Year: 2021

By his own admission, Chris Thür wasn’t the most obvious person to start a music education startup.

Thür (previously a laser researcher) recalled an early meeting with an investor who asked whether he and co-founder Mikko Kaipainen (an electrical engineer) were music teachers or musicians, ultimately going “down the list of all the things that would somewhat qualify us for that world.” Each time, they had to tell him no.

“We were just two people who wanted to play an instrument and felt we were missing out,” Thür said. “Obviously, we were not the only ones.”

While they didn’t convince that unnamed investor to write a check, Thür and Kaipainen did start Yousician, which now reaches 20 million monthly users across its two apps — the music education app Yousician and the guitar tuning app GuitarTuna. And the Helsinki-based startup is announcing today that it has raised $29 million in Series B funding.

Thür (Yousician’s CEO) said that it’s been “a bit of a journey” to get here. The company, previously known as Ovelin, was founded a decade ago, and it originally focused exclusively on kids before finding success with a less age-specific strategy.

Yousician CEO Chris Thür

He described the Yousician app as providing an interactive, gamified approach to learning guitar, piano, ukulele, bass or singing — but not too game-like. Users advance through a standard syllabus, playing for 15 or 20 minutes a day, with the app listening to their performance and awarding one to three stars based on how many mistakes they made. Users get one lesson per day for free, but if they want access to more lessons and the full library of songs (or if they want to learn multiple instruments), they need to sign up for a Premium or Premium+ subscription, with pricing starting at $19.99 per month.

Thür said Yousician allows people to learn music on their own schedule, at a much lower cost than in-person lessons. At the same time, he suggested that it’s not a “zero sum” competition with music teachers; there are teachers who recommend Yousician to their students as a way to keep practicing and learning between lessons.

As an example of how Yousician can help its users, Thür pointed to the story of Karen Gadd, who (as told in the video below) “in one year went from never having played an instrument to performing on-stage” with her band — though he hastened to add that the app is beneficial even if you never perform for anyone else.

“We want to make musicality to be as common as literacy,” Thür said. “Everyone should play from time to time and get all those benefits […] I think learning with a teacher works for many, but unfortunately it doesn’t work for everyone.”

The past year, he said, has been “a difficult year and an interesting year for us.” With students largely shifting to remote learning, “a lot of music lessons didn’t happen,” so Yousician tried to make up for some of those lost lessons by providing free premium subscriptions to more than 100,000 teachers and students.

At the same time, many people became interested in learning an instrument during the pandemic as part of a general focus on self-improvement, leading to “a huge organic increase” in usage. Monthly users grew from 14.5 million to 20 million, while subscriptions increased 80%, with the company bringing in revenue of $50 million last year.

Yousician has now raised a total of $35 million. True Ventures led the round, with participation from new investors Amazon’s Alexa Fund and MPL Ventures, as well as Zynga founder Mark Pincus, LAUNCH Fund founder Jason Calacanis, Unity Technologies founder David Helgason, Trivago co-founder Rolf Schrömgens, Cooler Future founder Moaffak Ahmed and Blue Bottle Coffee Company executive chairman Bryan Meehan.

“Yousician has been the leading platform for music instruction for nearly a decade, and people – now more than ever – are turning to the pursuit of creativity and music with renewed vigor,” said True Ventures co-founder Jon Callaghan in a statement. “We’re proud to stand behind a company and team that brings the joy and excitement of playing an instrument into more homes and families.”

Thür said that with the new funding, Yousician will work the team, improve brand marketing, localize the product and build more relationships with musical artists.

MessageBird, a communications platform out of the Netherlands, had a busy day today with two huge announcements. For starters, the company got an $800 million extension on its $200 million Series C round announced last October. It then applied $600 million of the extension to buy email marketing platform SparkPost. The company’s C round now totals at least $1 billion.

Let’s start with the acquisition. MessageBird CEO Robert Vis says his company had an email component prior to the acquisition, but the chance to pick up the largest email provider in the world was too good to pass up.

“If you talk about infrastructure, we’re defining largest […] as a matter of interactions, so basically the amount of emails sent. SparkPost sends about 5 trillion emails a year. And the second thing that’s very important to us is to be able to send high scale emails when it’s really critical,” Vis told me.

