Tag: africa
Mobility startup Plentywaka picks up $1.2M seed, acquires Ghana’s Stabus
Lagos and Toronto-based mobility startup Plentywaka has raised a $1.2 million seed round to scale its operations on the back of leaving the Techstars Toronto accelerator program last month. Canadian-based VC firm The Xchange led the round, SOSV and Shock Ventures participated, while Techstars Toronto made a follow-on investment. Nigerian…
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Y Combinator, 500 Startups, Plug and Play invest in Odiggo’s $2.2M seed round
Servicing one’s car personally is a time-consuming, expensive and painstaking process. It’s a cycle that can lead to more expensive repairs and safety issues down the line, and no car owner likes that. Egypt and Dubai-based auto tech startup Odiggo is a platform addressing this problem. It allows car owners…
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Alerzo raises $10.5M Series A to bring Nigeria’s informal retail sector online
The process of digitizing the operations of mom and pop stores in Nigeria is serious business right now. In fact, it might be the second-best thing after fintech at the moment. Today’s news is from Alerzo, a little-known B2B e-commerce retail startup based in Ibadan, Nigeria. The company is announcing…
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The hottest fintech market you aren’t paying attention to
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. For our Wednesday show this week, Natasha and Alex and Danny had colleague Tage Kene-Okafor on the show to chat about the burgeoning African startup scene. Tage has become TechCrunch’s key correspondent in the area, chronicling the…
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How Adia Sowho helped steer Thrive Agric through the pandemic crisis
Nigeria’s less than two-decade-old ecosystem is evolving fast. But behind the funding and legitimate hype, there’s without a doubt plenty of learning that needs to be done in running a startup. In retrospect, founders in Nigeria do tremendous work when you consider the kind of harsh market they operate in.…
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Nigeria’s Decagon raises millions to finance and train software engineers
This past decade, Nigeria has seen several companies cater to the development and growth of software engineers and tech talent in general. It’s a space many in the Nigerian ecosystem like to think is budding yet overcrowded. So when Chika Nwobi started Decagon in 2018, the perception was generally “here…
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