Author: azeeadmin

Spanish on-demand delivery platform Glovo today announced the expansion of its operations in Africa and plans to double its investment on the continent.

The Barcelona-based company has invested up to €25M ($30M) by bringing its food delivery service to six African countries — Morocco, Uganda, Kenya, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, and Nigeria.

Glovo is available in more than 40 cities with more than 300,000 users, 8,000 restaurants and 12,000 couriers in these countries. Earlier this year, it launched operations in Lagos, Nigeria and Accra, Ghana before expanding to Tema, another Ghanaian city last month.

Over the next 12 months, Glovo says it will invest an additional €50M ($60M) to drive expansion into more cities on the continent and move into new markets like Tunisia, where it plans to launch in Tunis next month.

According to a statement released by the company, the expansion will make Glovo’s services available to 6.5 million people. Co-founder Sacha Michaud believes these markets are currently underserved, and Glovo has found the right opportunity to work with local restaurants, bringing them online to reach new customers in a bid to “make everything, within all towns and cities, available to everyone.”

The attention on Africa follows a series of regional moves Glovo has pulled this year. After its mammoth $528 million Series F raise, it acquired several Delivery Hero’s businesses in Central and Eastern Europe for $208 million.

Now present in 23 countries, Africa represents 30% of the company’s geographical footprint. And the Spanish company plans to be live in 30 countries before the end of next year, a decision in part due to an IPO target in three years.

Glovo says it is a market leader in 80% of the countries where it has operations. The company’s grocery service arm has grown the fastest and revenue has been increasing significantly after a steady rise in orders. To meet the growing needs of customers, Glovo has had to invest heavily in dark stores and in July also launched virtual brands for restaurants.

It’s not clear if Glovo will extend these add-on services to Africa where it has its largest market in terms of population size: Nigeria. Yet, the West African nation does not come without its own fair share of troubles like poor logistics infrastructure and an unpredictable regulatory environment.

Despite that, a couple of food delivery platforms like Gokada and Jumia Food, a subsidiary of e-commerce giant Jumia have tried to scale, finding varying degrees of success doing so.

While Glovo will have to compete for market share with these players, the company says it is bullish because of its multi-category strategy. According to the company, grocery sales account for half of its business in some African markets.

That said, Glovo’s performance in emerging markets is questionable. Last year, the company pulled out of all the Latin American countries — Argentina, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic. It sold operations in these markets to Delivery Hero for $272 million.

The company also exited the Middle East and North Africa (Egypt and Turkey) and Uruguay and Puerto Rico in January 2020.

Over the past couple of years, Glovo has said it wanted to achieve profitability in a short amount of time. The delivery space is a thin-margin business and it is thinner in emerging markets. This played a part in why Glovo exited both Middle East and Latin America. The market isn’t any different in Africa, and time will tell if the Spanish delivery will stay put, exit, or close shop.

Whatever the case, Glovo says it is “committed to continuing its policy to hire top local talent” on the continent and plans to double its number of staff and add an extra 200 employees before the end of next year.

“Our expansion in Nigeria, Ghana, and our upcoming launch in Tunisia is something we’ve been looking at for some time now, so it’s great to be able to make it official. There’s been an unprecedented spike in the on-demand delivery business in Africa and the expansion of our services to new countries and cities is both a reflection of that trend and a testament to our commitment to the continent. We’re looking forward to making food, groceries, pharmaceuticals and retail products available to our new users at the touch of a button,” William Benthall, Glovo’s general manager of sub-Saharan Africa, said in a statement.

Spanish on-demand delivery platform Glovo today announced the expansion of its operations in Africa and plans to double its investment on the continent.

The Barcelona-based company has invested up to €25M ($30M) by bringing its food delivery service to six African countries — Morocco, Uganda, Kenya, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, and Nigeria.

Glovo is available in more than 40 cities with more than 300,000 users, 8,000 restaurants and 12,000 couriers in these countries. Earlier this year, it launched operations in Lagos, Nigeria and Accra, Ghana before expanding to Tema, another Ghanaian city last month.