With the company in the fold, it enables MessageBird, which has mostly been in Europe and Asia, to get a stronger foothold in the U.S. market. “So this is as much for us about the technology around SparkPost as it actually is for us to have market entry into the United States with a significant workforce instead of having to build that from scratch,” Vis said.

Rich Harris, CEO of SparkPost sees the deal as a way to expand SparkPost to multiple channels already available on the MessageBird platform and be a much more powerful combination together than it could have been alone.

“By joining forces with MessageBird, we will be able to bring broader, deeper value to all of our customers through any digital communications,” Harris said in a statement.

Vis agrees saying it gives his company the opportunity to upsell other MessageBird services to SparkPost customers. “SparkPost obviously only offers email. We can offer SmartPost customers way more channels. We can offer them texting, Instagram, WhatsApp or Apple Business Chat. So we feel very excited about leveraging them to go sell much more broad messenger products to their customers,” Vis said.

MessageBird announced its $240 million Series C on a $3 billion valuation last October. The company’s whopping $800 million extension brings the round to around $1 billion. It’s worth noting that the round isn’t completely closed yet, so that’s not an official figure.

“The round isn’t completely closed yet as we are still waiting on some of the funds to come in, so we cannot give you 100% final figures on the round, but we can say with confidence that the round will close at $1B or slightly higher,” a company spokesperson explained. It is announcing the funding before everything is 100% done due to regulatory requirements around the acquisition.

Eurazeo, Tiger Global, BlackRock and Owl Rock participated in the extension along with Bonnier, Glynn Capital, LGT Lightstone, Longbow, Mousse Partners and NewView Capital, as well as existing investors such as Accel, Atomico (they led the Series A and B rounds) and Y Combinator. The mix is 70% equity and 30% debt, according to the company.

Today’s acquisition comes on the heels of two others just last month when the company announced it was acquiring video meeting startup 24Sessions and Hull, a synchronization technology startup. The company also acquired Pusher, a push notification company in January, as MessageBird is using its Series C cash to quickly expand the platform.

There are lot of companies out there making robotic exoskeletons. In fact, it’s one of the more active categories in the space — and for good reason. These sorts of technologies have the ability to profoundly impact the future of how people work, move and rehabilitate.

The category also houses a surprisingly broad range of solutions, with something like the sci-fi Sarcos at one end and Roam on the other. Roam’s solution is really putting the wearable back in wearable robotics. Specifically, the company makes assistive devices out of fabrics, rather than metal or plastic.

Ultimately, that means the loss of some of the strength of more industrial solutions, but it also means they’re more suited for every day use. That’s precisely why something like the robotic smart knee orthosis makes a lot of sense. The product, which recently cleared the FDA as a Class I medical device, utilizes AI for an adapted technology that senses the wearer’s movements and adjusts accordingly.

Image Credits: Roam Robotics

“Roam is focused on a massively underserved market. More than 20% of the global population is limited by their body’s mobility, and as medical advancements help people live longer that number is only going to increase,” co-founder and CEO Tim Swift said in a release tied to the news. “Our approach to wearable robotics works seamlessly with the human body to help people lead healthier, happier and more active lives, unhindered by physical limitations.”

The product, which joins the company’s skier and military-focused offers, sports embedded sensors that can detect things like movement up and down stairs and standing up from a seated position. It utilizes a power source and air compressor to create motion to assist in movement.

The device is up for preorder and starts shipping later this summer.

Merama, a five-month old e-commerce startup focused on Latin America, announced today that it has raised $60 million in seed and Series A funding and $100 million in debt.

The money was raised “at well over a $200 million valuation,” according to co-founder and CEO Sujay Tyle.  

“We are receiving significant inbound for a Series B already,” he said.

LatAm firms Valor Capital and Monashees Capital and U.K.-based Balderton Capital co-led the “massively oversubscribed” funding round, which also included participation from Silicon Valley-based Triplepoint Capital and the CEOs of four unicorns in Latin America, including Uala, Loggi, Rappi and Madeira Madeira. 

Tyle, Felipe Delgado, Olivier Scialom, Renato Andrade and Guilherme Nosralla started Merama in December 2020 with a vision to be the “largest and best-selling set of brands in Latin America.” The company has dual headquarters in Mexico City and São Paulo.

Merama partners with e-commerce product sellers in Latin America by purchasing a stake in the businesses and working with their teams to help them “exponentially” grow and boost their technology while providing them with nondilutive working capital. CEO Tyle describes the company’s model as “wildly different” from that of Thras.io, Perch and other similar companies such as Valoreo because it does not aggregate dozens of brands.

