👨🏿‍🚀 TechCabal Daily-PayDay in talks to sell after $3million raise

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Happy pre-Friday!

It has been a really good year for Ebanx.

Just one year after its debut in South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya, the payment company has expanded to more African countries; Ivory Coast, Morocco, Senegal, Tanzania,  Egypt, Ghana, Uganda, and Zambia. It also recently made its debut in the Asian market by launching in India.

PayDay in talks to sell after $3million raise

Nigerian fintech PayDay, after securing a $3 million seed funding round six months ago, is now in talks to be sold.

What’s the gist? Per a member of PayDay’s management, the company was open to acquisition before its seed funding round which was led by Moniepoint. In March, a report speculated about Moniepoint acquiring PayDay, with a journalist privately predicting a three-month deal. According to an insider close to the situation, Moniepoint had expressed their intention to acquire PayDay contingent upon specific conditions or criteria that needed to be satisfied before proceeding with the acquisition. However, the deal remained in limbo, with sources suggesting that Moniepoint’s board was not enthusiastic about the acquisition. It’s possible that PayDay did not meet the required conditions for the deal to progress as initially anticipated.

Despite Moniepoint pulling out of the deal, talks to sell the company are still ongoing. Nonetheless, negative publicity may also be hindering the company’s sale.

A wave of bad press: In August, PayDay suspended customer accounts to recover funds lost to fraud. Per a source, the company did not disclose the losses until a prominent blog accused them of mishandling customer funds. Furthermore, some Nigerian employees claim their salaries were slashed in July—three months after the $3 million raise, while the CEO, Favour Ori, maintained a $15,000 monthly salary. These salary reductions coincided with the departure of key employees, including co-founder and COO Ogechi Obike.

Zoom out: As the company continues discussions about a potential sale, sources disclose that Ori has reduced his involvement in the company and has been working full-time at GitHub, implying that PayDay was a side hustle.

Get a working card from Moniepoint

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Openserve confirms Sat-3 cable repair

Openserve, South Africa’s Telkom subsidiary has confirmed that the broken SAT-3 subsea cable has been fully repaired. 

ICYMI  Last month the subsea cable broke off the coast off the Democratic Republic of Congo due to two separate rock falls in the Congo Canyon submarine. The SAT-3 cable breakage was one of three major west coast undersea internet cables that were severed in the past month. The West Africa Cable System (WACS) and SAT-3 undersea cables snapped simultaneously. As a result of the cable breakage, South Africans experienced reduced internet speeds.

With all three cables being repaired, South Africans will now enjoy normal internet connectivity.

Zoom out: The recent cable breakages show the need to rethink internet connectivity on the continent away from the traditional subsea cable. While subsea cables have been the backbone of internet connectivity for decades, recent disruptions highlight the importance of exploring alternatives.

Google releases new features for its AI chatbot Bard

On Tuesday, Google revealed new updates for its Bard chatbot.

What are the updates? Google has updated its AI chatbot, Bard, with the ability to access and use Google’s full suite of tools, communicate in multiple languages, and perform fact-checking. These updates are the biggest to Bard since it was widely released to the public six months ago. Bard can now also draw on information from Google’s other services, such as YouTube, Maps, Flights, and Hotels. Furthermore, Google has also taken steps to address some of the concerns that have been raised about AI chatbots, such as their tendency to generate inaccurate information known as “hallucinations”. Bard now has a “double-check” button that allows users to evaluate the accuracy of its responses, and the company has said that it is constantly working to reduce hallucinations.

Lastly, Bard now supports conversation sharing, enabling one user to share a chat with another, who can then expand on the conversation.

Zoom out: Overall, the new updates to Bard make it a more powerful and versatile AI chatbot. It remains to be seen how widely adopted Bard will become, but it is clear that Google is investing heavily in this technology.

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