Over the next 12 months, Glovo says it will invest an additional €50M ($60M) to drive expansion into more cities on the continent and move into new markets like Tunisia, where it plans to launch in Tunis next month.

According to a statement released by the company, the expansion will make Glovo’s services available to 6.5 million people. Co-founder Sacha Michaud believes these markets are currently underserved, and Glovo has found the right opportunity to work with local restaurants, bringing them online to reach new customers in a bid to “make everything, within all towns and cities, available to everyone.”

The attention on Africa follows a series of regional moves Glovo has pulled this year. After its mammoth $528 million Series F raise, it acquired several Delivery Hero’s businesses in Central and Eastern Europe for $208 million.

Now present in 23 countries, Africa represents 30% of the company’s geographical footprint. And the Spanish company plans to be live in 30 countries before the end of next year, a decision in part due to an IPO target in three years.

Glovo says it is a market leader in 80% of the countries where it has operations. The company’s grocery service arm has grown the fastest and revenue has been increasing significantly after a steady rise in orders. To meet the growing needs of customers, Glovo has had to invest heavily in dark stores and in July also launched virtual brands for restaurants.

It’s not clear if Glovo will extend these add-on services to Africa where it has its largest market in terms of population size: Nigeria. Yet, the West African nation does not come without its own fair share of troubles like poor logistics infrastructure and an unpredictable regulatory environment.

Despite that, a couple of food delivery platforms like Gokada and Jumia Food, a subsidiary of e-commerce giant Jumia have tried to scale, finding varying degrees of success doing so.

While Glovo will have to compete for market share with these players, the company says it is bullish because of its multi-category strategy. According to the company, grocery sales account for half of its business in some African markets.

That said, Glovo’s performance in emerging markets is questionable. Last year, the company pulled out of all the Latin American countries — Argentina, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic. It sold operations in these markets to Delivery Hero for $272 million.

The company also exited the Middle East and North Africa (Egypt and Turkey) and Uruguay and Puerto Rico in January 2020.

Over the past couple of years, Glovo has said it wanted to achieve profitability in a short amount of time. The delivery space is a thin-margin business and it is thinner in emerging markets. This played a part in why Glovo exited both Middle East and Latin America. The market isn’t any different in Africa, and time will tell if the Spanish delivery will stay put, exit, or close shop.

Whatever the case, Glovo says it is “committed to continuing its policy to hire top local talent” on the continent and plans to double its number of staff and add an extra 200 employees before the end of next year.

“Our expansion in Nigeria, Ghana, and our upcoming launch in Tunisia is something we’ve been looking at for some time now, so it’s great to be able to make it official. There’s been an unprecedented spike in the on-demand delivery business in Africa and the expansion of our services to new countries and cities is both a reflection of that trend and a testament to our commitment to the continent. We’re looking forward to making food, groceries, pharmaceuticals and retail products available to our new users at the touch of a button,” William Benthall, Glovo’s general manager of sub-Saharan Africa, said in a statement.

After living through the global upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic, many workers are re-evaluating their career path. Stefan Heinrich Henriquez, a former Head of Global Marketing at TikTok and Chief Marketing Officer at Cameo, is one of them.

“I have been thinking about music since my time at TikTok, and I was really thinking about building something on my own, but then it took me another year to finally have the guts to do it,” said Henriquez. “Then when the pandemic started, I think so many people were thinking about like, ‘What am I doing with my life?”

Along with his co-founder Akiva Bamberger, who was a software engineer on Snap’s Spectacles, Henriquez began work on mayk.it last summer. Today, the social music app launches on iOS and announces its $4 million seed round from investors including Greycroft, Chicago Ventures, Slow Ventures, firstminute, Steven Galanis, Randi Zuckerberg, YouTuber Mr. Beasts’ Night media, Spotify’s first CMO Sophia Bendz, Cyan Banister, artist T-Pain and music industry veteran Zach Katz, among others.

Mayk.it wants to help people easily produce, own, and share music that they can create using just their phone. Users can upload their own beat or select an existing beat from another user, then add vocals (voice effects and somewhat corny lyric generators are available if you’re shy), and then add a visual from Giphy. Once you make (or, “mayk”) something, you can post it on the app, where other users can see it via a discovery page, which categorizes music by feeling or theme, rather than genre.

