Analysts say the value of e-commerce in Africa is expected to reach $29 billion next year, yet Africans still find it difficult to make international payments for products online. Cards, M-Pesa, bank transfer and mobile money, are the most common methods Africans use to make payments. But while various payment gateways have provided better experiences
Month: October 2021
Getsafe has extended its Series B round that it previously announced in December 2020. In addition to its original Series B round of $30 million, the company is adding another $63 million in fresh capital. Overall, Getsafe has raised a $93 million Series B round. Investors in today’s funding round include unnamed family offices as
If you’ve ever tweeted something innocuous that went on to kick off a firestorm of unwanted attention, you know full well that people on Twitter will fight about anything and everything — it’s the internet’s premier destination for high-speed, low-information opinion slinging, after all. Twitter has been working on ways to tone down the toxicity
Logicworks might not be a household name, but since 2012 it has been working with customers to help them move to the cloud and manage their workloads once they get there. By following that approach, the late stage startup is closing in on $100 million in revenue. Today, it announced a new Cloud Reliability Platform
Making sure mental wellness is part of your routine can be difficult, especially if you are already busy and stressed. MindLabs wants to make it easier with a combination of on-demand or live video classes and community features. The company announced today it has raised a $3.5 million seed round, almost eleven months after its
The adoption of telehealth services has boomed in the pandemic — with usage up 38-fold since January 2020, according to a report by McKinsey. While a lot of the attention has been on companies that are building the communications layer between consumers and clinicians, there are also a wave of companies building devices to expand
Founded in 2019, Singapore-based Greywing was created to help ship operators and other members of the maritime industry make critical decisions. It includes tools for crew change management, predictive reporting of potential risks like piracy and pandemic-related travel restriction updates. Today Greywing announced the launch of a new solution that will help vessel operators track
Twitter announced Wednesday that it would offload MoPub, the mobile ad platform it bought back in 2013, selling the company to mobile game and marketing software maker AppLovin. Twitter paid around $350 million for MoPub back in 2013 and will sell the company for $1.05 billion in cash. MoPub helped Twitter bring in around $188
For the last decade, battery chemistry company Sila has been working to replace the graphite anode in lithium-ion batteries with silicon, a material that’s easier to come by, more environmentally friendly and allows for a battery cell that’s denser and cheaper. In September, the company shipped its first commercial product with Whoop wearables. Now, Sila
OpenStack, the open-source project that gives large enterprises and public cloud providers the tools to run their own AWS-like private clouds in their data centers, today announced the release of OpenStack 24. Codenamed Xena, the release focuses on polishing many of the system’s sharper edges. It’s no secret that the OpenStack project, which now falls
Will Uppington Contributor Will Uppington is the CEO and co-founder of TruEra. The European Commission announced first-of-its-kind legislation regulating the use of artificial intelligence in April. This unleashed criticism that the regulations could slow AI innovation, hamstringing Europe in its competition with the U.S. and China for leadership in AI. For example, Andrew McAfee wrote
In preparation for the holiday shopping season, Amazon today convenient a new way to send gifts through its mobile app. Instead of entering in the recipient’s mailing address — a piece of information people often don’t know in today’s age of digital communications — Prime members can now send a gift to a friend via their
Sep.27 — Polestar, the electric-vehicle maker backed by Volvo Car Group and actor Leonardo DiCaprio, agreed to go public through a merger with a blank-check company at a roughly $20 billion enterprise valuation. Thomas Ingenlath, CEO at Polestar, says their cars will be in over 30 markets in 2023. He speaks on “Bloomberg Markets, European Close.”
