Tage Kene-Okafor
Three out of every 10 payments in Africa fail, according to reports. Factors behind this range from a fragmented payments landscape and invalid cards to dormant accounts and higher dispute rates; they surface yearly leading to a $14 billion loss in recurring revenue for digital businesses across the...
Last February, Djamo announced that it got accepted into Y Combinator, the first from Ivory Coast. Months later, the two-year-old fintech has raised $14 million in funding from the famed accelerator, as well as from three lead investors — Enza Capital, Oikocredit and Partech Africa — and other...
Most small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in supply chains across different sectors in Africa execute orders in days but receive invoices after several weeks and sometimes months. It’s such an inefficient way of doing business that ultimately leads to cash-flow problems — and on top of that are...
Millions of small and medium businesses still operate inefficiently due to dependency on manual processes, which limits their capacity to grow and scale; this is despite contributing to about 48% of Nigeria’s GDP in the last five years,
But the tide is turning. Over the last couple of months,...
Last year, MaxAB, the food and grocery B2B e-commerce and distribution platform serving a network of traditional retailers across Egypt and Morocco, raised its $55 million Series A in two tranches; the latter accompanied its acquisition of the Morocco-based and YC-backed WaysToCap. The moves signaled MaxAB’s ambition to...
Nexta, an Egyptian startup that plans to launch its banking app in the coming months, has secured a $5 million investment from eFinance Group, a state-owned provider of digital payments solutions. This news follows the $2 million pre-seed round Nexta announced this March, which Egyptian early-stage VC Disruptech...
While studying at the London School of Economics and the University of Oxford, a group of graduates noticed how difficult it was to get data and information on Africa’s largest economy and their home country, Nigeria. Each had different yet complementary skills — Michael Famoroti, an economist; Bode...
For the average individual living in Lagos — Nigeria’s most populous city, with over 20 million people — apartment hunting is an extreme sport. Not only is rent expensive — low- to middle-income housing can cost between $1,000 and $5,000 yearly — but renters must also pay a...
When Vendease launched in January 2020, it wanted to solve the challenges and inefficiencies in Nigeria’s highly fragmented food sector using a marketplace model that connected suppliers and farms to restaurants and food businesses, with deliveries facilitated within 24 hours.
But over the next couple of months, Vendease switched...
Ivorian payments-led fintech startup Julaya has extended its pre-Series A round by $5 million. The company, which facilitates B2B payments for businesses in Francophone West Africa, mainly via mobile money channels, has raised a total of $7 million in the financing round.
In 2019, West Africa reported the most...