Mayk.it also poses “ideas,” or prompts to spur creativity, like “What is your pet thinking about right now?” or “Make a song about your first crush.” There’s also a Tinder-like tab that lets you swipe left or right on songs — if you really like it, you can leave a comment (called an “encouragement” in an attempt to keep things supportive) or remix it.

Of course, for creators who might want to get a bit more serious about their creations, remixing and collaborating poses a question of ownership — if someone writes a beat and another user sings over it, who owns it? While you can’t monetize music on mayk.it, you have the right to export it and sell it elsewhere. Henriquez said that anyone involved in the creation of an audio clip or song on the app gets an equal cut, so the beat-maker would get 50% of any profit, and the singer would get 50%. Mayk.it doesn’t take a cut.

Right now, the mayk.it doesn’t have in-app purchases, but Henriquez said that down the road, it could be possible to profit from working with brands or establishing an in-app marketplace. For now, mayk.it is focused on using its seed funding to add new features, improve the product and build a tool that inspires creativity — Henriquez added that, as an LGBTQ+ founder, it’s important to him that users can find community on the app through its social features.

“When I worked at YouTube, you really needed to know Adobe Premiere and After Effects,” said Henriquez. “And what I learned since Musical.ly and TikTok is that you could be a video creator or an actor without having to go through all these things. I think Roblox is doing that now with games, and Canva is doing that with design tools.”

Mayk.it wants to be like a Roblox or Canva for music composition and sharing. You can’t currently create something on mayk.it that sounds like it came from an artist who’s mastered Ableton, but something from mayk.it could easily make the rounds on TikTok.

Though mayk.it is now in the App Store, there’s a waitlist to gain access — but you can also test your skills with a “vibe check,” which invites you to make a song and see if existing users will right-swipe you in. Not to brag, but we passed.

After living through the global upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic, many workers are re-evaluating their career path. Stefan Heinrich Henriquez, a former Head of Global Marketing at TikTok and Chief Marketing Officer at Cameo, is one of them.

“I have been thinking about music since my time at TikTok, and I was really thinking about building something on my own, but then it took me another year to finally have the guts to do it,” said Henriquez. “Then when the pandemic started, I think so many people were thinking about like, ‘What am I doing with my life?”

Along with his co-founder Akiva Bamberger, who was a software engineer on Snap’s Spectacles, Henriquez began work on mayk.it last summer. Today, the social music app launches on iOS and announces its $4 million seed round from investors including Greycroft, Chicago Ventures, Slow Ventures, firstminute, Steven Galanis, Randi Zuckerberg, YouTuber Mr. Beasts’ Night media, Spotify’s first CMO Sophia Bendz, Cyan Banister, artist T-Pain and music industry veteran Zach Katz, among others.

Mayk.it wants to help people easily produce, own, and share music that they can create using just their phone. Users can upload their own beat or select an existing beat from another user, then add vocals (voice effects and somewhat corny lyric generators are available if you’re shy), and then add a visual from Giphy. Once you make (or, “mayk”) something, you can post it on the app, where other users can see it via a discovery page, which categorizes music by feeling or theme, rather than genre.

Mayk.it also poses “ideas,” or prompts to spur creativity, like “What is your pet thinking about right now?” or “Make a song about your first crush.” There’s also a Tinder-like tab that lets you swipe left or right on songs — if you really like it, you can leave a comment (called an “encouragement” in an attempt to keep things supportive) or remix it.

Of course, for creators who might want to get a bit more serious about their creations, remixing and collaborating poses a question of ownership — if someone writes a beat and another user sings over it, who owns it? While you can’t monetize music on mayk.it, you have the right to export it and sell it elsewhere. Henriquez said that anyone involved in the creation of an audio clip or song on the app gets an equal cut, so the beat-maker would get 50% of any profit, and the singer would get 50%. Mayk.it doesn’t take a cut.

