-19, but we are glad to have been able to support the governments’ efforts to ensure that more Nigerians have access to critical vaccines. Many African countries have peculiar challenges that often limit access to vaccines and other life-saving medications, and we need to continue to innovate around these challenges to secure lives and livelihoods.”

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Six years after TeamApt, a little-known banking software development company, had launched, it stirred excitement after Bloomberg reported the startup’s move to raise $150 million at a billion-dollar valuation—which would elevate it to the coveted unicorn status. TeamApt’s co-founders had bootstrapped the company from a four-man team in their flat in 1004 Estate to building products, MoneyTor and AptPay, which serviced virtually all the commercial banks in Nigeria. TeamApt followed the growth with a $5.5 million Series A round by 2019.

However, it was Moniepoint, the product it launched next, that skyrocketed the company to near-unicorn status.

According to the World Bank, Nigeria had 4.3 bank branches per 100,000 people in 2018, thereby leaving many of its 200 million population either unserved or underserved. Moniepoint provides payment, withdrawal, and deposit services to these underbanked users through an army of agents mostly in mom-and-pop stores across the country. In 2019, when OPay announced a total of $170 million in fundraising from two rounds and marched thousands of point-of-sale (POS) terminal-wielding footmen across the country to convert agents and successfully grow agency banking in the country, Moniepoint launched that September after a beta-testing phase, with about 1,000 agents.

“We didn’t have money then, so we were taking terminals from banks and manually sending them to agents, individually, in other parts of the country. That was so base and hectic,” says Tolu Adetuyi, Moniepoint Head of Growth.

After the $5.5 million raise, TeamApt had cash in the bank to place orders for terminals in China and invaded the Nigerian market. Now it processes over $4 billion monthly, servicing 18 million unique customers, and has over 120,000 active merchants in almost all of Nigeria’s 774 local government areas (LGAs)—only the terror-prone LGAs in the country’s northern regions are left out. A regulator report seen by TechCabal back in June capturing transaction volumes by super agents showed TeamApt recorded an agent transaction volume of roughly 50 million, which accounted for 75% of total agent volumes collated for the month reported. Although, an industry analyst under anonymity told TechCabal that he doubts OPay’s numbers were captured in the report.

TeamApt anticipates unicorn bells on the back of $16bn agent banking blitz
So how did TeamApt become this super agent?

“Back then, our fee was only 1% of each transaction, which was high, but that was what we could afford, but we obsessed about our agents and offered them unmatched user experience,” Adetuyi explained.

Tolu Adetuyi, as growth lead, along with 40 other support staff, oversee a massive network of agents engaged through Whatsapp groups dedicated to each LGA in Nigeria and a few other separate high-level Whatsapp groups of LGA agent leaders also called cluster managers, state managers, and regional managers. These performing agents-turned-managers are responsible for increasing and engaging the agents in their communities in order to increase their commission.

“My phone is always buzzing, and I’m attending town hall meetings. That’s like, the whole of my work. I know what’s happening on the streets right from my room,” Adetuyi tells me excitedly via a Google Meet call.

TeamApt’s strong feedback loop facilitates rich market intelligence which enabled the company successively introduce groundbreaking features to the market which some competitors adopted and eventually became industry standards.

Mrs Ogunleye, an agent in the Alimosho local government area of Lagos, runs a grocery store and owns three POS terminals. “I started using Moniepoint because of their daily commission settlement while others were paying monthly,” she tells TechCabal.

Sources at TeamApt credit Moniepoint’s early success and breakthrough growth to this payment feature. “Many of these agents are like petty traders who need their daily earnings for restocking and running their households. I study my agents. I literally have documents on agent motivation,” Adetuyi shares.

MoniePoint also provides agents with live analytics dashboards to see a detailed breakdown of their performance and earnings. This transparency enables agent trust in the commission given and drives them to improve their performance as opposed to opaque estimated monthly earnings.

TeamApt deploys an interesting active POS terminal performance management system for its merchants. For example, for every 10 terminals given, a certain number must be doing transaction values exceeding a fixed amount. The figure is determined by the area and market trend. This drives cluster managers to identify and recruit the best agents and engage them daily to improve their performance.

“We don’t really want merchants who use our terminals only when they need to make quick money. We want active agents who use them daily. We try to prevent what they call bozo explosion, where we bring in lots of agents but are not able to service the 20% that’s going to give you most of your revenue, then you end up losing them,” Solomon Amadi, Vice President at TeamApt, tells TechCabal.

TeamApt’s agent network is a vibrant talent ecosystem that allows enterprising agents to grow through the rank. Merchant agents can become cluster managers at LG level, grow into state managers, and finally regional heads, while increasing their earnings along the way.

“It’s like a talent war. Competitors are calling and trying to poach our cluster managers, so much so that we know the name of some of the employees calling them because our cluster managers tell us. That’s why we sign exclusive contracts with some of these managers,” Amadi disclosed.

The talent grab, though, goes both ways. TeamApt also tries to convert performing agents on other platforms.

To improve the reliability of its product, TeamApt introduced to the market a 24-hour resolution service for false debit card withdrawals. Usually, it takes 8 days after physically visiting a bank branch to resolve an unsuccessful card withdrawal where the customer’s account got debited. But TeamApt funds customers from its account once it can verify the transaction and later sorts out the reconciliation at the back end with the bank.

“The solutions we introduced to the market seem commonplace but many of them weren’t being done till we did. In Nigeria, we just like to copy and paste models without thinking to adapt them to our peculiarities. But, first principles thinking has really helped us in how we approach problems and come up with the solutions we have introduced,” Adetuyi concludes.

“First principles thinking” is a phrase I heard often while interviewing management executives at TeamApt. It’s a problem-solving thought process of attacking problems by first identifying the fundamental issues. It was first taught by Aristotle and currently made popular by South African-born physics engineering genius, Elon Musk. Tosin Eniolorunda, founder and CEO of TeamApt, champions the thought process and is instilling it into the company culture.

Nigeria's TeamApt eyeing unicorn status with planned $150m Series C funding
“When we hit a roadblock while thinking up a solution, Felix (TeamApt CTO) would often say, okay, let’s go back, let’s go back,” Eniolorunda tells me as he rolls his wrist backwards. He shares that his exposure to first principles philosophy came in stages. The first time was in his 100 level at Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) as a mechanical engineering student.

“I got into OAU on merit, first try. So, I was feeling fly with myself. But I now failed in my first year. My CGPA was 3.3,” he shares in-between laughs. “That was a major learning experience for me. I learnt the power of focus. Secondly, it sparked a new way of thinking because adversity changes us. I questioned myself on why I want excellence and I began to think of how to get there.”

Tosin, the first born of a building contractor father and primary teacher mother, worked and paid his way through tertiary school and graduated with a second class upper in mechanical engineering. He had always wanted to be an entrepreneur and build “something massive”. With TeamApt seemingly to be crowned with unicorn status, the company now has its eyes on digital banking but with a slant. “There’s a me too movement in tech. Everyone is launching digital banking with different offerings. But the fundamental question is, what do customers really need? Zero cost transaction accounts? That’s good, but I think credit is one of the key needs. So, we will be launching a hybrid credit-led banking solution that also caters to the offline market,” Eniolorunda concludes.

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As far back as 2005, Kola Aina knew he wanted to invest in companies. He even registered a company name after his MBA program—one which he’s too embarrassed to share and ended up not using. After a number of rejections, unreplied messages, and bootstrapping his first business, Kola Aina launched Ventures Platform, an early-stage pan-African VC firm, in 2016.

Today, Ventures Platform, announced a $40m fund for African tech startups. The new fund which has reached the first close is being led by the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA).

The fund features participation from experienced investors and some new leading names in Africa’s technology and corporate ecosystem,, including UAC Nigeria, VFD Group, Gbenga Oyebode, Paystack CEO Shola Akinlade, as well as global investors like Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel, and Adam Draper. A sizable portion of the fund comes from local partners, Ventures Platform told TechCabal.

