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TechCabal Daily – Sendy gets Toyota’s backing to disrupt logistics in West Africa

30th January 2020









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TOGETHER WITH FLUTTERWAVE & AFROBYTES

30 – 01 – 2020

Good morning and welcome to TC Daily! Please take a moment to subscribe to our newsletter if this mail was forwarded to you. Also join us on Telegram!

The Next Chapter for Wellness is a unique financial wellness proposition that combines the scientific discipline of banking expertise, with the emotional influence of attitudes and behaviours. 

Thanks to Flutterwave, TNC is able to empower employees, entrepreneurs, and just about anyone with strategies, plans and coaching that enables them to take charge of their financial wellbeing. Take charge of your financial wellbeing here. Link: http://tncwealth.com

Enygma Ventures has unveiled the 11 female entrepreneurs to participate in its investor-ready programme. Designed for businesses operating in Southern African Development Community countries, the entrepreneurs are from South Africa, Angola, Zambia, Swaziland and Rwanda. Chosen from a pool of 900 applicants, they stand to receive an investment of up to $130,000, depending on when each entrepreneur is ready for funding. The eleven entrepreneurs lead startups in a variety of sectors from education and food services, to personal care and energy.

South Africa-based media content company, Over, has been acquired by GoDaddy for an undisclosed fee. Founded in 2012, the Over app helps individuals and businesses create easy branding content usually for social media marketing. With the acquisition by GoDaddy, the US-based website-building company, “Over will help bolster GoDaddy’s focus on enabling entrepreneurs and small businesses to look great everywhere online that matters via Websites + Marketing,” according to Matt Winn, Over’s CEO. 

If you take disclosed and undisclosed deals into account, the value of equity rounds in African tech companies in 2019 amounts to $2.02 billion. That’s according to Partech Africa’s report released yesterday on funding tickets above $200,000 received by African tech companies last year. Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa and Egypt took 85% of the continent’s equity funding inflows, while fintech maintained dominance over other sectors. Read more here about the report and Partech Africa’s investments in the past year.

The countdown to Afrobytes 2020 continues. Afrobytes is the premier event that brings together entrepreneurs, innovators, investors, and more to explore business opportunities between the African tech ecosystem and players in the global tech world. Here are key reasons why you should attend Afrobytes 2020:

  • Finance: pitch world-leading Africa-focused tech funds
  • Network: connect with global companies and African tech leaders
  • Scale: find tech partners at the largest startup campus
  • Feature: talk to international media covering African markets

Get your early bird ticket here

Delivery solutions startup, Sendy has raised $20 million in a Series B round, with a view to improving its tech and expanding to West Africa. The Kenyan-based company is the latest East African mobility outfit to finalize a funding round in the past few weeks following QuickBus’s seed round. Sendy has been in existence since at least 2014 and counts Unilever, Safaricom and Copia as customers.

Why you should care: Mobility appears to be the new frontier for investor interest in Africa. Lori (Kenya), Kobo360 (Nigeria) and Swvl (Egypt) raised $102 million in 2019 in deals backed by notable institutions from Goldman Sachs to Hillhouse Capital. Then, there were sensational rounds by OPay whose (now troubled) logistics vertical ORide serves as a major pull for its super-app ambitions.

What does the future hold for the sector in Africa? It’s a question we deliberated a lot about in 2019. But enough has not been said, so watch this space – especially if you are in East Africa.

Knife Capital, a South African VC firm, has extended KNF Ventures – its venture funding programme. The firm has deployed $12.3 million in seven businesses since it was launched in 2016. Their decision to extend the fund for further investment is due to the “success” of the fund marked by 50% year-on-year growth of the participating startups, according to Keet van Zyl, partner at Knife Capital.

The fund takes advantage of South Africa’s Section 12J venture capital company (VCC) regime – a government tax break facility for investors in small and medium-size businesses.

Join Uzoma Nwagba, Chief Operating Officer, Government Enterprise & Empowerment Programme, at the TC Townhall: Emerging Tech, a forum that will help businesses, big corporations and governments understand blockchain and artificial intelligence, and how to take advantage of them to secure their future.

Uzoma Nwagba leads the operations aspects of the Nigerian government’s social welfare programmes, where machine learning is a feature in matching beneficiaries with befitting packages.

Nwagba’s expertise in technology and finance flows from his years as an Analyst at Goldman Sachs, New York, from where he proceeded to be an Engineering Product Manager at Microsoft, Redmond, Before becoming COO of GEEP, Uzoma worked at private equity firm African Capital Alliance.

Tickets to TC Townhall: Emerging Tech are now available for purchase  and a 15% early bird discount is available for readers who buy their tickets by January 31st with the code TCEM15%OFF. 

Further discounts apply for companies/individuals buying at least 5 tickets. Click here to redeem our 20% corporate discount.

You’re up to date,
 
See you tomorrow.

– Alexander

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