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Egyptian ride-sharing company Swvl plans to go public in a $1.5B SPAC merger
Cairo and Dubai-based ride-sharing company Swvl plans to go public in a merger with special purpose acquisition company Queen’s Gambit Growth Capital, Swvl said Tuesday. The deal will see Swvl valued at roughly $1.5 billion.
Swvl was founded by Mostafa Kandil, Mahmoud Nouh and Ahmed Sabbah in 2017. The trio started the company as a bus-hailing service in Egypt and other ride-sharing services in emerging markets with fragmented public transportation.
Its services, mainly bus-hailing, enables users to make intra-state journeys by booking seats on buses running a fixed route. This is pocket-friendly for residents in these markets compared to single-rider options and helps reduce emissions (Swvl claims it has prevented over 240 million pounds of carbon emission since inception).
After its Egypt launch, Swvl expanded to Kenya, Pakistan, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The company also moved its headquarters to Dubai as part of its strategy to become a global company.
Swvl offerings have expanded beyond bus-hailing services. Now, the company offers inter-city rides, car ride-sharing, and corporate services across the 10 cities it operates in across Africa and the Middle East.
Queen’s Gambit, the women-led SPAC in charge of the deal, raised $300 million in January and added $45 million via an underwriters’ overallotment option focusing on startups in clean energy, healthcare and mobility sectors.
The statement also mentions a group of investors — Agility, Luxor Capital and Zain Group — which will contribute $100 million through a private investment in public equity, or PIPE.
Per Crunchbase, Swvl has raised over $170 million. From an African perspective, Swvl features as one of the most venture-backed startups on the continent. The company has been touted to reach unicorn status in the past and will when this SPAC merger is completed.
The company will aptly trade under the ticker SWVL. The listing will make it the first Egyptian startup to go public outside Egypt and the second to go public after Fawry. It will also make the mobility company the largest African unicorn debut on any U.S.-listed exchange, beating Jumia’s debut of $1.1 billion on the NYSE. In the Middle East, Swvl joins music-streaming platform Anghami as the second startup to go public via a SPAC merger.
Swvl had annual gross revenue of $26 million in 2020, according to the statement, and the company expects its annual gross revenue to increase to $79 million this year and $1 billion by 2025 after expanding to 20 countries across five continents.
On why Queen’s Gambit picked Swvl for this deal, Victoria Grace, founder and CEO, said in a statement that the company fit the profile of what she was looking for: “a disruptive platform that solves complex challenges and empowers underserved populations.”
“Having established a leadership position in key emerging markets, we believe Swvl is ready to capitalize on a truly global market opportunity,” she added.
In May, TechCrunch wrote that SPACs didn’t target African startups for several reasons, including a lack of global appeal and private capital and market satisfaction. Judging by Grace’s comments, Swvl has that global appeal and is ready to venture into the public market despite being in operation for just four years.
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Nigeria leads mobile app market growth in Africa as use of gaming apps surge 44% from Q1 2020
The pandemic’s effect on the global app market has not been hard to miss. In the first quarter and first half of this year, consumer spending in mobile apps hit new records at $32 billion and $64.9 billion, respectively.
In Africa, it can be tough to call out exact numbers on consumer spending because the continent gets hardly a mention in global app market reports. Yet, other metrics are worth looking at, and a new report from AppsFlyer in collaboration with Google has some important insights into how the African app market has fared since the pandemic broke out last year.
The report tracked mobile app activities across three of Africa’s largest app markets (Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa) between Q1 2020 and Q1 2021.
From the first half of 2020 to the first half of 2021, the African mobile app industry (which is predominantly Android) increased by 41% in overall installs. This was analyzed from 6,000 apps and 2 billion installs in the three markets. Nigeria registered the highest growth, with a 43% rise; South Africa’s market increased by 37% and Kenya increased 29%.
Lockdown numbers
On March 22, 2020, Rwanda imposed Africa’s first lockdown. Subsequently, other countries followed; (those in the report) Kenya (March 25), South Africa (March 27), and Nigeria (March 30).
As more people spent time at home from Q2 2020, app installs increased by 20% across the three countries. South Africans were the quickest to take to their phones as the lockdowns hit with installs increasing by 17% from the previous quarter.
On the other hand, Nigerians and Kenyans recorded a 2% and 9% increase, respectively. The report attributes the disparity to the varying levels of restrictions each country faced; South Africa experienced the strictest and most frequent.
Per the report, gaming apps showed strong performance between Q1 and Q2 2020. The segment experienced a 50% growth compared to an 8% increase in nongaming apps pulled. It followed a global trend where gaming apps surged to a record high in Q2 2020, at 14 billion downloads globally.