Since its launch in 2016, Ventures Platform has backed almost 70 startups including Seamless HR, PiggyVest, Mono, and Paystack—which Stripe acquired in October 2020 for over $200m.

This new fund will allow Ventures Platform to significantly deepen its long-standing presence in Nigeria and West Africa while also investing in select companies in East, North and Francophone Africa that are able to expand across the continent.

“Prior to this fund, we could only write one cheque, then introduce the entrepreneur to our network of investors for a follow-on round. Now we’re not only able to write their first cheque but also write follow-on rounds for our companies,” Kola Aina, founder and General Partner at Ventures Platform, told TechCabal.

This new capital injection will enable Ventures Platform to double down on existing investments in its category-leading portfolio via subsequent rounds. Aina believes that being able to double down on existing investments means they can assure startups that they have a long-term capital partner. It also helps Ventures Platform defend their ownership stake in the companies, as they can participate in the upside they helped build, which is important from a returns perspective.

As part of a move to further deepen its expertise, Ventures Platform has also onboarded leading figures across African tech as Venture Partners, including Seni Sulyman (ex-VP at Andela, founder at Black Ops.)

“We’re very bullish about the market; it’s about the entrepreneur first. Across our portfolio, we now have two companies whose entrepreneurs we’ve funded twice. We funded their first project, it didn’t work; we’ve funded them again,” Aina said.

Aina has a heart for entrepreneurs as he’d been one before becoming an investor.

Fascinated by the power of capital

“I was just always fascinated by the power of capital. I always wanted to end up being an investor, even when it wasn’t popular.”

What attracted Aina to investing? It was the notion of giving people money and seeing them build something meaningful with it.

In 2009, Aina moved back from the US to Nigeria and co-founded Emerging Platforms, a software company. Initially, they had some customers willing to pay, but the business needed funding. They tried to raise funds but faced rejection at every corner.

“We wrote a letter to every bank in Nigeria, got introductions but everyone said no. So, we went back to the drawing board and bootstrapped the business.”

The harrowing experience of fundraising stayed with Aina and ignited the desire to change how people got access to capital in Africa.

Making new mistakes

Fortunately, the bootstrapped business thrived and Aina started angel investing in 2014. Two years later, he had an epiphany that waiting for the government and donors to solve society’s problems was pointless. A better alternative was to find and fund young people using technology to solve these problems.

Inspired by Silicon Valley-esque accelerators, Ventures Platform was born in 2016. The initial approach was to get the best entrepreneurs from across Africa to fly into a campus in Abuja for a 16-week acceleration program. They were paired with investors, team members, capital, and mentors.

“Obviously everyone told us acceleration is too difficult to do in Africa, but we told them we’ll make new mistakes.”

While making new mistakes, they also got a few things right. One of the things Ventures Platform did then that was pioneering and different was that it was fully transparent with its terms of investing in startups. It offered $20,000 for 10% equity.

“At that time it was one of the fairer deals out there,” Aina said.

This transparency helped ventures attract talents like Kayode Oyewole, partner at Ventures Platform and Fola Olatunji-David, who later left the firm to become Head of Startup Success and Service at Google. Aina also believes that sharing the firm’s manifesto helped move the market forward in setting the terms of evaluation for pre-seed companies in Africa.

Alongside the accelerator, Aina continued investing and got to invest in startups like Paystack, Kudi, Kangbe (now Reliance HMO), Printivo and Tizeti.

After the first year, Aina and his team saw that the accelerator wasn’t ideal for the continent, so they pivoted to an early-stage fund model.

“With people living together on campus, you’re not just investing and helping people scale their businesses, you’re also dealing with personalities. It was almost like the Big Brother House but for investing.”

Notably, the initial capital used to run the accelerator and invest in startups was Aina’s personal funds. He had to have a conversation with his wife telling her that he needed to raid their savings to support startups.

“We did over a million dollars in investments in the early days. But, in retrospect, that was a smart decision because it helped us show a track record.“

By late 2017, Ventures Platform started raising external capital: syndicate funds. This happened because people who were impressed with the performance of the firm’s portfolio companies wanted to invest in Ventures Platform.

The syndicate style investments continued until mid last year when Aina felt it was time for Ventures Platform to start working on raising its first institutional fund.

Why did he wait this long to raise an institutional fund?

“I wanted to see evidence that there’s liquidity in this market before I raised an institutional fund. Startups are not just about inspiration or motivational talk. It’s real business. Startup founders sometimes forget that I have to return money to my investors.”

Why $40m matters

2021 has been a record year for African startups as they’ve raised over $4 billion so far. It’s easy to see $40m, in an era where $100m raises are the new normal and wonder “What difference does $40m make?”

Aina believes that while the increase in capital inflow is important, the venture capital space needs to be seen as a continuum. For him, Venture Platforms’ role is to find companies early and support them along the way as they gain product-market fit and look to scale.

“There was a period when a company raising $500,000 was huge. Five years ago, you could count the number of local funds in the market. I think it’s day one for this fund. We must not get ahead of ourselves. We want to stay disciplined. We’re very clear about our thesis and are staying grounded to it.”

Source: https://techcabal.com/2021/12/16/ventures-platform-40m-fund-seni-sulyman-venture-partner/?utm_source=nairaland_reshare&utm_medium=referral&utm_id=nairaland.161221

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The digital age has seen people try to imitate reality online. A result of this trend is that people are buying the online versions of what they would normally buy in real life: luxury houses, dresses, and even land. For example, this year saw the purchase of the world’s first digital home, sold for over $500,000 on the NFT market. Instead of physical artworks, people now buy Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), digital assets whose ownerships are recorded on the blockchain.

Digital fashion allows designers to model their designs in pixels instead of silk, cotton, lace, or polyester. Digital fashion can be in the form of digital fashion conceived to produce physical garments or fashion that a person can wear only with augmented or virtual reality. Or it can be fashion that is sold directly to an avatar.

Powered by blockchain and NFTs, the digital fashion world is steadily growing. This growth is marked by the emergence of fashion houses like The Fabricant, which creates digital-only fashion; and RTFKT, a company that specialises in making digital sneakers that can be used and traded in virtual spaces as NFTs. In what represents a landmark moment in digital fashion, The Fabricant sold the world’s first digital-only dress, ”Iridescence”, for $9,500 to a Canadian, Rachel Ma.

The coronavirus pandemic forced designers to rethink and seek a digital option to showcase their collections, leading to the creation of hyper-real digital showrooms around the world.

A product of digital fashion, hyper-real fashion, is used to explain the use of tech to virtually showcase fashion products. By removing the need for humans to physically examine fashion products, hyper-real fashion tech continues to blur the lines of a prominent human physical experience: shopping.

This has also led to the development of Obsess, an experiential e-commerce platform, that uses 3D to create 360-degree virtual stores. Their portfolio includes brands such as Tommy Hilfiger, Dior, and Charlotte Tilbury. “Virtual stores can be created completely digitally and don’t have to exist in real life. Brands use this option to create super engaging experiences for their customers,” says Neha Singh, Obsess’s founder and CEO, in an interview with Vogue India earlier this year.

Positioning for “meta fashion”

The metaverse is the use of the combination of technology like virtual reality, augmented reality, and video to create a digital world. The metaverse, unlike the way we currently access the internet, is immersive.

Some of the earliest collaborations between the metaverse and fashion industry can be seen in games. There is Burberry’s first-of-its-kind NFT collection with Mythical Games’ Blankos Block Party, Gucci’s Garden Metaverse with Roblox and their Aria Collection Film at Christie’s, and Louis Vuitton’s “Louis The Game” NFT in celebration of the 200th anniversary of the French house’s founding.