“We will work with very few brands over time, and only the best, and work with our entire team to scale and expand these few businesses,” Tyle told TechCrunch. “We’re more similar to The Hut Group in the EU.”

Merama expects to sell $100 million across the region this year, more than two times the year before. It is currently focused on Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile. Already, the company operates “very profitably,” according to Tyle. So the cash raised will go primarily toward partnering with more brands, investing in building its technology platform “to aid in the automation of several facets” of its partners’ brands and in working capital for product innovation and inventory purchases. 

The 42-person team is made up of e-commerce leaders from companies such as Amazon, Mercado Libre and Facebook, among others. Tyle knows a thing or two about growing and building new startups, having co-founded Frontier Car Group, which sold to OLX/Naspers for about $700 million in 2019. He is also currently a venture partner at Balderton. 

It’s a fact that Latin American e-commerce has boomed, particularly during the pandemic. Mexico was the fastest-growing e-commerce market in 2020 worldwide, yet is still in its infancy, Tyle said. Overall, the $85 billion e-commerce market in Latin America is growing rapidly, with projections of it reaching $116.2 billion in 2023.

“Merchants are seeing hypergrowth but still struggle with fundamental problems, which creates a ceiling in their potential,” Tyle told TechCrunch. “For example, they are unable to expand internationally, get reliable and cost-effective working capital and build technology tools to support their own online presence. This is where Merama comes in. We seek to give our partners an unfair advantage. When we decide to work with a team, it is because we believe they will be the de facto category leader and can become a $1 billion business on their own.”

Merama collaborates with e-commerce giants such as Amazon and Mercado Libre, and several executives from both companies have invested in the startup, as well.

Daniel Waterhouse, partner at Balderton Capital, says his firm sees “huge potential” in Merama.

“In our two decades scaling businesses in Europe, we have seen firsthand what defines eCommerce category leaders,” he said in a written statement. “What they have already achieved is breathtaking, and it is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Valor Capital founding partner Scott Sobel believes that creating superior products that connect with consumers is the first key challenge D2C companies face.

“That is why we like Merama’s approach to partnering with these established brands and provide them unparalleled support to scale their operations in an efficient way,” he added.

Group video calls will be coming to Telegram’s messaging platform next month with what’s being touted as a fully featured implementation, including support for web-based videoconferencing.

Founder Pavel Durov made the announcement via a (text) message posted to his official Telegram channel today where he wrote “we will be adding a video dimension to our voice chats in May, making Telegram a powerful platform for group video calls”.

“Screen sharing, encryption, noise-cancelling, desktop and tablet support — everything you can expect from a modern video conferencing tool, but with Telegram-level UI, speed and encryption. Stay tuned!” he added, using the sorts of phrases you’d expect from an enterprise software maker.

Telegram often taunts rivals over their tardiness to add new features but on video calls it has been a laggard, only adding the ability to make one-on-one video calls last August — rather than prioritizing a launch of group video calls, as it had suggested it would a few months earlier.

In an April 2020 blog post, to mark passing 400M users, it wrote that the global lockdown had “highlighted the need for a trusted video communication tool” — going on to dub video calls in 2020 “much like messaging in 2013”.

However it also emphasized the importance of security for group video calling — and that’s perhaps what’s caused the delay.

(Another possibility is the operational distraction of needing to raise a large chunk of debt financing to keep funding development: Last month Telegram announced it had raised over $1BN by selling bonds — its earlier plan to monetize via a blockchain platform having hit the buffers in 2020.)

In the event, rather than rolling out group video calls towards the latter end of 2020 it’s going to be doing so almost half way through 2021 — which has left videoconferencing platforms like Zoom to keep cleaning up during the pandemic-fuelled remote work and play boom (even as ‘Zoom fatigue’ has been added to our lexicon).

How secure Telegram’s implementation of group video calls will be, though, is an open question.

Durov’s post mades repeat mention of “encryption” — perhaps to make a subtle dig at Zoom’s own messy security claims history — but doesn’t specify whether it will use end-to-end encryption (we’ve asked).

Meanwhile Zoom does now offer e2e — and also has designs on becoming a platform in its own right, with apps and a marketplace, so there are a number of shifts in the comms landscape that could see the videoconferencing giant making deeper incursions into Telegram’s social messaging territory.