In-app purchasing revenue and almost year-on-year growth
According to AppsFlyer, the biggest trend it noticed was in in-app purchasing revenue. In Q3 2020, in-app purchasing revenue numbers grew with a staggering 136% increase compared to Q2 2020, and accounted for 33% of 2020’s total revenue, “highlighting just how much African consumers were spending within apps, from retail purchases to gaming upgrades.”
In-app purchasing revenue among South African consumers increased by 213%, while Nigeria and Kenyan consumers recorded 141% and 74% increases, respectively.
On the advertising front and on an almost year-on-year basis, in-app advertising revenue also increased significantly as Africans were glued to their smartphones more than ever. Per the report, in-app advertising revenue increased 167% between Q2 2020 to Q1 2021.
For gaming and non-gaming apps, which was highlighted between the first two quarters, they both increased by 44% and 40% respectively in Q1 2021 compared to Q2 2020.
Fintech and super apps
In the last five years, fintech has dominated VC investments in African startups. It’s a no brainer why there is so much affinity for the sector. Fintechs create so much value for Africa’s mobile-first population, with large sections of unbanked, underbanked and banked people. This value is why all but one of the continent’s billion-dollar startups are fintech.
African fintechs have grown by 89.4% between 2017 and 2021, according to a Disrupt Africa report. Now, there are more than 570 startups on the continent. Many fintechs are mobile-based, therefore reflecting the number of fintech apps Africans use each day. Consumers in South Africa and Nigeria saw year-on-year growth in finance app installs by 116% and 60%, respectively.
AppsFlyer says that like fintech apps, super apps are on the rise as well. These “all-in-one” apps offer users a range of functions such as banking, messaging, shopping and ride-hailing. The report says their rise, partly due to device limitations on the continent, owes much to the same conditions that have led to a surge in fintech apps: systemic underbanking.
“Super apps remove some of the barriers that these users face, as well as providing a level of customer insight and experience that traditional banks cannot,” the report said.
Daniel Junowicz, RVP EMEA & Strategic Projects for AppsFlyer, commenting on the trends highlighted in the report said, “…The mobile app space in Africa is thriving despite the turmoil of last year. Installs are growing, and consumers are spending more money than ever before, highlighting just how important mobile can be for businesses when it comes to driving revenue.”
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Kenya’s Ajua acquires WayaWaya to consolidate consumer experience play in African SMEs
Kenyan consumer experience platform for businesses in Africa, Ajua today announced that it has acquired WayaWaya, a Kenya-based AI and ML messaging and payments company.
WayaWaya’s customers and partners include the likes of I&M Bank, Interswitch and MTN. The company offers a range of services, from digital banking and payment services to financial services APIs and payment bots.
According to Ajua, the acquisition is primarily focused on WayaWaya’s payments bots system known as Janja. The platform, which has customers like Airtel, Ezee Money, Housing Finance Company of Kenya (HF Group), enables borderless banking and payments across apps and social media platforms. Teddy Ogallo, the entrepreneur who founded WayaWaya, joins Ajua as VP of Product APIs and Integrations.
Per Crunchbase, WayaWaya has just raised $75,000. Although the two companies did not disclose the financial details of the acquisition, Ajua is expected to have paid 10 times more than WayaWaya’s total raise.
Ajua, formerly mSurvey, was founded in 2012 by Kenfield Griffith. The company is solving a consumer data problem for African businesses to understand their business better and drive growth.
“There’s a lot of commerce happening on the continent and Ajua wants companies to move from transaction numbers to the customers behind such transaction,” Griffith told TechCrunch. “Imagine if we knew what drove consumer habits for businesses. I mean, that’s a huge exponential curve for African businesses.”
Teddy Ogallo (Founder, WayaWaya) & Kenfield Griffith (CEO, Ajua)
Nigeria’s SME market alone is valued at $220 billion annually. And while businesses, mostly big enterprises, can afford customer communication tools, a large segment of small businesses are being left out. Ajua’s play is to use data and analytics to connect companies with their customers in real time. “We’ve taken what makes enterprise customers successful, and we’re capturing it in a simple format so SMEs can have the same tools,” Griffith added.
Since most consumer behavior for these SMEs happens offline, Ajua gives businesses unique USSD codes to receive payments, get feedback and offer discounts to their customers. It is one of the products Ajua has launched over the years for customer feedback at the point of service to businesses that cumulatively have over 45 million customers.
The company’s partners and clients also include Coca-Cola, FBNQuest, GoodLife Pharmacy, Java House, Safaricom, Standard Chartered and Total.
As an intelligent messaging bot, Janja is used by individuals and businesses across WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Telegram to automate customer support and make cross-border payments. So, Janja’s integration into Ajua’s product stack will close much of the acquirer’s customer experience loop by automating responses and giving customers what they want, when they want it.