Right now, the mayk.it doesn’t have in-app purchases, but Henriquez said that down the road, it could be possible to profit from working with brands or establishing an in-app marketplace. For now, mayk.it is focused on using its seed funding to add new features, improve the product and build a tool that inspires creativity — Henriquez added that, as an LGBTQ+ founder, it’s important to him that users can find community on the app through its social features.

“When I worked at YouTube, you really needed to know Adobe Premiere and After Effects,” said Henriquez. “And what I learned since Musical.ly and TikTok is that you could be a video creator or an actor without having to go through all these things. I think Roblox is doing that now with games, and Canva is doing that with design tools.”

Mayk.it wants to be like a Roblox or Canva for music composition and sharing. You can’t currently create something on mayk.it that sounds like it came from an artist who’s mastered Ableton, but something from mayk.it could easily make the rounds on TikTok.

Though mayk.it is now in the App Store, there’s a waitlist to gain access — but you can also test your skills with a “vibe check,” which invites you to make a song and see if existing users will right-swipe you in. Not to brag, but we passed.

Bringing order and understanding to unstructured information located across disparate silos has been one of more significant breakthroughs of the big data era, and today a European startup that has built a platform to help with this challenge specifically in the area of life sciences — and has, notably, been used by labs to sequence and so far identify two major Covid-19 variants — is announcing some funding to continue building out its tools to a wider set of use cases, and to expand into North America.

Seqera Labs, a Barcelona-based data orchestration and workflow platform tailored to help scientists and engineers order and gain insights from cloud-based genomic data troves, as well as to tackle other life science applications that involve harnessing complex data from multiple locations, has raised $5.5 million in seed funding.

Talis Capital and Speedinvest co-led this round, with participation also from previous backer BoxOne Ventures and a grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Mark Zuckerberg and Dr. Priscilla Chan’s effort to back open source software projects for science applications.

Seqera — a portmanteau of “sequence” and “era”, the age of sequencing data, basically — had previously raised less than $1 million, and quietly, it is already generating revenues, with five of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies part of its customer base, alongside biotech and other life sciences customers.

Seqera was spun out of the Centre for Genomic Regulation, a biomedical research center based out of Barcelona, where it was built as the commercial application of Nextflow, open-source workflow and data orchestration software originally created by the founders of Seqera, Evan Floden and Paolo Di Tommaso, at the CGR.

Floden, Seqera’s CEO, told TechCrunch that he and Di Tommaso were motivated to create Seqera in 2018 after seeing Nextflow gain a lot of traction in the life science community, and subsequently getting a lot of repeat requests for further customization and features. Both Nextflow and Seqera have seen a lot of usage: the Nextflow runtime has been downloaded over 2 million times, the company said, while Seqera’s commercial cloud offering has now processed more than 5 billion tasks.

The Covid-19 pandemic is a classic example of the acute challenge that Seqera (and by association Nextflow) aims to address in the scientific community. With Covid-19 outbreaks happening globally, each time a test for Covid-19 is processed in a lab, live genetic samples of the virus get collected. Taken together, these millions of tests represent a goldmine of information about the coronavirus and how it is mutating, and when and where it is doing so. For a new virus about which so little is understood and that is still persisting, that’s invaluable data.

So the problem is not if the data exists for better insights (it does); it is that it’s nearly impossible to use more legacy tools to view that data as a holistic body. It’s in too many places, and there is just too much of it, and it’s growing every day (and changing every day), which means that traditional approaches of porting data to a centralized location to run analytics on it just wouldn’t be efficient, and would cost a fortune to execute.

That is where Segera comes in. The company’s technology treats each source of data across different clouds as a salient pipeline which can be merged and analyzed as a single body, without that data ever leaving the boundaries of the infrastructure where it already exists. Customised to focus on genomic troves, scientists can then query that information for more insights. Seqera was central to the discovery of both the alpha and delta variants of the virus, and work is still ongoing as Covid-19 continues to hammer the globe.

Seqera is being used in other kinds of medical applications, such as in the realm of so-called “precision medicine.” This is emerging as a very big opportunity in complex fields like oncology: cancer mutates and behaves differently depending on many factors, including genetic differences of the patients themselves, which means that treatments are less effective if they are “one size fits all.”