While it is evident that the metaverse will enjoy massive investments from the fashion industry, the gaming industry is not left behind. Collaboration between the fashion and gaming industry in the metaverse presents a huge economic opportunity. Some notable collaborations in recent times include Balenciaga and Fortnite working together to design accessories and skins, Burberry partnering with Tencent to create exclusively designed skins for Honor of Kings characters.

The fashion industry is investing in the metaverse to create the branding of the future. While the metaverse is still new and building around it is still ongoing, its building blocks—fashion avatars, digitally designed spaces, exotic pets in games—are not entirely foreign.

In an attempt to tap into the trend of combining fashion and the digital world, Delz Erinle, a product and UX designer and Niyi Okeowo, an art director, started Thrill Digital, a company that started as a virtual fashion showcase and now pioneers a fashion metaverse. Thrill Digital uses a combination of Web3 technologies like XR (AR/VR), video, audio, crypto, and gaming to create its own fashion metaverse and other unreleased digital products.

During the pandemic last year, Erinle saw how difficult it was to shop. So, he decided to bring in Lead Developer and Chief Technical Officer (CTO), Luke Jeffers, to use 3D to create a VR shopping product, to make shopping more accessible and effortless for an audience that was stuck at home.

Pivoting from creating the initial idea of a fashion show, Thrill started working on a VR shopping product. Thrill Digital pitched a lot of investors and won Epic Game’s MegaGrant worth $40,000 in January this year to create the VR shopping product. They eventually delivered the product during Lone Design Club fashion week in February.

After that, Erinle carried out research in a mall in London where he asked people if they would play a game to win luxury prizes. The feedback they got from people was affirmative. “We didn’t set out to create a metaverse project initially. It was like a virtual shopping experience, first, ” Erinle said.

This was how Thrill Digital started Astra, a fashion crypto game where players can win real-life fashion luxury items. The game would have its own crypto token, which must be connected to a crypto wallet like the popular crypto game, Axie Infinity. The game will be open on December 20 and users can play to win a Balenciaga Small Hourglass Tote Bag. When players win a luxury item on Astra, it would be delivered to them wherever they are in the world.

Erinle, who doesn’t believe a fully fleshed metaverse has been created yet, explained the metaverse as “a collection of interoperable virtual worlds which people can experience using an avatar. The metaverse is a virtual 3D environment where people can interact but this time with phones; it is an immersive experience.”

Lead 3D designer, Charles Egbejule, believes daring to dream they can build a mini metaverse out of Africa was one of the biggest challenges they had to face. While lead VR architect, Adekunbi Ajai, believes building remotely from different parts of the world also poses a challenge for the team. But they were able to adapt and can now easily communicate, she added.

For the team’s brand designer and co-founder, Niyi Okeowo, one difficulty they faced was raising awareness on a new concept like digital fashion. “We were trying to sell the product while teaching people about it.”

The audience that Astra is targeting is people who love fashion, people who use crypto, and people who love games—or people who love all three.

So here is how the game works: players amass as many crypto tokens as they can within an allotted time, after which a leaderboard is created where winners will be declared and win luxury fashion.

Jeffers explained that NFTs would play a huge role in claiming ownership of clothing accessories and land in Astra.

Erinle explained that it chose to build its metaverse on the Solana blockchain because of its low gas fees and low energy consumption. Citing a report that says transactions on the Solana blockchain consume less energy than two Google searches, Astra believes it is contributing to the reduction of environmental sustainability issues.

The game will be available first on PC before VR headsets and, hopefully, mobile devices.

Tapping into the play-to-earn trend

Like the play-to-earn crypto game, Axie Infinity, Astra will make money through protocol profits too. Revenue is generated via fees for interacting with a protocol—a game’s unique crypto token.

Axie Infinity made huge profits using a similar approach this year. The leading crypto game has raked in $84.9 million in funds, making its protocol profit one of the biggest in the market. In the case of Axie Infinity, whenever a player sells one of the Axie creatures, he pays a 4.25% marketplace fee. He does this when he sells land or special items. Another way Axie makes money is through the fee of 4 AXS, the game’s native token for “breeding” more digital creatures called Axies.

Source: https://techcabal.com/2021/12/16/want-luxury-fashion-play-africas-first-metaverse-crypto-game/?utm_source=nairaland_reshare&utm_medium=referral&utm_id=nairaland.161221

Read more crypto/nft related stories here: https://techcabal.com/category/cryptocurrency/?utm_source=nairaland_reshare&utm_medium=referral&utm_id=nairaland.161221

The Nigeria Startup Bill (NSB) is a step closer to getting enacted into law as it has now been approved by the Federal Executive Council (FEC). The approval was made on December 15, and now, the Presidency will submit the bill to the National Assembly for consideration.

The NSB aims to create an enabling environment for Nigerian startups to thrive.The three major challenges that the bill is looking to tackle are the lack of an enabling environment, unclear regulatory framework, and inadequate local content support. The bill proposes measures to ensure that these issues are addressed. For example, there will be protection and incentives, like tax breaks and access to an exclusive list of public and private-led funding opportunities, for local entrepreneurs. There will also be incentives to attract local and foreign investors to the Nigerian startup community.

Although Nigeria has the highest number of startups on the continent—about 750—and holds the total highest YoY raises, it ranks below countries like South Africa, Kenya, and Tunisia in terms of business friendliness. With bans on cryptocurrency trading, and clampdowns on online investment, trading, and even social media, Nigeria’s startup scene has been rocked by a few disruptive regulatory announcements in recent years.

The bill is the result of a collaborative effort between the Presidency, the Federal Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy, the Nigerian Export and Promotion Council and wider government bodies. The initiative was launched in May of this year by the Presidency, in collaboration with 30 tech leaders, including Ventures Platform founder Kola Aina and Future Africa founder Iyin Aboyeji, officials of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), and the Minister of Digital Economy Isa Pantami. Since then, it has garnered almost 300 volunteers, with private sector players participating, including legal firms like TLP Advisory and Aelex, policy advisors Advocacy for Policy and Innovation (API) and Innovation for Policy Foundation, and media organisations TechCabal and Wimbart. Google Nigeria and the UK overnment, through the West Africa Research and Innovation Hub and the UK-Nigeria Tech Hub, are also backing the bill.

Speaking on recent developments, Oswald Osaretin Guobadia, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Digital Transformation and the NSB Lead said, “The NSB is one among a series of key activities the Presidency is using to drive the building of a more sustainable ecosystem for young people in Nigeria to thrive and scale.”

Kola Aina, Founder and General Partner of Ventures Platform Fund, also added, “The bill is being proposed to provide an enabling environment for the growth of startups and guard against different challenges faced by startups such as seemingly disruptive regulations, lack of regulatory certainty, and weak infrastructure like broadband, open data, and digital platforms that limit the optimisation of the many benefits of the digital economy.”

Source: https://techcabal.com/2021/12/14/1da-bantons-no-wahala-blew-up-on-tik-tok-now-he-knows-its-power/?utm_source=nairaland_reshare&utm_medium=referral&utm_id=nairaland.161221

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A few months ago, Nigerian artiste, 1da Banton, logged into his TikTok account, which he rarely used, only to discover that one of his songs, “No wahala”, from his Original Machine Vibe album, was being used in videos captioned in French. Because he doesn’t understand French, he Google-translated the captions, then smiled at himself.

The Afro dancehall artiste’s song was being used in a TikTok challenge that would take his music straight to the ears of millions of fans around the world. Since the challenge began, “No wahala” has been used as a soundtrack in more than 190,000 videos and was at some point the second most Shazamed song in the world. The song is also charting in over 10 countries, including the UK, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Uganda, and Kenya.

Speaking on the inspiration for the song, on a video call with TechCabal, from his Lagos apartment, 1da Banton said he set out to create a stress-free vibe and connect with people who just wanted to live their lives without worrying.