The one-to-one video calls Telegram launched last year were rolled out with its own e2e encryption — so presumably it will be replicating that approach for group calls.

However the MTProto encryption Telegram uses is custom-designed — and there’s been plenty of debate among cryptography experts over the soundness of its approach. So even if group calls are e2e encrypted there will be scrutiny over exactly how Telegram is doing it.

Also today, Durov touted two recently launched web versions of Telegram (not the first such versions by a long chalk, though) — adding that it’s currently testing “a functional version of web-based video calls internally, which will be added soon”.

He said the Webk and Webz versions of the web app are “by far the most cross-platform versions of Telegram we shipped so far”, and noting that no downloads or installs are required to access your chats via the browser.

“This is particularly good for corporate environments where installing native apps is now always allowed, but also good for users who like the instant nature of web sites,” he added, with another little nod toward enterprise users.

This morning Wunderite, a Boston-based software startup, announced that it has raised $3 million in an early-stage round led by Spark Capital.

Wunderite builds and sells software designed to help insurance agencies more rapidly process insurance applications, and automate some of their processes. With an industry-focus on insurance agencies while providing some API hooks, the startup fits into a number of startup trends, including vertical SaaS, developer-friendly tooling, and insurtech.

TechCrunch caught up with co-founders Peter MacDonald (CEO) and Joe Schnare (COO) about their company and its new investment. MacDonald previously worked for his family’s insurance business, while Schnare earned insurance experience by working for a large player in the market. The two met while at business school.

The pair told TechCrunch that most property and casualty insurance (car, pet, home, and other forms of popular coverage) is still sold by small and mid-sized agencies. That may surprise, but most of the United States is not the Bay Area, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Denver, or Seattle it turns out.

But while that market share point is good news for smaller insurance groups out there, it’s not great news for the staff of those firms as MacDonald and Schnare detailed that many are forced to work with archaic tooling. Like writing with their hands. Or email. A huge market — insurance is a monster industry — with a piecemeal competitive market and antiquated tooling could prove ripe for Wunderite, provided that it can reach a sufficient number of the companies that it hopes will comprise its revenue base.

Spark Capital’s Alex Finkelstein is bullish on the company’s chances. In a conversation with TechCrunch concerning the round, he expressed an interest in what he called “unsexy” business categories that feature extensive fragmentation and either outdated software, or no software at all. That is precisely Wunderite’s thesis.

Finkelstein thinks that such companies can build workflow tooling, grow themselves into being the data hub of their industry customers, leveraging that perch into an even larger enterprise. So he has big hopes for startup past its current product remit.

Today the startup is just seven folks — four in the United States, three in the Philippines — but expects to grow to 15 to 20 this year.

Finally, why did the company raise $3 million in a market when it seems that every round is ten times the size it might have been three years ago? The founders said that they are at the “early stages” of product-market fit, so they want to start building their sales team without overspending. Asked the same question, Finkelstein said that the company had outlined a series of milestones that it wants to meet, and that $3 million was the number it needed to reach them. At which point it can raise more capital at a higher valuation.

Wunderite — a portmanteau of the German word “wonder,” which means wonder or miracle, and “underwrite,” which is English for taking on risk in exchange for a fee — has the funds it needs to stretch its sales legs a bit and put more revenue points on the board. Let’s see how well it can scales its revenue operation with its new capital.

IRP Systems, a maker of innovative electric powertrains for electric vehicles, has raised a $31m Series C funding, bringing its total funding to $57m.

The financing was led by Clal Insurance and Altshuler Shaham, which are Israeli institutional investors. Also participating was Samsung Ventures, Renault-Nissan importer Carasso Motors, and Shlomo Group, as well as existing investors such as Entrée Capital, Fosun RZ Capital and JAL Ventures.

IRP Systems supplies a whole host of EV manufacturers including Renault. Its electric powertrain claims to have a high performance and efficiency while reducing the weight, size, and overall cost of the powertrain in electric vehicles of several sizes.

Moran Price, CEO and Co-Founder of IRP Systems said in a statement: “The automotive industry is undergoing tectonic shifts in recent years as electrification and digitalization are becoming core automotive technologies. IRP Systems is in the epicenter of this revolution. With the new investment, we will continue to create disruptive solutions as well as penetrate new EV segments.”
 