Increasingly, we are seeing approaches that leverage machine learning and big data analytics to better understand individual cancers and how they develop for different populations, to subsequently create more personalized treatments, and Seqera comes into play as a way to sequence that kind of data.

This also highlights something else notable about the Seqera platform: it is used directly by the people who are analyzing the data — that is, the researchers and scientists themselves, without data specialists necessarily needing to get involved. This was a practical priority for the company, Floden told me, but nonetheless, it’s an interesting detail of how the platform is inadvertently part of that bigger trend of “no-code/low-code” software, designed to make highly technical processes usable by non-technical people.

It’s both the existing opportunity, and how Seqera might be applied in the future across other kinds of data that lives in the cloud, that makes it an interesting company, and it seems an interesting investment, too.

“Advancements in machine learning, and the proliferation of volumes and types of data, are leading to increasingly more applications of computer science in life sciences and biology,” said Kirill Tasilov, principal at Talis Capital, in a statement. “While this is incredibly exciting from a humanity perspective, it’s also skyrocketing the cost of experiments to sometimes millions of dollars per project as they become computer-heavy and complex to run. Nextflow is already a ubiquitous solution in this space and Seqera is driving those capabilities at an enterprise level – and in doing so, is bringing the entire life sciences industry into the modern age. We’re thrilled to be a part of Seqera’s journey.”

“With the explosion of biological data from cheap, commercial DNA sequencing, there is a pressing need to analyse increasingly growing and complex quantities of data,” added Arnaud Bakker, principal at Speedinvest. “Seqera’s open and cloud-first framework provides an advanced tooling kit allowing organisations to scale complex deployments of data analysis and enable data-driven life sciences solutions.”

Although medicine and life sciences are perhaps Seqera’s most obvious and timely applications today, the framework originally designed for genetics and biology can be applied to are a number of other areas: AI training, image analysis and astronomy are three early use cases, Floden said. Astronomy is perhaps very apt, since it seems that the sky is the limit.

“We think we are in the century of biology,” Floden said. “It’s the center of activity and it’s becoming data-centric, and we are here to build services around that.”

Elvie, the women’s health tech pioneer behind a connected breast pump and smart pelvic floor exerciser, has topped up a Series C which it announced earlier this summer (July) — adding a further £12.7m to bring the total raised to £70 million ($97m).

The 2013-founded, UK-based startup previously raised a $42M Series B in 2019, and a $6M Series A in 2017 — when femtech startups were a lot rarer than they are now. Products designed for (and often by) women have gained a lot of momentum over this period as female-led startups have blazed a trail and shown there’s a sizeable market for femtech — leading investors to slow clock on to the opportunity too.

Analysts now project the femtech industry will become a $50 billion market by 2025.

Elvie says the Series C extension includes funds sponsored by the co-founders of Blume Equity – a PE firm that focuses on the food and health sectors – plus further capital from existing investors IPGL, Hiro Capital and Westerly Winds.

In July, when it announced the earlier ($80M) tranche of the raise, Elvie said the Series C was led by BGF and BlackRock alongside existing investors including Octopus Ventures.

The Series C will be used to drive for more growth through geographical expansion (including entering new markets) and diversifying its product portfolio to target other “key stages” in women’s lives, it said.

That means it’ll be splashing out on R&D to support product development — connected hardware that blends physical gadgetry with software still looks to be a strong focus — and also on strengthening its ops and infrastructure to prep for further scale.

Elvie sells four products at this stage: Its connected kegel trainer, and a wearable breast pump (plus two non-electric pumps).

Where the company goes next in terms of product will be an interesting one to watch.

Commenting in a statement, Tania Boler, CEO and founder, said: “Elvie is ready for the next phase of our growth. We have already revolutionized the categories we operate in, but we know that there is vast untapped potential to create better technology products and services for women in new areas.”

She added that Elvie’s goal is to create “the go-to destination for women’s health at all life stages” — selling “sophisticated, accurate and personalised solutions” to its target female consumer.