“When I recorded ‘No Wahala’, that was how I was feeling, so I put it into music. When my producer, Blaise Beats, played the beat for me, the only thing that came to my head was to write a song that talks about a stress-free life, not a love or party song. I just wanted to make music people could relate to; that no matter the situation or circumstance, you just have to live your life. So, I’m glad we achieved that.”

Born and raised in Port-Harcourt, 1da Banton, dropped his debut single in 2015. Since his debut, he has released one EP and collaborated with Ghanaian Afro Dancehall superstar, Stonebwoy.

“No wahala” means no stress in Nigerian pidgin, a language widely spoken in Port Harcourt.

The song is featured in videos of afro-dances; reactions or replies to challenges or questions, sometimes from a loved one or crush. Some of the funniest videos under the challenge feature videos of Nigerian social media influencers, James Brown and Idris Okuneye (popularly known as Bobrisky), dancing, kicking a football, or in the gym.

“My TikTok video on the ‘No Wahala’ challenge gave me my highest views and engagement on TikTok. I didn’t expect it,” said Yewande Daranijo, an aspiring actress whose first viral TikTok video has over 300,000 views through this challenge.

“I jumped on the challenge, and boom it went viral. I was really excited, and I’m glad I joined the challenge,” said Daranijo who joined the app about seven months ago. Before the challenge, Daranijo did not know about 1da Banton, but now she knows him and believes he will get his due now that a lot of people know his song.

1da Banton recalled that at the time his song was blowing up in France, he wasn’t a regular user of Tik Tok and was still finding his way around the app.

“So, ‘No Wahala’ doing so well on TikTok wasn’t me; it was people. I just gave them the song. From now on, it would be a great idea to follow up on TikTok because of the influence it has on music today.”

1da Banton explained that all of his social media—YouTube and Instagram—is growing: “Everyone is trying to check out who sang this amazing song, so all my numbers are going up.”

And as Nigerian artiste CKay did a few weeks ago, 1da Banton created a video on TikTok where he tried to claim ownership of the “No Wahala” sound. He might have been successful with that, but his dance skills in the video were questionable, an assessment he agrees to and laughs about.

“Up until now, a lot of people still don’t know that I am the owner of the song. It’s a gradual process. I just had to make that video as a part of the process. I’m not really a good dancer, but I still had to dance to the song. I needed them to understand that I am the original owner of the song.”

This year alone, TikTok has taken at least three African songs to the global stage, and it is making Africans feel represented. Somali singer Nimco Happy’s song, “Isii Nafta”, became an internet sensation, with celebrities like Cardi B, Trevor Noah, and Bella Hadid using the song in content. More than 100,000 videos have been created using the song. The viral song which switches between Swahili, English, Arabic, and Somali has left many Somalis celebrating the fact that their culture is in the global spotlight.

CKay’s “Love Nwantiti” also took over TikTok for weeks, earlier this year, with more than three million videos created using the song. As of September of this year, it was the most Shazamed song in the world and charting in 160 countries.

TikTok’s impact on music in Africa is growing and proving to be a massive support for artistes who may now create and strengthen the reach of their music beyond the continent, without a bank-breaking marketing campaign.

Source: https://techcabal.com/2021/12/14/1da-bantons-no-wahala-blew-up-on-tik-tok-now-he-knows-its-power/?utm_source=nairaland_reshare&utm_medium=referral&utm_id=nairaland.141221

The year 2021 has set many new standards for Africa’s tech ecosystem. As reporter Alexander Onwukwue states, “It’s the year African startups normalised $100 million rounds.” It’s the year francophone Africa produced its first unicorn, Wave, which raised $200 million at a $1.7 billion valuation.

It’s also the year of mergers and acquisitions, with over 333 M&A deals worth $51 billion done in the first half of the year alone, a 567% increase in deal value from 2020’s $8 billion. Following Stripe’s acquisition of Paystack in a $200 million deal in 2020, quite a number of notable acquisitions have occurred. From Flutterwave’s acquisition of Disha, MaxAB’s acquisition of Morocco’s WaystoCap, and even Piggyvest’s acquisition of Savi, companies in the ecosystem are consolidating to solve some of the continent’s taxing issues.

One of the biggest acquisition deals of 2021 is MFS Africa’s deal with Capricorn. In October, MFS Africa—the largest fintech interoperability hub in Africa—signed a deal to acquire Capricorn Digital, one of Nigeria’s largest digital solutions and distribution companies. While the amount is undisclosed, both parties confirmed that the deal is Nigeria’s “second-largest” fintech acquisition deal, second only to Paystack’s $200 million acquisition deal with Stripe.

But how do hundred-million-dollar deals get made? And why are more startups hitching their wagons together? On December 3, TechCabal brought Dare Okoudjou, MFS Africa CEO, and Degbola Abudu, co-founder of Capricorn together in a live session to answer some of these questions.

Big deals start out small

For Dare Okoudjou—who has led MFS Africa’s growth in 35 African countries—big deals and acquisitions don’t always start out as big deals. “Big deals are done over time, and sometimes, they start off as minority investments talks which evolve into acquisition talks,” he said. “The first time Degbola and I spoke in 2014, Capricorn had just started and we—MFS Africa—we’re trying to help him raise money. Fast forward to 2020, and we’re speaking about acquisitions.”

On Capricorn’s end, Degbola Abudu and his team had been fundraising for a while, and while they weren’t planning on getting acquired, the deal was a realistic next step for them. “Initially, MFS Africa was supposed to be an investor. Conversations for this present deal started even before COVID, and by the end of 2020, when it became clearer, we were more open to it. There were many conversations between myself and Dare, and many more between myself and the Capricorn board.”

While Capricorn’s motivation for taking the deal was geared towards sustainability, MFS Africa’s was targeted at growth and expansion. “MFS has agent networks in 35 SSA countries and the opportunity to merge that with what exists in Nigeria isn’t easily replicated,” Okoudjou said. “We’d been eyeing Nigeria for a while, hoping that the mobile money network would kick-off, but it didn’t. On the other hand, there was Capricorn which had built a strong agent network of 90,000 agents. When we realised that, it was evident what the next steps were.”

Building trust and partnerships

Recognising strategic partnerships is something that can be said of MFS Africa’s earlier acquisitions. Prior to Capricorn, MFS Africa had acquired two other companies. In 2020, the company acquired Beyonic, a Ugandan fintech delivering payment management solutions to SMEs. That deal also started off with several conversations on strategic partnerships between Beyonic’s CEO, Luke Kyouhere.

In 2016, MFS Africa acquired Sochitel—a company that specialised in international airtime transfers into Africa—and the acquisition, according to MFS Africa, helped create the largest transfer payment network which focuses on Africa.

The company has also made six minority investments in companies across the continent including Maviance, Numida, Julaya, and Inclusivity solutions. One crucial thing that has helped these relationships—investments and acquisitions—is trust.

“In considering acquisitions at MFS Africa, we start with our destination, our North star. We want to be in all 54 African countries, and we don’t want borders to matter. You can be in Benin and make transactions with people in Zambia, or in Nigeria. Over time, we’ve calculated what that means, infrastructure and regulation-wise for us. And when we want to invest or acquire a company, we ask ourselves how or if that investment or acquisition will bring us closer to these goals. That’s usually the starting point,” Okoudjou said. “The thing that usually makes or breaks these things is the people. Because, in the end, if you can’t work with the people, it doesn’t matter what the spreadsheets say.”

Abudu also agrees that trust is a necessary ingredient to any big deal. “Other than being realistic, trust was one thing we had to show, and for that to happen, we had to be open on our end. We had to be clear what the acquisition meant for our people and it was important to be open about everything. That’s what startups need to understand. Hiding things won’t help you in the long run, and with trust, you can even work towards solving some of those crucial points together.”

Source: https://techcabal.com/2021/12/13/how-african-startups-can-build-multi-million-dollar-partnerships-and-acquisitions/?utm_source=nairaland_reshare&utm_medium=referral&utm_id=nairaland.131221

Read more like this here: https://techcabal.com/category/funding/?utm_source=nairaland_reshare&utm_medium=referral&utm_id=nairaland.131221

Ever wondered how much data is created every day?