This acquisition comes a month after Ajua announced that it partnered with telecom operator MTN Nigeria to launch a customer management product for Nigerian businesses. The product called MTN EnGauge carries the same features present in Ajua but, in this case, is tailored solely for businesses using the MTN network. The roll-out is expected to generate more data for Ajua’s thousands of users. It will also be upgraded to incorporate Janja and other services.
In hindsight, it appears Ajua could have created a product like Janja in-house due to its vast experience in the consumer experience space. However, the company chose an acquisition and Griffith gave two reasons why — building a similar product would have taken a long time and Ogallo seemed to know Janja’s business and operations so well, it just made sense to get him on board.
“Teddy was going the same direction we’re going. We just thought to acquire WayaWaya instead and make a really good company out of both products attempting to solve the same problem. To me, it’s all about solving the problem together rather than going alone,” said the CEO.
On why he accepted the acquisition, Ogallo, who now has a new role, noted that Ajua’s ability to scale customer service and experience and also help businesses was one reason and earned admiration from him. “Seeing how WayaWaya’s technology can complement Ajua’s innovative products and services, and help scale and monetize businesses, is an exciting opportunity for us, and we are happy that our teams will be collaborating to build something unique for the continent,” he added.
This is a solid infrastructure play from Ajua coming from a founder who is a massive advocate of acquisition and consolidation. Griffith believes that the two are strategies for a speedier route to new markets and channels in Africa.
“I think there are lots of ways we can build the ecosystem. There are lots of young talent building stuff, and they don’t have access to capital to get to the next stage. The question is if they want to race to the finish line or take off time and get acquired. I think there’s a huge opportunity in Africa if you want to solve complex problems by acquisition.”
There has been an uptick in local acquisitions in Africa from startups within a single country and between two countries in the past three years. For the former, Nigerian recruitment platform Jobberman’s acquisition of NGCareers last year comes to mind. And there are pan-African instances like Lagos-based hub CcHub’s acquisition of iHub, its Nairobi counterpart; Ethiopian software provider Apposit sell-off to Nigerian fintech Paga; and Johannesburg-based fintech MFS Africa acquiring Uganda’s Beyonic.
The common theme among the acquisitions (and most African acquisitions) is their undisclosed sums. For Ajua, Griffith cited regulatory issues as one reason why the company is keeping the figure under wraps.
Since launching nine years ago, Ajua has raised a total of $3.5 million, according to Crunchbase. Given the nature of this acquisition and partnership with MTN, the company might set sights on another fundraise to scale aggressively into Nigeria (a market it entered in 2019) and other African countries.
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Andela begins global expansion in 37 countries months after going remote across Africa
More than a year after the pandemic began, remote work shows no signs of going away. While it has its cons, it remains top of mind for potential employees around the world before joining a new company.
But while most people in Africa still go to physical offices despite the pandemic, a few companies have nevertheless embraced this concept. Andela, a New York-based startup that helps tech companies build remote engineering teams from Africa, was one of the first to publicly announce it was going remote on the continent.
Today, it is doubling down on this effort by announcing the global expansion of its engineering talent. Over the past six months, the company has seen a 750% increase in applicants outside Africa. More than 30% of Andela’s inbound engineer applications also came from outside the continent in March alone. Half this number came from Latin America while Africa saw a 500% increase in applications as well.
When Andela launched in 2014, it built hubs in Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda to source, vet and train engineers to be part of remote teams for international companies. It also tested satellite models in Egypt and Ghana as substitutes to physical hubs.
The company would issue a call for applications, select a few (less than 1%), pay them a salary for the first six months and provide them with housing and food. It also helped developers improve their skills via training and mentorship. Over 100,000 engineers have taken part in the company’s learning network and community, and, as of 2019, Andela had more than 1,500 engineers on its payroll.
However, after noticing that this model wasn’t sustainable, it began to make changes.
In September 2019, it let go of 420 junior engineers across Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria. Nine months later, citing the pandemic, it laid off 135 employees while introducing salary cuts for senior staff. But despite the layoffs, the pandemic provided some form of clarity to how Andela wanted to operate — which was remote, judging by the success of the satellite models.
“In the very beginning, a developer had to be in Lagos to work with Andela. Then it became living in Nigeria. Then Kenya. Then Uganda, Rwanda,” CEO Jeremy Johnson told TechCrunch. “Before the pandemic, Andela was opening applications in country after country. The pandemic came and changed that as we opened up to the entire continent.”
Shutting down its existing physical campuses and going remote also helped the company focus on getting engineers with more experience to meet its clients’ requirements. That experiment, which the company conducted in less than a year, is also part of its mission to be a global company.
“That went so well and we thought ‘what if we accelerated it now that we’re remote and just enable applicants from anywhere?’ because it was always the plan to become a global company. That was clear, but the timing was the question. We did that and it’s been an amazing experiment,” Johnson added.