Hyundai Motor Group is backing hydrogen as a top energy solution for sustainability. With its new fuel cell system that it plans to launch in the next few years, the South Korean automaker said it will provide hydrogen fuel cell versions for all its commercial vehicles by 2028.

Hyundai announced its strategy for the future of hydrogen on Tuesday during a live stream of the automaker’s Hydrogen Wave conference. Saehoon Kim, executive vice president and head of the fuel cell center at Hyundai Motor Group, said Hyundai’s goal is to also achieve cost competitiveness comparable to that of EV batteries by 2030.

The company also shared details about its high-performance, rear-wheel drive hydrogen sports car, the Vision FK, with a 500kW fuel cell system that can push it from 0 to 100 kilometers per hour in under four seconds and has 600 kilometers (373 miles) of range. Hyundai did not share when the vehicle would go into production.

As most automakers begin to roll out electric vehicles for both passenger and commercial use, hydrogen is still a bit of a niche market, but one that is growing as Europe, China and the United States set ambitious emissions reductions goals. Toyota Motor Corp, BMW and Daimler have all begun embracing hydrogen fuel cell technology to varying degree, even as they continue to develop exclusively electric vehicles. For its part, Hyundai’s commitment to hydrogen doesn’t deter from its commitment to electric. With the climate situation as it is, we’re facing an all hands on deck situation. May the best fuel win.

At the event, Kim also announced Hyundai’s plans to launch two new hydrogen fuel cell powertrains in 2023, which the company hopes will help make hydrogen mainstream by 2040. The third generation of Hyundai’s hydrogen fuel stack will come in either 100 kW or 200kW outputs for either passenger cars or commercial vehicles, respectively.

Hyundai Motor Group, which includes Hyundai, Kia and Genesis, has one fuel cell bus on the market today, the Elec City Fuel Cell bus, with 115 buses live on the road in South Korea. The automaker also has one fuel cell truck, the Xcient Hyundai, on the market, 45 of which were launched in Switzerland last year.

Hyundai boasts a fuel-cell SUV, the NEXO, with plans to introduce the next model in 2023, alongside a hydrogen-powered multi-purpose vehicle model. The company announced at the IAA Mobility conference in Munich that it would also launch a large fuel cell-powered SUV after 2025, as well as four more commercial vehicles by the end of the decade. The company aims to provide fuel cell technology for different use cases, including emergency vehicles, ships, freights, trams, forklifts and other vehicles for industrial processes.

“Fuel cell is a proven technology that can deliver the benefits of hydrogen to people around the world in various fields,” said Kim. “Basically, a fuel cell is a power generator like an engine. It differs from a battery which stores electricity. A fuel cell system consists of a fuel cell stack that generates electricity, a hydrogen supply system, an air supply system and a thermal management system. It generates power by combining hydrogen and oxygen, similar to the engine of an internal combustion vehicle, but without the carbon emissions.”

Kim went onto explain that fuel cell systems produce energy through chemical reactions and operate as long as hydrogen fuel is supplied, unlike a battery which just passively stores energy. He said Hyundai is working on building up the necessary ecosystem to create success in the hydrogen space, including production, storage, fuel cell technology and infrastructure. Much of the infrastructure would be solar and wind sources that would produce the renewable energy needed to create clean power to split water into oxygen and ‘green’ hydrogen.

Alongside its own research and development, Hyundai Motor has also already invested in hydrogen startups like H2Pro and has announced plans to establish green hydrogen infrastructures in countries with supportive governments and abundant renewable energy resources.

Much of the movement in this space comes after the group announced its commitment to become carbon neutral by 2045 and to reduce its emissions by 75% below 2019 levels by 2040. By 2030, Hyundai expects 30% of all vehicle sales to be zero emission, with battery electric and fuel cell electric vehicles taking up 80% of total fleet sales by 2040.

Francophone Africa has its first unicorn, and if you’ve been following tech on the continent, you will be very unsurprised to hear that it’s coming from the world of fintech.

Wave, a U.S. and Senegal-based mobile money provider, has raised $200 million in Series A round of funding. The investment is the largest-ever Series A round for the region, and it values Wave at $1.7 billion.