Let me give you a hint. Every day around the world we generate 500 million tweets, 294 billion emails, 4 million gigabytes of Facebook data, 65 billion WhatsApp messages, and 720,000 hours of new content added daily on YouTube.

Now that’s a staggering amount of data. According to a report from market research firm, IDC, humans and computers generated more than 64 zettabytes of data in 2020—that’s the equivalent of 6.4 trillion gigabytes, or simply put, more images or videos than the average person takes in their lifetime.

This massive amount of data produced reflects the growth in people living and working at home recently. It also poses one question: Where is all the data stored? Or, better still, where do you store your data?

The answers to these questions cut across a range of options such as our phones, laptops, external hard drives, and cloud services.

But these options have some shortcomings. Our phones, laptops and external hard drives are vulnerable to data loss risks from viruses and human error. Cloud services require high internet bandwidth to transfer data and are not completely safe as they are susceptible to ransomware attacks.

For many individuals and organisations, the default option is using public cloud storage services like Google Drive, OneDrive or iCloud, among other options, but the limitations associated with them are a source of concern.

Fortunately, these limitations can be mitigated by using network-attached storage (NAS) to store files and other important documents.

Meet Synology’s NAS device

A NAS is an intelligent storage device connected to your home or office network. On this device, you can store all your family and colleagues’ files, from important documents to precious photos, music and video collections. These important documents can then be accessed via a web browser or mobile apps over the internet.

Recently, I got my hands on a NAS device (Synology DS920+) by Synology, a leading provider of NAS appliances. I set up the NAS system at the TechCabal office and explored some of its features.

The look and feel

The Synology DS920+ NAS device is about the size of a UPS device but lighter in weight. The front of the device has four drive trays that house external hard drives. At the back of the device are two fans and other relevant ports to power the device and connect it to the internet. In terms of cost, Synology NAS devices cost from as low as $99 to as high as $2,000, meaning there’s a device that meets your needs and budget.

Setting up the device was easy and straightforward. In connecting the device with my computer system, I got stuck for a while until I realised that my laptop and the NAS device had to be connected to the same internet network for my laptop to discover the NAS device. In all, over the space of 30 mins, I was able to set up and connect my laptop to the NAS device.

The beauty of using the Synology DS920+ is that it offers users higher-level data ownership, data protection and recovery, and comprehensive public cloud-level accessibility.

For anyone storing sensitive information in a cloud-based system, there is fear about who has access to it. Luckily for anyone with such fears, a NAS device will allow efficient cloud-based storage without the possibility of snooping.

“I use a Synology NAS device because of the speed. If I want to send files or backup files, I don’t need to worry about the strength of my internet connection,” a business owner in Lagos who uses Synology told TechCabal.

Considering that internet speed and penetration is still low in many African countries, a NAS device offers the advantage of sending files over a private network at a faster speed. This is ideal for the backup of office documents as consistent data backup is integral to the continuity of a business or institution, especially in the instance where their hard disks sustain a crash. When using the Synology NAS device, it is possible to configure automatic backups which will reflect any changes to documents or folders made locally on a PC.

It’s also possible to monitor your NAS device and access documents from your phone. I tried a couple of apps by Synology that help to do this.

A screenshot from the Active Insight app, a health monitoring solution that supports multiple Synology NAS systems.
To sum it up, investing in a NAS device can be one of the best moves you make, especially if you have a lot of irreplaceable files and folders.

Source: https://techcabal.com/2021/11/25/better-way-to-store-your-files-synology/?utm_source=nairaland_reshare&utm_medium=referral&utm_id=nairaland.131221

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The novelist Rita Mae Brown once said, “Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.” If this is true, what then does an extinct language mean for its people? It means they have no culture, ancestral value, or true identity. As hyperbolic as this may sound, many languages have already gone extinct and more are predicted to join in the coming years.

More than 573 languages are extinct. The National Geographic Society says a language dies every two weeks, ceasing to be actively spoken. In Africa alone, at least 52 known languages have experienced either linguicide—the death of a language due to natural or political reasons—or glottophagy, which happens when a smaller language is absorbed in or replaced by a major language.

In another disturbing report, UNESCO data indicates that if no efforts are made to conserve them, half of the languages currently spoken today will be extinct by the end of the 21st century. How can this be avoided, especially for African languages? Some young Africans living and schooling in America are taking the lead in answering this question through their startup called Mandla, an app that helps people learn African languages.

Mandla, a Zulu and Xhosa word that means power, is an innovative e-learning language app created for those who seek to strengthen their connection with their African roots. The app combines education with gamification to create an enjoyable and effective experience. With the help of predictive AI, Mandla is able to personalise language lessons for all of its users.

How it started

During the winter break of last year, Wenitte Apiou, a then freshman student of Electrical Engineering and Mathematics at the Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, shared the idea to build Mandla in a text to Boluwaji Odufuwa, another freshman studying Computer Science at Harvard University.

Apiou was born in Burkina Faso but moved to America when he was five. Odufuwa, on the other hand, was born in Nigeria but also moved to America in his early childhood. Because of their shared struggle with speaking and understanding their native language, Apiou’s idea organically resonated with Odufuwa, and the duo launched into action.

Growing up, Apiou’s family only spoke French—Burkina Faso’s official language—and some English in the household. His parents are from two different ethnic groups: his mother speaks Mòoré, the most spoken indigenous language in Burkina Faso; and his father speaks Kasem, a minority language spoken only by about 100,000 people in southern Burkina Faso and Northern Ghana.

“The only language I’m fluent in besides English is French, which makes it difficult to communicate with some of my older family members who never went to school and were not able to learn French fluently,” Apiou told TechCabal in an interview. “It’s harder being in the United States as well. The only people that can help would have been my parents, and they did not speak those languages in the house.”

Apiou was stuck in-between two foreign languages: French in the house and English everywhere outside the house. This is the reality of many young Africans, especially those who have parents of diverse ethnic backgrounds.

Even though the idea had stuck with him since high school, Apiou couldn’t do much because of school work and time barrier. He had some coding skills and had built two apps in high school, but he didn’t want to start building the app and then drop it. So the winter break and the COVID-19 lockdown availed them the time to solve the problem for themselves and millions of young people in America and across the world.

A diverse team building a diverse product

As the duo built, they realised they needed more diverse hands. After all, Africa has 54 countries and over 3,000 tribes. Building a diverse solution should involve a diverse team, they thought. So they sought more hands.

Emeka Ezike, a sophomore Computer Science student at Harvard University, who also originally came from Nigeria, joined as the CTO. Kwesi Afrifa, born and raised in Ghana and an International student studying Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), joined to lead the web platform effort. Delanyo Mensah, a sophomore student of Human and Organisational Development at Vanderbilt University, originally from Ghana, joined to lead Mandla’s growth and marketing team.

“We brought a number of smart young Africans to join in the effort—a few engineers and Delanyo, who’s passionately pushing our growth, especially on TikTok where a bunch of our audience are,” said Apiou.

Today, Mandla has grown into a 10-man core team. The startup also accepts volunteers that can help create learning content around the languages currently on its platform and upcoming ones.

Growth and challenges

Mandla currently has more than 15 languages including Nigeria’s Yoruba and Igbo; Ghana’s Twi; Ethiopian’s Amharic; and East Africa’s Swahili on its platform. According to Apiou, the plan is to continue adding more languages until they’ve covered a large extent of African cultures.

As young founders, the natural thing is to find a way to scale on social media, and that’s what the team has done; they are creating captivating content on social media, especially TikTok, which now houses over a billion users.

The app is currently growing organically and, according to Apiou, has 5,000 registered users, pegged at about 50 signups per day and about three to 400 daily active users.

