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She Leads Africa is building Africa’s largest female-focused media company. They’ve just closed a seed round and are hiring. Click here for more details: http://bit.ly/slay-cabal.

Vodacom (South Africa) and Safaricom (Kenya) want to buy the intellectual property rights for M-Pesa from Vodafone for US$13 million. Both companies plan to form a joint venture with the intention of saving costs on the royalties paid to Vodafone. Vodafone which owns a stake in Vodacom collects 5% from the latter’s M-Pesa business as intellectual property fees while it takes 2% of M-Pesa’s annual revenue from Safaricom. The joint venture will use the savings from the deal to take M-Pesa to other African markets. The first will very likely be Ethiopia. M-Pesa is mainly present in Kenya and Tanzania and expansion to some other major African markets has so far been unsuccessful. In 2016, the service was discontinued in South Africa after Vodacom struggled for 6 years to find enough customers for it.

Online vessel chartering platform, MVXchange has announced the closing of its pre-seed funding round led by Oui Capital. The investment which is likely about $100,000 will be used by the Lagos-based company to scale its technology and acquire more enterprise users. MVXchange connects vessel charter requests to available Offshore Support Vessels (OSV’s) operating in Africa using its B2B tech platform thereby reducing the time it takes to get a vessel from weeks to minutes. OuiCapital is a $10 million fund founded by Ingressive’s former Vice President of Investments, Olu Oyinsan that is targeted towards fintech, mobility, education and healthcare startups in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa.

Techpoint Africa is partnering with the University of Sussex to offer future innovators and techpreneurs with the best pitch ideas the chance to win a £6,000 post-grad scholarship, ₦70,000 in cash and other amazing prices at the Techpoint inspired 2019 conference. Visit here to apply.

Amidst the company’s ban in the US, Huawei has launched a free 5G training course in two South African universities.  The programme which was launched at the Wits University in Johannesburg and at the University of Pretoria aims to grow and support ICT skills training in exponential technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence, cloud and data services.

Pan-African digital payments company, Wari has rolled out a WhatsApp service that allows its customers to perform financial transactions on the messaging platform. The service is available in the following languages; French, English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese. Launched in 2008, Wari is present in about 60 countries at over 500,000 direct and partner outlets.

An internet cutoff during Malawi’s vote count affected its electoral commission’s backup network.

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