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TOGETHER WITH FLUTTERWAVE

05 – 03 – 2020

Good morning and welcome to TC Daily! If this email was forwarded to you, please take a moment to subscribe. Also, join us on Telegram for all the hot takes and deep dives into Africa’s technology sector.

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Actis, a London-based private equity company, is going all-in on the African cloud business.

The firm has acquired a majority stake in Rack Centre, a Nigerian cloud and data centre company. The company provides cloud services to a number of companies including MTN, Orange and Airtel. The new investment will help Rack Centre double its capabilities and aid its expansion across West Africa.

The acquisition is part of Actis larger plans for Africa. The continent is underserved in terms of cloud services despite high demand and a growing number of its internet population. This represents an opportunity. The UK firm plans to invest $250 million over the next three years in the data centres based on the continent.

By developing cloud infrastructure and locating them on the continent, it improves the connection speed and helps businesses like banks remain compliant with data storage regulation.

Actis is not the only company targeting Africa’s cloud and connectivity markets. MainOne is leading the pack in the Nigerian market with its data centres and connectivity infrastructure. Foreign companies like Amazon and Microsoft have developed data centres South Africa, their first forays into cloud computing on the continent. US company, Berkshire Partners acquired a stake Teraco Data Environments, a leading South African cloud company.

African telecom infrastructure companies have also received significant investor interest as the continent’s connectivity industry booms. Helios Towers raised $364 million when it listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2019. IHS Towers is also planning a multibillion-dollar IPO this year. Eaton Towers, another African telco infrastructure company was acquired for $1.85 billion last year.

Omniscient, a South African startup has raised an undisclosed pre-Series A funding. Nedbank, Investec Private Capital and Compass Venture Capital participated in the round. Omniscient runs a platform that makes it easy for companies to share data without compromising user data privacy. With the new funding, the company plans to grow its team and expand to new markets like Nigeria.

G. Elias & Co. a Nigerian business law firm is organizing a roundtable and open day event on March 19 in Lagos at the Google Developers Space. The event is focused on reaching out to businesses in the technology space. It aims to equip start-ups and stakeholders with a better understanding of applicable laws in the technology space. Register here

Fintech regulation is a hot topic in Nigeria. Over the years, hundreds of startups have emerged, ushering in a boom in the adoption of financial services. As startups continue to scale, they would like government regulation to change; to become more flexible and less restricting on what services these companies can offer. But traditional financial institutions like banks are wary of such regulatory pursuits since it risks eroding investments they have made in people and physical branches. In this article, I explore how these concerns have complicated the fintech regulatory discussion in Nigeria.

Tomilola Adejana is not a developer. But she’s a people person, with a strong passion to digitize cash and savings for people in Nigeria’s informal sector. Her startup, Bankly processes thousands of transactions and is “scaling up” more in the northern region of Nigeria. Adejana’s story is the latest entry to the My Life In Tech series in this Women’s Month of March.

Bike hailing company, SafeBoda, has officially launched in Nigeria. The company ditched Lagos, Nigeria’s most populous city, in favour of Ibadan, another highly populated but relatively sane city. SafeBoda has always been careful of the regulatory drama in Lagos; the same concern is why Uber’s bike hailing service exists in Nairobi, Kenya and Kampala, Uganda but not in Lagos. In this article, TechCabal’s Muyiwa explains how Ibadan offers a haven for SafeBoda and how the service plans to grow in the city.

That’s it for today,

We’ll be back tomorrow

– Abubakar

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