The team thinks it’s time to scale their technology and build a more powerful marketing strategy, from organic to paid. But the problem is funding. Apiou said they’ve reached out to hundreds of investors to no avail.

But why no funding yet?

Apiou stated a number of reasons for this. One is “being a black college student. In the United States, there aren’t very many people looking to fund someone who has an unproven track record,” he said, agreeing to his lack of experience as a major barrier. “Second is the domain, edtech. While there is a lot of VC interest in it, it’s relatively new because many people don’t see a path to profitability, or huge billion-dollar success for edtech companies,” Apiou said.

This statement may not be completely correct, however, as there are a couple of unicorn edtech companies, like Udemy and Coursera, and even Duolingo, which is one of the startup’s competitors.

The third Apiou raised is about niche: their product focuses on Africa and African languages and culture. He narrated their experience when they went to college pitch competitions. “We have not won a single pitch competition, despite the fact that—and I mean no disrespect to the other teams—our product has a more natural need and significant traction than some of the teams that beat us out.”

However, they have gotten some support from Angel Onuoha, a graduate of Harvard University, ex-Googler, and a serial entrepreneur who’s somewhat popular for his bullish tweets on African tech.

The team believes that with more funding, they could build more tech stacks, hire more talent, and go full-frontal on their marketing efforts and then compete on a larger scale.

Unlike other language learning apps that are including African languages just to check a diversity-and-inclusion box, Mandla’s mission is deeper than educational or entertainment purposes; it’s really about cultural preservation.

“And what better way to preserve a culture than to preserve its language?” Apiou asked with the signatory laughter he had kept throughout the call.

Source: https://techcabal.com/2021/12/09/mandla-wants-to-preserve-the-continents-culture/?utm_source=nairaland_reshare&utm_medium=referral&utm_id=nairaland.131221

Read more interesting African tech stories here: https://techcabal.com/category/features/?utm_source=nairaland_reshare&utm_medium=referral&utm_id=nairaland.131221

Nigeria’s National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA) has teamed up with Gricd—a cold chain technology company—to use the Internet of Things (IoT) to deliver 4.2 million doses of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to all 36 states of the country and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja.

This news comes on the heels of last month’s announcement when the West African country was reported to have lost about 1 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. According to a spokesperson for the World Health Organization (WHO), the doses were lost due to their short shelf life—about four-to-six weeks—and Nigeria’s lack of adequate storage facilities.

Vaccine storage or wastage, however, is a global problem. And as the world struggles to understand the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus—sequestering Africa in the process—it’s becoming increasingly evident just how unvaccinated African countries are, and the factors contributing to the low numbers.

As of October, only 7.5% of the continent’s population has been fully vaccinated against COVID—a sad figure compared to the EU’s 62% and US’s 55%. While the largest barrier to vaccination in Africa is the purchasing power of most countries, another is the lack of storage and delivery infrastructure.

Over the course of the year, countries like Malawi, Congo, and South Sudan destroyed thousands of COVID vaccine doses because they couldn’t store them properly or deliver them before their expiry dates. Across Europe, some countries, including Germany and Switzerland have also struggled with administering the vaccine before their expiry dates, with France reportedly destroying 25% of the AstraZeneca and 20% of the Moderna vaccines in April.

Vaccines are temperature-sensitive and must be kept below certain levels in order to maximise their shelf life. Every year, WHO estimates that 50% of vaccines worldwide are wasted because of inefficient cold storage and cold chain management, and in Africa, the percentage could be higher since about 60% of the population live in rural areas with limited infrastructure.

There are, however, companies that use tech to aid the storage process and Gricd is one. Gricd is a cold chain technology company that provides IoT solutions to enable last-mile delivery of temperature-sensitive products such as vaccines, insulin, and food. Gricd helps reduce this number through a number of ways including automated real-time monitoring of temperature and data logging during storage, transit and distribution of temperature-sensitive products. The company does this using MOTE, a data logger that transmits information about location, humidity, and temperature in real-time.

The MOTE comes with a built-in GSM antenna to track its location and can last up to 30 days on a single charge. It can be monitored and controlled from anywhere in the world with a mobile phone. Alerts can also be sent via SMS, email, or push notification to relevant parties to inform them and advise on the best next step if the tracked product deviates from their intended route or exceeds the preset temperature range.

With Gricd’s MOTE, Nigeria’s NPHCDA tracked its latest batch of dosages—about 4.2 million doses of Moderna donated by USAID through the COVAX scheme—across all its 36 states and the FCT. NPHCDA also had access to Gricd’s enterprise monitoring dashboard which enabled it to track all the devices in one place, ensuring the vaccines arrived where and as they were intended.

The vaccines required storage conditions between -15 degrees and -25 degrees and the NPHCDA, using MOTE, was able to monitor the temperature levels. All vaccines were safely delivered and no cases of ineffectiveness were recorded, claimed the NPHCDA.

Commenting on the partnership, Oghenetega Iortim, CEO and co-founder of Gricd, said, “With 36 states and a landmass of more than 900,000 square kilometres to cover, the NPHDCA had its work cut out for it to ensure that the vaccines got to each state in the best condition. There is still a lot of work to be done to protect Nigeria from COVID-19, but we are glad to have been able to support the governments’ efforts to ensure that more Nigerians have access to critical vaccines. Many African countries have peculiar challenges that often limit access to vaccines and other life-saving medications, and we need to continue to innovate around these challenges to secure lives and livelihoods.”

Source: https://techcabal.com/2021/12/09/nigeria-partners-with-gricd-to-save-vaccines/?utm_source=nairaland_reshare&utm_medium=referral&utm_id=nairaland.131221

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Electric cars and shared mobility concepts are starting to disrupt Africa’s taxi industry. Just a few years after cab-hailing apps upended the market and made city transportation cheaper and safer, they’re now about to get greener.

Kenya takes the lead in e-mobility

Last month, Nopea Ride, Kenya’s electric taxi fleet service, opened a new EV charging hub at Village Market in the capital Nairobi, underpinning the growing demand for electric mobility in the East African state.

In January, the Finnish electric cab firm had announced it planned to triple its fleet in Nairobi, helping reduce emissions from the populous city’s notorious traffic. EkoRent, the parent company of Nopea, is planning to have about 1,500 EVs in its ecosystem by the end of 2021.

The electric fleet is giving Nopea a competitive edge over the gasoline vehicles that dominate the market.

“To ensure we not only offer environmentally friendly but also wallet-friendly rides, we benchmark our prices regularly with other similar vehicles (size and quality) in Nairobi,” it says on its website.

Unlike Uber, Bolt and LittleCab, Nopea cars are owned and operated by the company, with the revenues split 75 percent ( to the driver) and 25 percent (to Nopea) on all NopeaRide trips.

Drivers in the company’s ecosystem also don’t pay for electricity at Nopea charging stations.

EkoRent’s other offering, Nopea Xpress, became the first delivery service with a 100 per cent electric vehicle fleet in Africa, allowing sending packets emissions-free.

Cab-hailing services plan e-mobility roll-out in Africa

Signalling the shift from gasoline to EVs is being witnessed Africa-wide, Estonian on-demand transport firm Bolt announced in October that it will roll out electric cabs in South Africa.

It came four months after the firm introduced e-bike food delivery services in that market.

“We are looking to roll out a green taxi category in South Africa in the next few months, and plan to roll out green categories in other African markets,” said Bolt’s regional director for Africa and the Middle East, Paddy Partridge.

Bolt has operations in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Polokwane, Cape Town, Durban, Pietermaritzburg, Port Elizabeth, Knysna, Mossel Bay, George and Plettenberg Bay.

EVs make business sense in Africa, and especially in Kenya where fuel prices are increased arbitrarily.

Taxi drivers and owners of electric or hybrid vehicles enjoy better profit margins and longer mileage per car servicing.

In May 2020, Vaya Africa, a ride-hail mobility venture founded by Zimbabwean mogul Strive Masiyiwa, unveiled an electric cab service and charging network in Zimbabwe, with plans to expand across the continent.