Now with its global expansion, its clients can tap into regional expertise to support international growth.
According to a statement released by the firm, it currently has engineers from 37 countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America, North America and Europe.
Johnson didn’t go into details about how many of these engineers are getting jobs from Andela or even its total developer count. He’s more interested in helping its clients solve the diversity issues that have plagued many Western corporations.
Andela is currently working with eight companies that have hired its engineers in Latin America and Africa. In addition to the diversity play, the CEO says that means Andela engineers get to prove themselves on a global playing field in a way the company has “always wanted to see.”
Andela serves more than 200 customers, including GitHub, ViacomCBS, Pluralsight, Seismic, Cloudflare, Coursera and InVision. GitHub is one company that seems to be benefitting from Andela’s new offerings. The company’s VP of Engineering, Dana Lawson, in a statement said, “As a business in the developer tool space, a lot of us are trying to enter those areas of the world (Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa) where the emergent developers are coming so we can better understand their needs. Having a local presence there with amazing talent is super valuable to building a global product.”
Image Credits: Andela
In its quest to become a global company, going up against competition is unavoidable for the seven-year-old company. But since most of these companies are horizontal marketplaces (providing a wide range of expertise), whereas Andela is vertical, Johnson believes there’s enough market share to be acquired by the company.
“We are focused on building digital products, and because of that, we’re able to do more, essentially, for our customers… That’s where our focus is — [building long-term relationships] and around building great digital products,” the CEO said.
The company was founded by Jeremy Johnson, Christina Sass, Nadayar Enegesi, Ian Carnevale, Brice Nkengsa and Iyinoluwa Aboyeji. It has raised more than $180 million (up to Series D) from firms like Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Generation Investment Management, Google Ventures and Spark Capital, at a valuation of about $700 million.
While announcing the layoffs last year, Andela said it was on an annual revenue run rate of $50 million. But when asked how this number has changed over the past year, Johnson said the company is “growing at a healthier pace as we’ve ever had.”
The future of remote work is global and Johnson believes Andela provides the vital link to talent wherever it is found. The company’s head of talent operations, Martin Chikilian, echoed similar sentiments regarding the expansion.
“We’ve seen exponential growth and interest from engineers from across Africa who want to work with some of the world’s most exciting technology-focused companies,” he said. “Growing our network of talent from Africa to include more markets is a unique proposition and we continue to match talent with opportunity beyond geographical boundaries.”
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SunCulture wants to turn Africa into the world’s next bread basket, one solar water pump at a time
The world’s food supply must double by the year 2050 to meet the demands of a growing population, according to a report from the United Nations. And as pressure mounts to find new crop land to support the growth, the world’s eyes are increasingly turning to the African continent as the next potential global bread basket.
While Africa has 65% of the world’s remaining uncultivated arable land, according to the African Development Bank, the countries on the continent face significant obstacles as they look to boost the productivity of their agricultural industries.
On the continent, 80% of families depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, but only 4% use irrigation. Many families also lack access to reliable and affordable electricity. It’s these twin problems that Samir Ibrahim and his co-founder at SunCulture, Charlie Nichols, have spent the last eight years trying to solve.
Armed with a new financing model and purpose-built small solar-powered generators and water pumps, Nichols and Ibrahim have already built a network of customers using their equipment to increase incomes by anywhere from five to 10 times their previous levels by growing higher-value cash crops, cultivating more land and raising more livestock.
The company also just closed on $14 million in funding to expand its business across Africa.
“We have to double the amount of food we have to create by 2050, and if you look at where there are enough resources to grow food — all signs point to Africa. You have a lot of farmers and a lot of land, and a lot of resources,” Ibrahim said.
African small farmers face two big problems as they look to increase productivity, Ibrahim said. One is access to markets, which alone is a huge source of food waste, and the other is food security because of a lack of stable growing conditions exacerbated by climate change.
As one small farmer told The Economist earlier this year, “The rainy season is not predictable. When it is supposed to rain it doesn’t, then it all comes at once.”
Ibrahim, who graduated from New York University in 2011, had long been drawn to the African continent. His father was born in Tanzania and his mother grew up in Kenya and they eventually found their way to the U.S. But growing up, Ibrahim was told stories about East Africa.
While pursuing a business degree at NYU Ibrahim met Nichols, who had been working on large-scale solar projects in the U.S., at an event for budding entrepreneurs in New York.
The two began a friendship and discussed potential business opportunities stemming from a paper Nichols had read about renewable energy applications in the agriculture industry.
After winning second place in a business plan competition sponsored by NYU, the two men decided to prove that they should have won first. They booked tickets to Kenya and tried to launch a pilot program for their business selling solar-powered water pumps and generators.