Four big-name backers jointly led the round — Sequoia Heritage, a private investment fund and a subsidiary of Sequoia; Founders Fund; payments upstart Stripe; and Ribbit Capital. Others in the round include existing investor Partech Africa and Sam Altman, the former CEO of Y Combinator and current CEO of OpenAI.

The mobile money market in sub-Saharan Africa is growing exponentially. This past year, up to $500 billion has moved through the accounts of 300 million active mobile money users in the region. But despite being one of the largest alternative financial infrastructures known globally, this represents only a fraction of the overall market. 

The International Monetary Fund says that as of 2017, only 43% of adults in sub-Saharan Africa were “banked” by way of a traditional bank or mobile money account. When it comes to growing that proportion, however, mobile money — based on simpler technology and with an easier onboarding process — wins out, and it is set to capture more market share faster than traditional banking in the region. And this has investors, especially foreign ones, excited and looking to get on board.

(Neobanking, based on mobile technology too, falls somewhere in the middle of the two).

From Sendwave to Wave

If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard of Wave, the reason might be because you don’t know it’s a spinoff from Africa-focused remittance provider Sendwave.

Drew Durbin and Lincoln Quirk founded Sendwave in 2014 to offer little or no fee remittances from North America and Europe to select African and Asian countries. The YC-backed company became a WorldRemit subsidiary last year when the global fintech paid up to $500 million in cash and stock for Sendwave.

But before that, the team stealthily worked on a mobile money product described as having no account fees and “instantly available and accepted everywhere.”

In 2018, the product was piloted as Wave in Senegal but it was still within the Sendwave ecosystem. When WorldRemit acquired Sendwave, Durbin and his team turned their focus to Wave.

“We saw an opportunity to make a bigger impact by trying to build a better, much more affordable mobile money service than the telcos are building throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa,” Durbin told TechCrunch in an interview. “We didn’t see any companies besides the telcos trying to solve that problem.”

Going up against incumbents

Telecom operators and banks have been the early entrants in the mobile money space, not least because they control much of the infrastructure in the process, from having mobile subscribers using handsets on their networks through to building the financial services to manage money and payments at the back end, and everything in between. 

Third-party providers, mostly fintechs, have tried to capture some market share from these incumbents. Wave, however, wants to disrupt it.

Durbin tells TechCrunch that unlike M-Pesa, the mobile payment provider led by Safaricom, and other products of telecom operators like Orange and Tigo, Wave is building a mobile money service that is “radically affordable.”

The Dakar-based platform is akin to PayPal (with mobile money accounts, not bank accounts) runs an agent network that uses their cash on hand to service Wave users. According to the company, users can make free deposits and withdrawals and charge a 1% fee whenever they send money.

Durbin says this is 70% cheaper than telecom-led mobile money and whenever there is a transfer problem, refunds are made instantly, unlike with incumbents where users might need to wait for some days.   

Wave’s technology also differs from telecom-led mobile money. Whereas the incumbents mostly focus on USSD (although there are provisions to use applications), Wave is solely app-based. For users without a smartphone, Wave also provides a free QR-card to transact with an agent.

By building its own infrastructure full-stack — agent network, agent and consumer applications, QR cards, business collections, and disbursements — Wave has been able to fuel its growth to several million monthly active users and billions of dollars in annual volume.

The two-year-old startup claims to be the largest mobile money player in Senegal and that over half of the country’s adults are active users. That pegs the number of users between 4 million and 5 million, and Wave wants to replicate this growth in Ivory Coast, the second market it officially expanded to last year.

This sort of growth pressure on telecom operators. That has indeed been the case for the leading telecom operator in both regions, Orange. In June, the telecom operator stopped users in Senegal from purchasing Orange airtime via Wave’s mobile application.

Per this report, Wave argued that Orange was applying anti-competitive tactics by restricting it from selling directly or via an approved wholesaler. Orange said it had made proposals “in line with those offered to its other providers” and that Wave wanted special treatment.

To reach a fair decision, both parties are working with the regulatory body in charge, Regulatory Authority for Telecommunications and Posts (RATP). And if the regulator isn’t capable of settling the issue, BCEAO, the regional bank of Francophone countries, is the next in line to resolve the dispute.