The South Africa-headquartered company acquired a fleet of Nissan Leaf EVs, just as Nopea and Bolt had done and developed its own solar-powered charging stations.

The role ride-sharing services play in lowering carbon emissions

Meanwhile, e-mobility firms are finally introducing cab sharing services – a key element of the business in other markets but until now not available in African markets – to reduce both passenger fares and traffic congestion.

Late last month, Uber launched “Chapchap Share” allowing two people heading in the same direction to board one ride.

“When you share your ride with another rider heading in the same direction, you can save up to 30 per cent on your Chapchap trip. If we can’t find other riders for you to share with – you’ll still save 5 per cent of your regular Chapchap fare,” read an Uber notification in part.

“By sharing and moving more people in fewer cars you’ll also help reduce congestion and lower carbon emissions in your city. Remember, you can only order Chapchap Share if you are travelling by yourself.”

To make sure pick-ups and drop-offs don’t interrupt individual schedules, a passenger will only be matched with up to one rider heading in the same direction as them – and no more than one stop.

Both shouldn’t “arrive more than 5 to 10 minutes later than a regular Chapchap ride so that you can get going with ease” according to Uber.

According to Munich-based international management consultancy firm, Roland Berger, the overall global car market will remain ownership-driven – with owned vehicles accounting for 98 per cent of all vehicles in 2020 and a predicted 96 per cent in 2025 – but a shift is likely to occur in new car sales.

“New sales will shift strongly toward new mobility concepts, representing an expected 13 per cent of new sales in 2020, rising to 20 per cent in 2025,” read its industry report in part.

“We estimate that the number of ride-sharing drivers will grow rapidly between 2020 to 2025, reaching around 57 million. This represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13 per cent.”

Source: https://techcabal.com/2021/11/24/africas-taxi-and-mobility-ecosystem-is-about-to-get-greener/?utm_source=nairaland_reshare&utm_medium=referral&utm_id=nairaland.071221

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MainOne, a West African data centre and connectivity solutions provider with a presence in Nigeria, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire is set to be acquired for $320 million by American multinational Equinix Inc., the US company said in a statement Tuesday.

The all-cash transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of next year, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions including the requisite regulatory approvals.

Founded by Funke Opeke in 2010, MainOne is a key provider of enterprise connectivity solutions, with an estimated 800+ business-to-business customers. These include major international technology enterprises, social media companies, global telecom operators, financial service companies, and cloud service providers.

The company owns and operates an extensive submarine network extending 7,000 kilometers from Portugal to Lagos, Accra, and along the West African coast, with landing stations in Nigeria, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire. These provide connectivity to and from Europe, West African countries, and the major business communities in Nigeria.

MainOne also owns digital infrastructure assets that include three operational data centers, with an additional facility under construction expected to open in Q1 2022. These are in addition to key internet exchanges enabling low latency to key global networks, including Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Facebook.

Under the terms of the agreement, the management team, including CEO Funke Opeke, will continue to serve in their respective roles.

“The MainOne team is excited about the partnership created through the acquisition,” Opeke said in the statement. “With similar values and culture to what we have built in 12 years, Equinix is the preferred partner for our growth journey and will accelerate our long-term vision to grow digital infrastructure investments across Africa.”

For Equinix, a global specialist in data centres and internet connectivity, the deal marks the first step in a long-term strategy to become a leading provider of digital infrastructure in Africa.

Equinix believes MainOne to be one of the most exciting technology businesses to emerge from Africa, making the acquisition a pivotal entry point for the US company into the continent.

“Expansion in Africa has long been a strategic priority for us. With MainOne, we have found a company that not only has highly complementary data center and connectivity assets but can further accelerate the expansion of our business model and growth objectives,” said Eugene Bergen, EMEA President at Equinix.

Given the huge supply gap in digital infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa, Ayobami Omole, a Lagos-based telecom analyst at Tellimer, expects more of such transactions in the coming years. “Deals like the MainOne acquisition will keep drawing foreign investors’ attention to the region,” Omole told TechCabal over the phone.

The UN International Telecommunication Union (ITU) estimates SSA is home to approximately 700 million of the world’s 3.7 billion people without access to the internet. More so, available infrastructure in the region is barely enough for the current internet users.

“With increasing internet traffic, smartphone penetration, and digitisation, we can only expect demand for cloud services and digital infrastructure to increase with foreign players looking to plug that gap,” Omole added.

Globally, Platform Equinix is comprised of 237 data centres across 65 metros and 27 countries, providing data centre and interconnection services for over 10,000 businesses, including more than 50% of Fortune 500 companies. When completed, the acquisition will extend Platform Equinix into West Africa.

“MainOne’s leading interconnection position and experienced management team represent critical assets in our aspirations to be the leading neutral provider of digital infrastructure in Africa,” added Charles Meyers, President and CEO of Equinix.

Source: https://techcabal.com/2021/12/07/funke-opekes-mainone-to-be-acquired-for-320mn-by-u-s-giant-equinix/?utm_source=nairaland_reshare&utm_medium=referral&utm_id=nairaland.061221

Read more stories about Nigerian companies here: https://techcabal.com/category/companies/?utm_source=nairaland_reshare&utm_medium=referral&utm_id=nairaland.061221

Niyi Okeowo was one of the artists that exhibited at Art X’s NFT exhibition project titled, Reloading…, and recently sold his art—“Indigo Child”—for 1.2ETH ($4,140), on the popular NFT marketplace, SuperRare.

But instead of creating individual NFT artworks, he wants to create long-term projects also known as collectibles.

Okeowo explains “Indigo Child” is inspired by children with the ability to harness nature’s power. Citing Black Panther as a point of reference, he says he wanted to depict how these special children go through a rite of passage to create a spiritual binding ceremony with nature and a panther, as seen in the art.

Okeowo has worked as a photographer, 3D artist, visual artist, creative strategist, and an animator for almost a decade. The 30-year-old visual artist, who started designing in 2009, describes himself as an art director—for lack of appropriate words to cover the various strands of his practice in graphic design, 3D art, and photography.

A graduate of Mass Communication from Covenant University, Okeowo learned to design by watching tutorial videos on the internet. He worked as an art director on Apollo, the sophomore album of Nigerian Afro-Life artist, Fireboy DML.

In his designs, Okeowo creates alternative virtual experiences by using 3D, bright colours, music, and socio-political themes—especially around mental health, which is a largely unacknowledged reality in Nigeria.

Beyond music, Okeowo has designed experiences, identities, and visuals for a roster of high-profile clients, including Smirnoff, Uber, and LVMH.

During the pandemic, Okeowo co-founded a company, Thrill Digital, that uses Virtual Reality (VR) and 3D to create digital fashion shows and stores. Thrill Digital brings fashion and shopping experiences to its users’ homes by simulating an experience whereby, using a VR headset or personal computer, users can check out and pick up items. With UX and product designer, Ayodele Erinle, as co-founder, Thrill Digital is tapping into the digital fashion trend.

Okeowo also creates colourful illustrations under the moniker @hellomrcolor and shares them on his various social media accounts.

“I like posting my artworks online to keep me active.”

Stuck on both sides of the NFT coin

Drawn to the lack of middlemen in the NFT space, Okeowo is happy to sell his work and get direct compensation without any interference.

Although Okeowo has made as much as 1.5ETH—about $6,500—from one artwork, he has reservations about the environmental degradation caused by blockchain technology. “I am trying to make sure we’re not part of the problem,” Okeowo said.

He expressed concern about how vulnerable people are because the NFT space is new: “There are a lot of people who don’t know about the space, and that makes them vulnerable to scams.”

Yet, Okeowo appreciates the opportunity blockchain technology presents for artists who have been struggling for years to get funds to complete the projects they have been working on.

