Browsing: Andela

Dream VC launches fellowship programs to inspire investors in Africa. www.theexchange.africa

The application for this programme went live on March 8 and will be processed on a rolling basis until the deadline on May 1, 2022, at 11:59 GMT.

The rigorous and immersive Investor accelerator programme will launch in June 2022, running for 20 weeks until late October.

Participants in this programme will be taught actively, with multiple live sessions every week, occurring on evenings and weekends to engage them. Investor accelerator guarantees over 800 hours of content, distributed across strategic block-based learning and complemented by a team of panels with leading industry professionals like GPs and Executives in many Venture Capital firms actively investing in or based out of Africa markets.…

The Harambeans are young entrepreneurs transforming the innovative African ecosystem. www.theexchange.africa

In the latest fundraising led by B Capital Group, Flutterwave raised US$250 million, with participation from Alta Park Capital LP, Whale Rock Capital and Lux Capital.

Flutterwave said in an emailed statement on Wednesday. “The investment has enabled the company to become the highest valued African startup,” a Flutterwave email read.

Flutterwave has processed transactions worth more than US$16 million in over 50 million transactions across dozens of countries in Africa, facilitating cross-border transactions in multiple currencies for companies, including Uber Technologies Inc., Booking.com and Alibaba’s Alipay. It has evolved beyond payments products to an online marketplace and a lending channel to small and medium businesses.

With operations from the Nigerian commercial hub of Lagos to Nairobi, Kenya, the San Francisco-based company will continue to grow in East Africa. According to Flutterwave’s software engineer, the company also plans to expand its Francophone African nations such as Senegal and Cameroon.…

AltSchool Africa in Nigeria. AltSchool provides a solution as an online school with a curriculum to improve/upskill non-technical people with technical and soft skills. www.theexchange.africa

While tech has presented an avenue to create jobs, supply isn’t catching up with demand. Additionally, the continent’s best talents are leaving in droves to foreign companies in the U.S, Canada, the U.K., and Germany.

AltShcool Africa founded by Adewale Yusuf, Akintunde Sultan and Opeyemi Awoyemi last October in Nigeria, has already received more than 8,000 applications for its software engineering program which starts in April. 

These applications come from 19 countries (including 14 African countries) and Yusuf said the company received the most entries from Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Kenya and Botswana. …

Nigeria’s fintech unicorns are leading the way in Africa. Nigeria has four of the leading fintech unicorns on the continent. www.theexchange.africa

PAGA, a payment processing company in Nigeria (similar to PAYPAL) started by Tayo Oviosu in 2009 is on track to potentially be the next unicorn as it processed $2.3 billion worth of transactions in 2020 and $8 billion during the past four years. The company is now expanding into Ethiopia and Mexico as part of its global growth plan.

Another future unicorn is CNG TRANSFER founded during the pandemic by Emmanuel Tochi and Vincent Omulo, a Nigerian and Kenyan, respectively. The startup’s flagship product is www.Transfy.io – a cross border intra-African money transfer platform built on blockchain enabling Africans to transparently move money from one country to another at no cost. Within a year of launch, they have already processed 100 million of Kenyan Shillings in Kenya alone while operational in Nigeria, Zambia, Botswana, South Africa, Rwanda and Ghana.…