Conceptually solar water-pumping systems have been around for decades. But as the costs of solar equipment and energy storage have declined, the systems that leverage those components have become more accessible to a broader swath of the global population.
That timing is part of what has enabled SunCulture to succeed where other companies have stumbled. “We moved here at a time when [solar] reached grid parity in a lot of markets. It was at a time when a lot of development financiers were funding the nexus between agriculture and energy,” said Ibrahim.
Initially, the company sold its integrated energy generation and water-pumping systems to the middle income farmers who hold jobs in cities like Nairobi and cultivate crops on land they own in rural areas. These “telephone farmers” were willing to spend the $5,000 required to install SunCulture’s initial systems.
Now, the cost of a system is somewhere between $500 and $1,000 and is more accessible for the 570 million farming households across the word — with the company’s “pay-as-you-grow” model.
It’s a spin on what’s become a popular business model for the distribution of solar systems of all types across Africa. Investors have poured nearly $1 billion into the development of off-grid solar energy and retail technology companies like M-kopa, Greenlight Planet, d.light design, ZOLA Electric and SolarHome, according to Ibrahim. In some ways, SunCulture just extends that model to agricultural applications.
“We have had to bundle services and financing. The reason this particularly works is because our customers are increasing their incomes four or five times,” said Ibrahim. “Most of the money has been going to consuming power. This is the first time there has been productive power.”
SunCulture’s hardware consists of 300-watt solar panels and a 440-watt-hour battery system. The batteries can support up to four lights, two phones and a plug-in submersible water pump.
The company’s best-selling product line can support irrigation for a two-and-a-half acre farm, Ibrahim said. “We see ourselves as an entry point for other types of appliances. We’re growing to be the largest solar company for Africa.”
With the $14 million in funding, from investors including Energy Access Ventures (EAV), Électricité de France (EDF), Acumen Capital Partners (ACP) and Dream Project Incubators (DPI), SunCulture will expand its footprint in Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Zambia, Senegal, Togo and Cote D’Ivoire, the company said.
Ekta Partners acted as the financial advisor for the deal, while CrossBoundary provided additional advisory support, including an analysis on the market opportunity and competitive landscape, under the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)’s Kenya Investment Mechanism Program.
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Why COVID-19 could delay Interswitch, Africa’s next big IPO
The economic effects of COVID-19 could delay Africa’s next big IPO — that of Nigerian fintech unicorn Interswitch.
If so, it wouldn’t be the first time the Lagos-based payments company’s plans for going public were postponed; the tech world has been anticipating Interswitch’s stock market debut since 2016.
For the continent’s innovation ecosystem, there’s a lot riding on the digital finance company’s IPO. After e-commerce venture Jumia, it would become only the second listing of a VC-backed African tech company on a major exchange. And Interswitch’s stock market debut — when it occurs — could bring more investor attention and less controversy to the region’s startup scene.
What is Interswitch?
TechCrunch reached out to Interswitch on the window for listing, but the company declined to comment. The tech firm’s path from startup to IPO aspirant traces back to the vision of founder Mitchell Elegbe, a Nigerian electrical engineering graduate whose entire career has pretty much been Interswitch.
Africa’s tech scene is still fairly young, but it does have a timeline with several definitive points. An early one would be the success of mobile money in East Africa, with the launch of Safaricom’s M-Pesa in 2007. Another is the notable wave of VC-backed startups and founders that launched around 2010.
Interswitch CEO Mitchell Elegbe (Photo Credits: Interswitch)
With Interswtich, Elegbe pre-dated both by a number of years, founding his fintech company back in 2002 to connect Nigeria’s largely disconnected banking system. The firm became a pioneer of the infrastructure to digitize Nigeria’s economy.
Interswitch created the first electronic switch whereby Nigerian financial institutions could communicate and thereby operate ATMs and point of sales operations. The company now provides much of the rails for Nigeria’s online banking system.
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Kenya turns to M-Pesa mobile-money to stem the spread of COVID-19
Kenya’s largest teleco, Safaricom, will implement a fee-waiver on East Africa’s leading mobile-money product, M-Pesa, to reduce the physical exchange of currency in response to the COVID-19 outbreak.
The company announced that all person-to-person (P2P) transactions under 1,000 Kenyan Schillings (≈ $10) would be free starting Tuesday for the next 90 days.
The move came after Safaricom met with the country’s Central Bank and per a directive from Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta “to explore ways of deepening mobile-money usage to reduce risk of spreading the virus through physical handling of cash,” according to a release provided to TechCrunch from Safaricom.
To encourage the use of digital payments over cash, the East African telecom will also allow SMEs to increase their daily M-Pesa transaction limits from 70,000 Kenyan Schillings to 150,000 (≈ $700 to $1,500).