IRP Systems will use the new case to scale the development of its systems for EVs and reduce the path to mass production, expand R&D, operations and customer support and make a push on global sales and marketing.

Over the last few months, PayPal has been quietly gearing up for its expansion in China.

At the recent Boao Forum for Asia, China’s answer to Davos, the American payments giant said its strategy for China is not to challenge the duopoly of Alipay and WeChat Pay. Instead, it wants to focus on cross-border business and provide gateways both for Chinese merchants to collect funds and for Chinese consumers to pay for overseas goods.

It’s certainly a lucrative area. The market size of cross-border e-commerce in China surged from about 3 trillion yuan ($460 million) to nearly 6 trillion yuan between 2016 and 2021, according to market research firm iResearch.

But this space has also become crowded in recent years and PayPal may be late to the fray, said a China-based manager for an American tech giant, who asked for anonymity because he’s not authorized to speak to the media.

On Amazon, one of the largest marketplaces for Chinese exporters to sell online, there are already established options for merchants to collect funds. Setting up a bank account in a foreign country can be difficult for a small-time Chinese exporter, not to mention the high fees for remittance, so such merchants often seek third-party payments transfer solutions such as U.S.-based Payoneer and Chinese equivalents Pingpong and Lianlian, which charge a relatively small fee to deposit merchants’ sales into their bank accounts at home.

China has stringent policies for foreign exchange and electronic payments, but PayPal has already cleared the regulatory hurdles. In January, the American fintech titan became the first foreign firm to hold a license for online payment processor in China after it bought out shares in a local payments firm.

Obtaining the government greenlight is just the first step. The appeal of PayPal hinges largely on what it can offer to Chinese e-commerce exporters, who are now flooding the likes of Amazon and eBay.

“At the end of the day, customers only care which service is the cheapest and easiest to use,” said the China-based manager from the American firm.

“The Chinese cross-border payment solutions have achieved impressive results in terms of products, scale, and fees,” the person said. “I don’t think PayPal stands a chance.”

Exporters who build their own online stores instead of selling on mainstream marketplaces may still find PayPal necessary as a tool to accept payments from customers, given the app’s wide reach.

As for cross-border payments, PayPal is competing with Tencent’s WeChat Pay and Ant Group’s Alipay, which have long been ubiquitous in China. Both e-wallets have been aggressively growing their global partnerships to let China’s outbound travelers pay at overseas retailers like they would at home. Those shopping for overseas products domestically often use Chinese-owned e-commerce apps, which tend to have Alipay or WeChat Pay as their payment processor. Credit cards never became prevalent in China.

Cross-border payments have also become one of Ant’s main growth goals, according to the prospectus of its now-halted initial public offering. While overseas businesses accounted for just about 5% of the firm’s revenue in the second half of 2020, most of that segment came from cross-border payments. At the time, Ant also had plans to spend HK$52.8 billion, or 40%, of the net proceeds from its IPO on expanding its cross-border payment and merchant services as well as other overseas functionalities.

“It depends on whether PayPal is able to offer even lower fees than Ant,” said a person who previously worked on cross-border wallets for a Chinese company. “But PayPal itself is not famous for low fees.”

SOS Accessoire, a French startup that helps people diagnose and repair their home appliances, has raised €10M/$12M in a funding round led by ETF Partners. The round was joined by Quadia, Starquest, and Seed for Good.

There is now a growing home repair market, powered by startups like this, which allow people to save money, but also reduce waste, and ultimately help the environment.

Around 80% of home appliances get replaced instead of repaired, creating an enormous environmental problem. At the same time, says SOS Accessoire, the spare parts market is worth €4.1bn in the European Union alone. So why not tap into that consumer desire? Why indeed not.

However, sourcing spare parts is not easy, there are hundreds of suppliers, and instructions are aimed at professionals, not amateur repairers.

SOS Accessoire provides tools to diagnose home appliance problems, access spare parts, and provides video tutorials for the repair process.

The company says it estimates it has now saved half a million appliances in 2020, equivalent to 20,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions, or the annual equivalent of CO2 emissions from 4,375 French people a year.

Olivier de Montlivault, the founder of SOS Accessoire, said: “We have a huge opportunity to help reduce household appliance waste and, in doing so, disrupt the perceived thinking that once something is broken, it must be replaced.”

