TechCabal – Cashing in on the moment

Jumia is selling 9 million American depositary shares (ADS) in a move to raise more cash. 

The details: This comes 3 months after the company sold almost 7 million shares at an average price of $30.51, raising $243.2 million in the process. With Jumia stock trading at $42.14 on Monday, this secondary sale of shares will raise almost $400 million. 

It is not unusual for companies to try to cash in on stock rallies in this manner. The electric car maker, Tesla, has sold secondary shares twice in the last year. In 2020 when the company’s share price went up by over 700%, it raised over $5 billion. 

Yet, one key difference between Jumia and Tesla is that while the electric car maker is profitable, the e-commerce company isn’t. So for Jumia, this kind of move is a way to get some extra runway. It is a smart move from the company as it is cashing in on the rise in share price it has enjoyed in the past eight months.

Read more: Jumia is raising $400 million months after raising $243 million

We dropped out to focus on our startup and scaling it into a $1 billion company. We believe the opportunity here is huge. So for us, the right thing to do is to get the job done well. Startups need time so dropping out was inevitable.

In 2019, Ben Eluan and Osezele Orukpe, two software engineers based in Nigeria, faced a problem after executing a project for a client in the U.K. 

The problem: It took a week for the friends to get their money, and they lost a considerable chunk of it to charges.

The solution: Flux. They built a crypto remittance company to enable merchants to send and receive money from anywhere in the world.

The stats: The six-month-old company has 5,000 customers who have transacted over $750,000 in payments volume. It’s growing 40% month-on-month and has made $25,000 in revenue.

Read more: These undergraduates left university to build Flux, a payments startup now in YC

Jacon Osinachi remembers the thrill of teaching himself to design the logo of the Nigeria Television Authority (NTA) on Microsoft Word. 

As an aspiring writer, he would go to cyber cafes to write poems and short stories. Typing manuscripts for long periods caused boredom, so he would play around with the software’s drawing tools. 

This was around 2005 in Aba, a rough-and-tumble city in southeastern Nigeria where he was born and raised. 

More than fifteen years later, those experiments are yielding a global reputation, foreign currency earnings and a comfortable life. Osinachi now draws more complex things on Microsoft Word, this time within the ambience of his 20-by-20ft bedroom in a duplex in Lagos. 

He may not be Beeple, but Osinachi has sold $75,000 worth of crypto art in ten days. What’s his sauce? Alex looks into that in this article.

In 2012, Ife Kohossi had just graduated from university and was finding it difficult to get a job as a nutritionist in the Republic of Benin.

After a few internship programs that didn’t turn out as expected, she considered setting out on her own. The rising prevalence of obesity in her country was a source of great concern and a confirmation that there were people who needed her skillset: teaching people to eat better and live healthier lives.

Today she earns about $2,000 per month from teaching people to eat better and live healthier lives.

What changed? Attending a program which taught her how to use online tools and market her business better.

In this article, I talk about three platforms helping African creators like Kohossi monetize their skills