The measures represent the ability of the Kenyan government to use digital finance as a lever to influence social distancing and P2P transactions in an infectious health crisis.
M-Pesa has 20.5 million customers across a network of 176,000 agents and generates around one-fourth ($531 million) of Safaricom’s ≈ $2.2 billion annual revenues (2018). The company has held nearly 75% of the mobile-money market share in Kenya for nearly a decade and the country has the highest mobile-money usage rates in Africa.
In some respects, having all that output on one platform represents systemic risks to Kenya’s economy. But in the case of a global health pandemic spread by human contact, the dominance of mobile money in the country provides a policy tool to encourage digital versus physical contact on a wide scale through financial transactions.
Kenya has only three cases of COVID-19 (aka the coronavirus), according to Worldometer, but the country is taking cautionary measures. President Uhuru cancelled two foreign meetings due to the virus, the University of Nairobi shut down classes and a number of companies in the country are encouraging workers to telecommute, according to local sources and press reporting.
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Lessons from M-Pesa for Africa’s new VC-rich fintech startups
In African fintech, the fourth quarter of 2019 brought big money to new entrants.
Chinese investors put $220 million into OPay and PalmPay — two fledgling startups with plans to scale in Nigeria and the broader continent. Several sources told me the big bucks had created anxiety for more than few payments ventures in Nigeria with similar strategies and smaller coffers. They may not need to fret just yet, however: lessons from Africa’s most successful mobile-money case study, M-Pesa, suggest that VC alone won’t buy scale in digital finance.
Startups and fintech in Africa
Over the last decade, Africa has been in the midst of a startup boom accompanied by big growth in VC and improvements in internet and mobile penetration.
Some definitive country centers for company formation, tech hubs and investment have emerged; Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya lead the continent in numbers for all those categories. Additional strong and emerging points for innovation and startups across Africa’s 54 countries and 1.2 billion people include Ghana, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Senegal.
The continent surpassed $1 billion in VC to startups in 2018 and per research done by Partech and WeeTracker, fintech is the focus of the bulk of capital and deal-flow.
By several estimates, Africa is home to the largest share of the world’s unbanked and underbanked population.
This runs parallel to the region’s off-the-grid SME’s and economic activity — on display and in commercial motion through the street traders, roadside kiosks and open-air markets common from Nairobi to Lagos.
IMF estimates have pegged Africa’s informal economy as one of the largest in the world. Thousands of fintech startups have descended onto this large pool of unbanked and underbranked citizens and SMEs looking to grow digital finance products and market share.
In this race, the West African nation of Nigeria — home to Africa’s largest economy and population — is becoming an epicenter for VC. Many fintech-related companies are adopting a strategy of scaling there first before expanding outward.
Enter PalmPay and OPay
That includes new entrants OPay and PalmPay, which raised so much capital in fourth quarter 2019. It’s notable that both were founded in 2019 and largely incubated by Chinese actors.
PalmPay, a consumer-oriented payments product, went live in November with a $40 million seed-round (one of the largest in Africa in 2019) led by Africa’s biggest mobile-phones seller — China’s Transsion. The startup was upfront about its ambitions, stating its goals to become “Africa’s largest financial services platform,” in a company statement.
To that end, PalmPay conveniently entered a strategic partnership with its lead investor. The startup’s payment app will come pre-installed on Transsion’s mobile device brands, such as Tecno, in Africa — for an estimated reach of 20 million phones in 2020.
PalmPay also launched in Ghana in November and its U.K. and Africa-based CEO, Greg Reeve, confirmed plans to expand to additional African countries in 2020.
If PalmPay’s $40 million seed round got founders’ attention, OPay’s $120 million Series B created shock-waves, coming just months after the mobile-based fintech venture raised $50 million — making OPay’s $170 million capital haul equivalent to roughly a fifth of all VC raised in Africa in 2018.
Founded by Chinese owned consumer internet company Opera — and backed by 9 Chinese investors — OPay is the payment utility for a suite of Opera -developed internet based commercial products in Nigeria that include ride-hail apps ORide and OCar and food delivery service OFood.
With its latest Series A, OPay announced it would expand in Kenya, South Africa, and Ghana.
In Nigeria, OPay’s $170 million Series A and B announced in the span of months dwarfs just about anything raised by new and existing fintech players, with the exception of Interswitch.
The homegrown payments processing company — which pioneered much of Nigeria’s digital finance infrastructure — reached unicorn status in November when Visa took a reported $200 million minority stake in the venture.
A sampling of more common funding amounts for payments ventures in Nigeria includes established fintech company Paga’s $10 million Series B. Recent market entrant Chipper Cash’s May 2019 seed-round was $2.4 million.