CostCertified, a Canadian startup which provides real-time, interactive residential construction estimates, raised $8.45 million in a seed round of funding. FUSE, a Pacific Northwest venture firm which counts former Microsoft CFO John Connors and Seattle Seahawks linebacker Bobby Wagner as venture partners, led the round. The company is also backed by Y Combinator (having participated
Regions once overlooked by the venture capital industry are racking up impressive investment totals in recent quarters. African startups, for example, were long ignored by the global VC scene, with totals for the continent’s upstart technology companies representing a fraction of a fraction of the funds made available to other regions’ next-generation companies. But in
Video sharing platforms that offer a service in the UK have to comply with new regulations intended to protect users and under 18s from harmful content such as hate speech and videos/ads likely to incite violence again protected groups. Ofcom, the country’s comms, broadcast and — in an expanding role — Internet content regulator, has
Celonis, the late-stage processing mining startup with a gaudy $11 billion valuation, announced a new partnership today, this one with ServiceNow. Celonis co-founder and CEO Alexander Rinke says that he and ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott go back a long way, and that working together should provide big benefits for the two companies. “With ServiceNow, we
Increasingly, companies are being encouraged by governments to engage in carbon accounting, but of course, only a small number of companies actually do. Even those probably count only 10% of their emissions because they don’t account for the emissions of their supply chain, which, when looked at, probably accounts for 90% of their total emissions.
Move over, precision agriculture — precision apiculture is what’s on the minds of all future-focused farmers. BeeHero has been growing fast since its debut and seed round last year, and $19M in new funding means it can scale beyond its initial markets and find more uses for its one-of-a-kind collection of data collected from thousands
Marc Lore, who earlier this year stepped down from his role as Walmart’s head of U.S. e-commerce, is now backing a new startup in the e-commerce space called Wizard. Lore has taken on the roles of co-founder, chairman of the board and investor in Wizard, a B2B startup in the “conversational commerce” space which believes
Mauritius and U.K.-based investment company Juven went live today with plans to fund growth-stage technology and consumer companies in Africa. The one-year-old firm is looking to invest large checks in companies “that have proven business models, strong revenue traction and large addressable markets,” it said in a statement. Juven is one of the few investment
The founders of Tazah Technologies, a B2B agriculture marketplace in Pakistan, met while serving leadership roles at Uber subsidiary Careem. Abrar Bajwa and Mohsin Zaka bonded during long working hours as the platform dealt with COVID-19’s impact. Eventually, the two started talking about creating their own startup. When asked how they got from ride-hailing to
Anyone looking for a job, even in the past decade, knows how difficult it can be or has been — applications going into a black hole of a CRM, no response and follow-ups or the process being drug out for months. Lydia Han and Christopher Triolo started ModernLoop in December 2020 after seeing the problem
Wayve, a U.K.-based self-driving startup that is notable for its use of deep learning and cameras rather than more-costly Lidar and other sensors to guide vehicles, is gearing up for its next stage of development with a strategic backer in its pocket. Today Ocado — the online grocer that also powers online grocery systems for
While working as a software engineer in Japan, Singapore and San Francisco for the past 10 years, Ryo Chikazawa, CEO and co-founder of Autify, came to realize that there’s one common problem in the software development industry; software testing takes excessive time. Chikazawa and co-founder Sam Yamashita started Autify in 2016 in San Francisco to
SmartRyde, a Japanese online pre-booked airport transfers service platform, is a marketplace that connects travelers to local transportation operators/online travel agencies (OTAs). Sota Kimura, co-founder and CEO of SmartRyde, founded SmartRyde in 2017 after he experienced trouble getting a taxi from the airport to the hotel when he traveled abroad, Kimura told TechCrunch. SmartRyde, which
Byteboard, a service designed to replace the pre-onsite technical interview part of a company’s hiring process with a web-based alternative, will be spinning out of Google, TechCrunch learned and Google confirmed. The product was originally incubated as part of the company’s internal R&D lab known as Area 120, where it’s been led by CEO Sargun
Facebook’s hours-long outage on Monday may have hurt the company, its founder, shareholders, and many businesses that rely on the social juggernaut’s services. But for its instant messaging rivals, it was a very good day. Telegram founder and chief executive Pavel Durov said on Tuesday that his instant messaging app added a staggering 70 million
I have worked in startups for more than half of my life, and for most of that time, I was the only Black person in the room. As a result, the lack of representation in tech isn’t abstract to me. Besides my experience, I read and talk about diversity in tech every day, so when
Ride-hailing giant Uber is facing a legal challenge over its use of real-time facial recognition technology in a driver and courier identity check system that it uses in the UK. The App Drivers & Couriers Union (ADCU) announced the legal action Tuesday, alleging that Uber’s biometric identity checks discriminate against people of color. The union