This Week in African Tech 🌍

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Welcome to This Week in African Tech!

Caleb here, and I had a lot of fun connecting with the tech communities in Lagos and Accra last week! I can’t wait to do it all again soon.

Before we get into this week’s roundup, I wanted to remind you that we’ve teamed up for a webinar with Founders Factory Africa (FFA) to explore “The Female Founder's Guide to Raising”.

I’ll be joined on the panel by Farah Emara, CEO at FreshSource Global, Hope Ditlhakanyane, Investment Principal at FFA, and Gwera Kiwana, Co-Founder of Women Who Build Africa.

If you’re a female founder looking to raise capital for your startup in Africa, this is for you.

The webinar is on the 26th of March and starts at 5 pm EAT.

Register here to save a seat.

Now, let’s get into the roundup!

Tech Roundup

• Meta has great news for content creators in Nigeria: they will soon be able to make money through ads and other features on its platforms. Meta expects to roll out these features before June and hopes this move will keep the country’s top content creators on its platforms.

• Three months after banning Starlink, Ghana is now in talks to grant the ISP a license to operate in the country. This will give Ghana's internet users more options, especially following the recent internet blackouts caused by damage to major undersea internet cables.

• TikTok is teaming up with the African Union Commission’s Women, Gender, and Youth Directorate (WGYD) to launch a digital campaign promoting online safety for young people and parents across Africa. This comes as TikTok faces more scrutiny, including bans in Senegal and Somalia.

• Uber is currently in a data-sharing dispute with the Lagos State Government. Though the ride-hailing giant insists it has provided all the data it is supposed to, the government is demanding real-time access and threatening to sanction Uber.

• Union54 and Mastercard have teamed up to launch ChitChat, a social commerce platform in Zambia. ChitChat offers users a chat platform integrated with USD digital wallets. With this, ChitChat users can send and receive money directly within their chats.

• Following Uber’s announcement of its intention to invest in Moove, the mobility fintech has finally closed its $100 million Series B funding round. This is Uber's first investment in Africa, and it solidifies its partnership with Moove.

Deal Roundup

• P1 Ventures, a pan-African seed venture capital fund, raises $35 million at the close of its second funding round. The investment firm plans to use the funds to accelerate its work in sectors like AI-powered Software as a Service (SaaS) and fuel its expansion into Senegal and Kenya.

• Float, a South African BNPL startup, raises $11 million in a growth facility fund. Standard Bank led the funding round, and Float will use the funds to support the launch of its card-linked installment platform and accelerate growth over the next four years.

• Tunisian AI startup Clusterlab raises $600,000 in pre-seed funding. This round was led by prominent investors including Karim Beguir as well as regional angel investors. The funding will be used to boost Clusterlab’s research and development efforts and advance their next-generation large language models (LLMs).

• mTek, a Kenyan-based digital online insurance platform, raises $1.25 million from Verod-Kepple Africa Ventures and Founders Factory Africa. The new funding will help increase its presence in the Kenyan and East African insurance markets.

• Nigerian payment infrastructure startup Zone raises $8.5 million in an oversubscribed seed funding round. The round was led by Flourish Ventures and TLcom Capital, with participation from Verod-Kepple Africa Ventures (VKAV), Alter Global, and Endeavor Catalyst. The funds will help Zone scale its blockchain-based decentralized payment infrastructure for financial services providers.

Events and Opportunities

• Applications are now open for the 14th edition of the Orange Social Venture Prize (OSVP) in Africa and the Middle East, aimed at supporting social innovation and encouraging entrepreneurship. The Prize rewards innovative startups positively impacting education, healthcare, e-commerce, agriculture, or the environment. Qualified startups can apply here until the 24th of May, 2024.

• South African startups are invited to apply for the Irish Tech Challenge South Africa, which seeks to foster partnerships between South African and Irish startups. Startups in clean and green technology, healthcare, education, and water sanitation and hygiene are particularly encouraged to apply. If that’s your startup, apply here before the 26th of April, 2024.

• Burning Heroes Founders Association has opened applications for the second edition of the BH Africa Startup Awards, which aims to connect ventures with investment and other opportunities. The awards offer 30 early-stage startups the chance to virtually pitch to a panel of VCs and successful tech founders. Applications are open here until the 1st of April, 2024.

• Calling all techies in Lagos! The Lagos Tech Summit 2024 takes place on the 6th of April, 2024. The Summit aims to tackle unemployment by leveraging the power of technology with the theme “Breaking Barriers of Unemployment through Tech.” Get your tickets here.

• Village Capital and Moody’s Foundation have launched Greentech 2024: The Future of Sustainability, an investment-readiness accelerator. Applications are open to African startups building solutions in sustainable development in cleantech and climate tech, agri-tech and food security, and more. Applications are open here until the 10th of May, 2024.

• “The Female Founder's Guide to Raising” webinar will be hosted by Tech Safari, and on the panel we have;

  • ​Farah Emara, Co-Founder/CEO at FreshSource Global

  • ​Hope Ditlhakanyane, Investment Principal at Founders Factory Africa

  • ​Gwera Kiwana, Co-Founder of Women Who Build Africa

    The webinar is on the 26th of March and starts at 5 pm EAT.

    Register to save a seat.

And that's a wrap for this week!

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