There is a large disparity between fintech startups in Nigeria with capital raises in ones and tens of millions vs. OPay and PalmPay’s $40 and $120 million rounds. Conventional wisdom could be that the big-capital, big spending firms have an unmistakable advantage in scaling digital payments in Nigeria and other markets.
A look at Kenya’s M-Pesa may prove otherwise.
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Africa Roundup: Nigerian fintech gets $360M, mints unicorn, draws Chinese VC
November 2019 could mark when Nigeria (arguably) became Africa’s unofficial capital for fintech investment and digital finance startups.
The month saw $360 million invested in Nigerian-focused payment ventures. That is equivalent to roughly one-third of all the startup VC raised for the entire continent in 2018, according to Partech stats.
A notable trend-within-the-trend is that more than half — or $170 million — of the funding to Nigerian fintech ventures in November came from Chinese investors. This marks a pivot (to tech) in China’s engagement with Africa. We’ll get to that.
Before the big Chinese-backed rounds, one of Nigeria’s earliest fintech companies, Interswitch, confirmed its $1 billion valuation after Visa took a minority stake in the company. Interswitch would not disclose the amount to TechCrunch, but Sky News reporting pegged it at $200 million for 20%.
Founded in 2002 by Mitchell Elegbe, Interswitch pioneered the infrastructure to digitize Nigeria’s then predominantly paper-ledger and cash-based economy.
The company now provides much of the tech-wiring for Nigeria’s online banking system that serves Africa’s largest economy and population. Interswitch offers a number of personal and business finance products, including its Verve payment cards and Quickteller payment app.
The financial services firm has expanded its physical presence to Uganda, Gambia and Kenya . The Nigerian company also sells its products in 23 African countries and launched a partnership in August for Verve cardholders to make payments on Discover’s global network.
Visa and Interswitch touted the equity investment as a strategic collaboration between the two companies, without a lot of detail on what that will mean.
One point TechCrunch did lock down is Interswitch’s (long-awaited) and imminent IPO. A source close to the matter said the company will list on a major exchange by mid-2020.
For the near to medium-term, Interswitch could stand as Africa’s sole tech-unicorn, as e-commerce venture Jumia’s volatile share-price and declining market-cap — since an April IPO — have dropped the company’s valuation below $1 billion.
Circling back to China, November was the month that signaled Chinese actors are all in on African tech.
In two separate rounds, Chinese investors put $220 million into OPay and PalmPay — two fledgling startups with plans to scale in Nigeria and the broader continent.
PalmPay, a consumer-oriented payments product, went live last month with a $40 million seed round (one of the largest in Africa in 2019) led by Africa’s biggest mobile-phone seller — China’s Transsion.
The startup was upfront about its ambitions, stating in a company release its goals to become “Africa’s largest financial services platform.”
To that end, PalmPay conveniently entered a strategic partnership with its lead investor. The startup’s payment app will come pre-installed on Transsion’s mobile device brands, such as Tecno, in Africa — for an estimated reach of 20 million phones.
PalmPay also launched in Ghana in November and its U.K. and Africa-based CEO, Greg Reeve, confirmed plans to expand to additional African countries in 2020.
OPay’s $120 million Series B was announced several days after the PalmPay news and came only months after the mobile-based fintech venture raised $50 million.
Founded by Chinese-owned consumer internet company Opera — and backed by nine Chinese investors — OPay is the payment utility for a suite of Opera -developed internet-based commercial products in Nigeria. These include ride-hail apps ORide and OCar and food delivery service OFood.
With its latest Series A, OPay announced it would expand in Kenya, South Africa and Ghana.
Though it wasn’t fintech, Chinese investors also backed a (reported) $30 million Series B for East African trucking logistics company Lori Systems in November.
With OPay, PalmPay and Lori Systems, startups in Africa have raised a combined $240 million from 15 Chinese investors in a span of months.
There are a number of things to note and watch out for here, as TechCrunch reporting has illuminated (and will continue to do in follow-on coverage).
These moves mark a next chapter in China’s engagement in Africa and could raise some new issues. Hereto, the country’s interaction with Africa’s tech ecosystem has been relatively light compared to China’s deal-making on infrastructure and commodities.
There continues to be plenty of debate (and critique) of China’s role in Africa. This new digital phase will certainly add a fresh component to all that. One thing to track will be data-privacy and national-security concerns that may emerge around Chinese actors investing heavily in African mobile consumer platforms.
We’ve seen lines (allegedly) blur on these matters between Chinese state and private-sector actors with companies such as Huawei.
As OPay and PalmPay expand, they may need to do some reassuring of African regulators as countries (such as Kenya) establish more formal consumer protection protocols for digital platforms.