Investing in the future of NFTs

With the prices of major NFT arts and projects falling, NFT collectors and artists are shifting their focus to digital collectibles. One of the most popular NFT projects, CryptoPunks, fell from a weekly average of $99,720 in early May to $50,840 at the start of June. The prices of the digital arts on popular NFT marketplace SuperRare have also fallen, on average, from a record $31,778 to $5,342 in a similar time span.

And one of the reasons given for this, according to Gauthier Zuppinger, Chief Operating Officer of Nonfungible, a company that tracks the NFT market, is the sharp drop in the NFT market was a sudden rise and fall in sales of new crypto collectible items called MeeBits — made by the creators of CryptoPunks.

So, instead of selling individual NFT arts, Okeowo is now more interested in NFT projects or collectibles because of their longevity. ”I don’t want to sell artworks on platforms,” Okeowo says, explaining why he prefers collectibles. “I want to create something that keeps evolving.”

Source: https://techcabal.com/2021/12/01/how-a-nigerian-artist-made-over-20k-in-nft-sales-then-lost-his-wallet-to-scammers/?utm_source=nairaland_reshare&utm_medium=referral&utm_id=nairaland.061221

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Nigeria’s biggest telco, MTN Nigeria, has announced that starting from Wednesday, 1 December 2021, retail investors can purchase up to 575 million shares held in MTN Nigeria at ₦169 per share—lower than its share price on the stock market. This public offer is in line with MTN Group’s commitment to reduce its shareholding in MTN Nigeria from 78.8% to 65% over time. MTN listed its Nigerian business two years ago at ₦90 per share, becoming the second-largest stock by market capitalisation; its share price has since grown by about 100%.

Notably, this public offer is primarily digital as the shares can be purchased online. Bolaji Balogun, CEO of Chapel Hill Denham, an investment banking firm leading the public offering, explained this to TechCabal.

“The beauty of it being digital is that a lot more people can participate. The customer experience is a lot better; you can complete your purchase within 3-5 minutes. It also reduces the amount of paper that’s going to be used in printing share certificates,” Balogun said. “In all, we recognise that there are Nigerians who don’t have access to a smartphone or the internet, so they can go into any money deposit bank or a nearby MTN shop/agent to make more inquiries.”

The offer, which is open until Tuesday, 14 December 2021, will provide many Nigerian retail investors with an opportunity to own shares in MTN Nigeria.

The minimum amount of shares that can be bought is 20 units. To encourage people to buy more, the MTN offer includes one bonus share for every 20 purchased, subject to a maximum of 250 free shares per investor—an incentive open to retail investors who hold shares for at least 12 months after allotment.

Balogun added that he believes the digital sales of these shares will increase financial literacy on stocks but also expressed concern that retail investors should be wary of buying from just anyone or platform.

“There are five investment bank/issuing houses mandated to sell: Chapel Hill Denham (the led), Rand Merchant bank, Renaissance Capital, Vertiva, and Stanbic IBTC. In addition to this, all the (about 200) stock broking firms in Nigeria can sell,” he said. “The primary authorised digital platform to buy from is PrimaryOffer, as seen on MTN’s site.”

In addition to these, Fintech platform, Chaka, on Wednesday announced that it’s partnering with Renaissance Capital to give its customers access to this public offering.

It’s important to note that the mobile money agents and MTN shops only provide information on how people can purchase from the aforementioned authorised parties.

In response to this public offering announcement, MTN Nigeria’s share price fell 10% on Wednesday to a five-week low, a logical response as investors rushed to buy the lower-priced MTN public offering shares.

“In my 30 years of issuing shares, I’ve never seen this number of applications in the first few hours,” Balogun said. “People typically wait until the last few days to start buying. It shows that there’s a huge benefit in doing this digitally.”

MTN disclosed that if the 575 million ordinary shares are oversubscribed before the closing date, another 15%, which translates to 86 million more shares, would be offered to the public.

Source: https://techcabal.com/2021/12/02/mtn-nigeria-digital-public-offer/?utm_source=nairaland_reshare&utm_medium=referral&utm_id=nairaland.061221

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In Nigeria, insufficient purchasing power among middle-class citizens, coupled with limited or no access to vehicle financing, puts car purchases out of reach for over 90% of the population. Also, most taxis and public transport buses in Nigerian cities are leased by drivers, who have to deliver rental fees to the owners periodically.

That means ride-hailing companies such as Uber and Bolt that launch in Nigeria are likely to face a shortage of driver-partners, especially if they’re looking to cover all of the country’s major cities.

Earlier this year, Bolt launched a vehicle financing programme that offered drivers a flexible plan through which they could purchase their own vehicles. The scheme allows drivers to own a car or motorbike with low equity repayment for about four years and no interest.

“As we expand our presence into more cities across the country, it is important to provide solutions that ensure working with Bolt is more flexible and profitable for drivers,” Bolt’s Country Manager, Femi Akin-Laguda, said at the time.

After a pilot phase, which Akin-Laguda tells TechCabal “enjoyed great success”, the company has now partnered with Metro Africa Xpress (MAX), a Nigerian mobility company with a fintech play, to expand the program in the country.

MAX originally started out as a motorcycle-based operator for delivery services. With its mobile app, users could order pickup riders who could fulfil deliveries quickly in the congested city of Lagos. By 2017, MAX had expanded into bike hailing, becoming the first company to pioneer the innovation in Nigeria. But in February 2020, the Lagos government’s restrictions on passenger motorcycles threatened the company’s growth in Nigeria’s largest city.

In an interview with TechCabal, MAX’s CFO, Guy-Bertrand Njoya, explains that the company has had to double down on its other mobility solutions since the ban. One of these is a subscription platform for low-to-zero emission vehicles in five cities across Nigeria, and Ghana. The subscription product includes credit and original equipment manufacturer (OEM) services, which the more than 13,000 drivers on its platform opt into.

For the partnership with Bolt, the company’s alternative credit-scoring technology will allow access to proprietary performance and revenue analytics to underwrite the Bolt car loans for drivers.

“MAX is a renowned vehicle subscription platform with the capacity to support a truly wide placement of this type of partnership,” Akin-Laguda said on Bolt’s preferred car financing partner in Nigeria. “Their approach and insight to meet our goal of empowering drivers suited our desired proposition.”

Harambe Entrepreneur Alliance invests $200,000 in two Nigerian startups; MAX and Releaf Group
MAX motorcycle riders.
The car financing programme is currently open only to drivers in Lagos and Abuja, with Bolt planning to expand the offer to all active drivers across Nigeria.

According to Bolt, an agreement can be reached for up to 100% of the purchase, both for new and used cars, within 24 hours of signing up. This is given that drivers have provided all the information required. They can choose to pay back their loans using a percentage of the weekly revenue generated while driving on Bolt for up to five years.

“We’re looking to expand our commitment to helping those on the Bolt platform to earn more and at their own pace, either driving full-time or part-time,” Akin-Laguda said. “Improving the earnings of drivers is fundamental to our business operations.”

For drivers, Bolt’s loan repayment process is more flexible than what traditionally exists in the market. Loan tenors from Nigerian banks often don’t exceed two years whereas Bolt’s repayment duration ranges from two to five. In the long run, Yamaha-backed MAX plans to add electric vehicles to the financing mix.

In addition to extending the lease-to-own framework to more e-hailing drivers, the partnership is expected to enable drivers access value-add services provided by MAX. These include licenses and permits, insurance, health coverage, and other financial products.

The low rate of vehicle ownership in Nigeria is similar across Africa, a continent with the lowest per capita vehicle ownership in the world.

With the majority of Africa’s more than one billion population having limited or no access to vehicle financing, the continent recorded fewer than 900,000 new vehicle sales in 2019, compared to more than 17 million in the United States alone.

Source: https://techcabal.com/2021/11/24/bolt-partners-max-ng/?utm_source=nairaland_reshare&utm_medium=referral&utm_id=reddit.261121

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