Author: Akin Naphtal

Kenyan electric vehicle company Opibus has changed its name to ROAM, with the rebrand coming after the company’s expansion led to a strategic shift in its vision. Founded in 2017, Opibus is the leading provider of electric vehicles designed and manufactured locally. Its vision is to create reliable and cost effective products designed for the pan-African mass market. The company raised US$7.5 million in equity and grant funding late last year to help it scale its operations, and in January it introduced the first all-electric bus in Kenya – also the first Africa-designed electric bus ever. It has now changed…

Google has announced that it is submitting its Istio service mesh project for consideration as an incubating project within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Google’s Kubernetes has long been the flagship project for the CNCF and the company recently also brought Knative, a project that aims to make it easier to build and deploy serverless applications on top of Kubernetes, to the CNCF as well. It’s maybe no surprise then that Istio, too, will likely become a CNCF project. There are still some steps to take before that happens, but chances are Google wouldn’t make today’s announcement if those weren’t, for the most part,…

Spotify has announced that it’s launching a Free and Open Source Software Fund to support independent open source projects. The company says the purpose of the fund is to bring attention to independent open source projects and give back to developers. The new fund will start at €100,000. Spotify’s open source tech lead said in a blog post that “this is just a starting amount” and that as with any new program, the company wants to test it before deploying it more broadly. The company will donate the money to different open source projects over the course of the year. The funds will provide…

Zenda, a UAE-based startup looking to change how parents pay school bills, and the way educational institutions manage fee collection, is eyeing Africa as its next frontier for growth. Zenda (formerly nexopay) told TechCrunch it plans to enter the continent through Egypt – its third market after India – in the coming months, as it embarks on a growth drive accelerated by a $9.4 million seed funding it has raised. Through its app, Zenda allows parents to pay fees directly to schools, all while streamlining collections by enabling schools to accept and manage payments online. This means that parents no longer need…

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is infamous for using Twitter to tease and tease out various ideas he has about his business interests, cryptocurrency, politics and life in general, but today it looks like he’s making good on one of the biggest of his musings. Twitter has announced that it has accepted Musk’s offer to acquire the publicly traded company at $54.20/share, valuing the social media platform at $44 billion. Moments after the news broke that Twitter trading was halted, the company issued a press release confirming that it was accepting Musk’s offer to take the social network private. “The Twitter Board conducted…

Biometric Verification Number (BVN) enrolments in Nigeria hit 54,241,963 on April 17. According to data released by Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS), the body saddled with eliminating bottlenecks in the country’s banking sector, enrolments by bank account owners in the country rose by 2.3 million in the last three months. At the end of December 2021, enrolments for the number stood at 51.9 million. Checks revealed that the BVN database grew by six million in the year. Also, NIBSS data showed that active bank accounts in the country stood at 133.5 million as of December 2021. Across the world, conventional security systems (password and PIN) face…

The Central Bank of Seychelles (CBS) says it will introduce e-money regulation by June this year in order to encourage and support investment into the market. CBS said the regulation is in line with its payment system modernisation plan, its Fintech strategy and the government’s digital economy agenda, and that it will implement other incentives to attract more people online. Financial surveillance analyst at the CBS Cyril Benoiton said the regulation will provide more information on the licencing, reporting requirements and the applicable licences, offences, notification, fees and penalties. Benoiton said, “The introduction to e-money serves regulation serves to open…

Egyptian e-commerce startup Kemitt has launched a new B2B platform as it diversifies its offering after strong growth in the B2C segment. Founded in 2017, Kemitt is a marketplace that connects product and furniture designers with consumers, handling the manufacturing, overheads, and last-mile logistics. The online platform allows customers to access over 30,000 SKUs, with an on-demand manufacturing option and 7-12 day delivery services to their doorstep. Kemitt, which raised a six-figure US dollar seed funding round a year ago, has now launched a B2B marketplace for furniture, home accessories, and materials. The platform makes procurement simple by providing an…

Nigerian fintech startup Syarpa has closed a US$500,000 pre-seed round of funding to help it expand across Europe and Africa. Syarpa enables users to carry out both international money transfers and crypto exchanges by providing fiat and crypto payment solutions, has over 2,000 users, aand has facilitated transactions worth over US$4 million since launch. The startup is now planning expansion across Europe and Africa after raising a US$500,000 pre-seed funding round led by CrossFund and FirstFounders and also featuring Yolo Investments and a strategic angel investor. “Moving funds or purchasing goods across borders is too complicated. People in Nigeria need…

South African fintech startup Stitch has launched LinkPay, allowing businesses in South Africa and Nigeria to enable users to link their financial accounts and pay securely via instant bank transfer, in seconds. The Stitch API allows developers to connect apps to financial accounts within minutes, allowing their users to share their transaction histories and balances, confirm their identities, and initiate payments. This tooling allows companies to innovate with new and improved services including personal finance, lending, insurance, payments and wealth management. Stitch also enables fintechs to work with traditional financial institutions in a safer and more compliant way. Stitch raised…