One more thing to follow on OPay’s funding and planned expansion is the extent to which it puts Opera (and its entire suite of consumer internet products) in competition with multiple actors in Africa’s startup ecosystem. Opera’s Africa ventures could go head to head with Uber, Jumia and M-Pesa — the mobile money-product that put Kenya out front on digital finance in Africa before Nigeria.
Shifting back to American engagement in African tech, Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey was on the continent in November. No sooner than he’d finished his first trip, Dorsey announced plans to move to Africa in 2020, for three to six months, saying on Twitter, “Africa will define the future (especially the bitcoin one!).”
We still don’t know much about what this last trip — or his future foray — mean in terms of concrete partnerships, investment or market moves in Africa from Dorsey and his companies.
He visited Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa and Ethiopia and met with leaders at Nigeria’s CcHub (Bosun Tijani), Ethiopia’s Ice Addis (Markos Lemma) and did some meetings with fintech founders in Lagos (Paga’s Tayo Oviosu).
I know pretty well most of the organizations and people Dorsey talked to and nothing has shaken out yet in terms of partnership or investment news from his recent trip.
On what could come out of Dorsey’s 2020 move to Africa, per his tweet and news highlighted in this roundup, a good bet would be it will have something to do with fintech and Square.
More Africa-related stories @TechCrunch
- Lime is launching electric scooters in Cape Town
- Pan-African e-tailer Jumia grows 3Q revenue, e-payments and losses
- Sim Shagaya’s uLesson African edtech startup raises $3.1M
- Samasource raises $14.8M for global AI data biz driven from Africa
- Chaka opens up global investing to Africa’s most populous nation
- Solar-based ISP startup Tizeti launches 4G LTE network in Nigeria
- Senegal’s NIMA Codes to launch address app in 15 African countries
African tech around the ‘net
- Kenyan e-commerce startup Copia nets $26m Series B funding
- Nigerian entrepreneur Temie Giwa-Tubosun wins Jack Ma’s African business hero award
- Kenyan public WiFi sensation BRCK launches In South Africa
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Bosun Tijani talks strategy as CEO of Africa’s new largest tech hub
With CcHub‘s acquisition of iHub in September, Nigerian Bosun Tijani is at the helm of (arguably) the largest tech network in Africa.
He is now CEO of both organizations, including their robust membership rosters, startup incubation programs, global partnerships and VC activities from Nigeria to Kenya .
One could conclude Tijani has become one of the most powerful figures in African tech with the CcHub/iHub merger. But that would be a little shortsighted.
The techie from Lagos still faces plenty of challenges and unknowns in integrating two innovation hubs that lie 3,818 flight kilometers apart. Several sources speaking on background over the last year have indicated iHub was experiencing financial difficulties.
Tijani offered TechCrunch some initial details last month on how the acquisition will fall together.
But more recently he shared greater detail on his strategy for operating the multi-country innovation network. A big test for Tijani will be aligning the organizations on a path to sustainability. The buzzword is usually code for generating consistent operating income beyond expenses.
The growth of innovation spaces, accelerators and incubators in Africa — which tally 618 per GSMA stats — is often lauded as an achievement for the continent’s tech ecosystem.
But debate on how these focal points for startup formation, training and IT activity fund themselves is ever-present.
Grant income has served as a dominant revenue source for Africa’s tech hubs — including iHub in its early days — though many have worked to diversify.
That includes CcHub, according to Tijani, who plans to continue the trend across the expanded CcHub/iHub organization.
“When people talk about sustainability, we’ve been in business for nine years,” he notes of CcHub Nigeria.
“We de-emphasized grant funding six years ago; most of our revenue is actually earned revenue.”
On income sources Tijani looks to foster across both organizations, he named consulting services (for corporates, governments and development agencies), events services and generating greater return on investment.
iHub has been active with startup seed investments and CcHub has a portfolio of companies through its Growth Capital Fund.
“Our size will become a major part of us being able to invest in startups, and the longer we stay invested the more we will start to see significant returns and exits,” said Tijani.
The CcHub/iHub nexus will also use its size to leverage more partnerships. Tijani and team have already mastered gaining collaborations with big African and global tech names, such as MainOne and Facebook.
Tijani will look to connect iHub to CcHub’s Google-sponsored Pitch Drive — which has done African startup tours of Asia and Europe — and potentially take the show to the U.S.
“We’re talking about it,” Tijani said, of a U.S. pitch trip. And this could lead to a permanent presence in San Francisco for the new CcHub/iHub entity.
“Beyond just a tour, we want to build strong presence in the Bay Area,” Tijani said, but didn’t offer more specifics on what that could mean.
So on the list of things to emerge from the CcHub-iHub acquisition, African tech planting a big flag in San Francisco is a future possibility.
A more immediate result of the union between the innovation spaces will be Bosun Tijani becoming a regular sight on flights between Lagos and Nairobi.
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