Its direct competitors are other digital players focusing on the retail customer such as Spareka and Adepem. But SOS Accessoire says its competitive advantages include its size, availability of spare parts and catalog/database.

Remy de Tonnac, a partner at ETF Partners, said: “We’re seeing an increasingly conscious consumer wanting to maintain their appliances, rather than just throw them away. SOS Accessoire is ideally placed to meet that need, with a management team that has a deep understanding of the market and the business model to not only dominate this niche within the e-commerce sector but disrupt the broader market itself.”

In 2016, Ivorian e-commerce startup Afrikrea started as a marketplace for African-based and inspired clothing, accessories, arts, and crafts. Over the past five years, Afrikrea has served more than 7,000 sellers from 47 African countries and buyers from 170 countries.

Per the company’s data, it records more than 500,000 visits monthly, with the majority of its customers from Europe and North America recording over $15 million in transactions.

But while Afrikrea presents African merchants to showcase and sell their products to the world, it is just one of the many channels available, including personal websites and social media.

Co-founder and CEO Moulaye Taboure says that he noticed that merchants were splitting time and concentration across different channels, which affected their engagement with Afrikrea.

“We noticed that it was getting harder for our sellers to make sales because they were losing time, money and energy switching between channels,” Taboure told TechCrunch. “Every time they want to sell a product, they put it on social media, Afrikrea, and other websites. And when one buyer shows interest, there is no single place to track and see all the orders. That’s hard for these businesses to offer quality services and grow effectively.”

Then last year, Afrikrea began testing an all-in-one SaaS e-commerce platform for these merchants. Today, it is announcing its launch. The platform called ANKA will allow users to sell from Africa, ship products to anywhere in the world and get paid through local and international African payment methods.

Image Credits:

E-commerce, payments and global shipping. That’s ANKA’s play for thousands of micro-retailers and businesses on the continent and around the world.

The platform lets users sell via an omnichannel dashboard with a single inventory, orders and messages management. Customers can carry out transactions via a customized online storefront like Shopify, social media platforms, links such as on Gumroad and the Afrikrea marketplace.

Merchants can carry out payments and payouts via a wallet and an Afrikrea Visa card. The platform, which costs $12, allows customers to perform mobile money and mobile banking transactions with MPesa, Orange, MTN and PayPal. 

Shipping completes the entire sales life cycle, from the point of sale to receipt of goods. In 2019, Afrikrea partnered with global logistics partner DHL to offer shipping services to its customers.

Fashion is ANKA’s best-selling category because of its affiliation with Afrikrea. The African fashion and apparel market is worth $31billion, per Euromonitor, and Afrikrea estimates the yearly spend of its major markets to be worth $12.5 billion. A breakdown from the company puts “the African diaspora in Europe at $1 billion, those in America and the Caribbean at $9 billion and non-Africans with links to the continent at $2.5 billion.”

But in terms of general e-commerce activities on the continent, McKinsey & Company pegs consumer spending to reach $2.1 trillion by 2025. African e-commerce is also expected to account for up to 10% of retail sales.

Platforms like Jumia, Mall4Africa and Takealot have been at the forefront of this growth over this past decade. MallforAfrica struck a partnership with DHL in 2015, then launched DHL Africa eShop with the logistics giant four years later. More than 200 sellers from the U.S. and U.K. serve African consumers in more than 30 countries on the platform.

Unlike MallforAfrica and other e-commerce platforms, ANKA differentiates itself as a platform for export rather than import, specifically for African products. According to Moulaye, ANKA is currently the largest e-commerce exporter on the continent, and since its partnership with DHL, it has shipped more than 10 tons of cargo monthly from Africa. 

“We are the biggest client of DHL exporting from Africa. We ship 10 tons every month and have sellers in 47 African countries, with Kenya and Nigeria as our largest markets. We have something African that is going to a global scale. That’s one of the angles we had with Afrikrea, and we want to keep that with ANKA. What sets us apart is that we’re not just trying to solve a purely African problem; we want to solve a global problem for Africans.”

Since launching five years ago, Afrikrea, which Taboure launched with Luc B. Perussault Diallo and Kadry Diallo, has raised a total of $2.1 million per Crunchbase. In this period, the company has seen its revenue grow 5x and claims to have ARR more than it has raised in its lifetime. To continue its growth efforts, Afrikrea is in the process of concluding a Series A round later this year.