According to Wave’s CEO, the bank’s regulatory approach is one reason why Wave has been able to take on the telecom operators in the first place. But among all the West African countries where mobile money is prevalent, why start with Senegal, an emerging market?

“Senegal is a big enough market that we would have to work really hard to potentially win the market. But also a small enough market that if we were doing well, we could win the market quicker than if we were in a giant country. And so that combination of those two things made it seem like a good place to start,” Durbin remarked.

Following this fundraise, Wave will deepen its presence in Senegal and Ivory Coast and grow its already 800-strong team across product, engineering, and business. In addition, Wave will expand into other markets it feels are regulatory-friendly like Uganda.

“I think there’s a pretty broad array of countries that have strong central banks and clear regulations are open to new players, or even want new players to come in and try to compete with the telcos. And so we have a lot of licenses that are in progress, and we’ll try to prioritize the countries where we’re able to get started sooner over the ones that it takes longer.”

A unicorn after two rounds

While some reports say Wave had raised $13.8 million prior to this, Durbin declined to comment on the figure when asked. However, he did mention that Partech, the French outfit with an African fund, invested in a seed round alongside other investors like Founders Fund and Stripe.

In addition to Sequoia and Sam Altman, the same crop of investors also participated in this monster Series A round.

In a market that has typically lacked innovation, Partech general partner Tidjane Deme says the investment will help Wave improve its service.

“Since 2018, we’ve supported Wave because we were convinced mobile money is still an unsolved problem in Africa,” he said in a statement. “Wave has great product design, stellar execution, and a strong financial trajectory. We are proud to see it become the first unicorn from Senegal.”

In May, Sequoia Capital invested in Egyptian fintech Telda, its first big deal on the continent. The Wave investment, meanwhile, is coming via subsidiary Sequoia Heritage and is the latter’s first investment in an Africa-focused startup. 

In a call with TechCrunch, Altman said that Wave ticked the boxes he considers before an investment — strong founders, an important problem in a large market, working product, and traction.

“I’ve known these founders for a long time, and I think they’re like off the charts good. I’ve been super impressed with their ability to figure out what users want and how to grow,” he said. “I think the company is solving the most important problem around money transfer in Africa and fixing the inefficient agent networks.”

The largest venture rounds for any venture in Africa remain OPay’s recent $400 million fundraise and Jumia’s equivalent in 2016. Both were Series C rounds. The next biggest rounds include Interswitch’s $200 million investment from Visa and Flutterwave’s $170 million Series C.

All these companies attained unicorn status following their respective rounds. The same goes for Wave but more spectacularly, considering the company bagged it in a Series A round, it’s transcending the region and is one of the largest A-rounds globally this year.

Wave joins OPay and Flutterwave as the newly minted unicorns in Africa this year — that is, startups valued above $1 billion — and the fourth African unicorn after Interswitch. Other billion-dollar companies include publicly traded Jumia and Egyptian fintech Fawry.

Funding rounds in Africa keep getting bigger and the continent has reached an inflection point. However, some skeptics have questioned the valuations of previous unicorns; Wave wouldn’t be an exception.

The argument would be around why Wave commands such a high valuation when for instance, two prominent telecom operators, Airtel and MTN, are looking to list their mobile money businesses between $2 to $6 billion despite being in the operations for several years across multiple African countries.

Yet like any investor optimistic about a portfolio company, Altman doesn’t believe Wave is overvalued. In fact, he thinks the company is undervalued.

“The opportunity in front of the company is massive. But plenty of times, I’ve gotten it wrong, so you never know. However, I have been fortunate to make a number of great investments and I feel Wave has as good of a shot as you can ask for,” he said. “Africa is going to be the fastest growing and most important market over the next coming decades for many companies. I think people are realizing how big the market opportunity is and how much value is going to be created and we’ll see a lot more things like this happen.”

BP Ventures, the investing arm of oil and gas giant BP, has announced a €10 million (~$11.9 million) investment in Ryd, a German in-car digital payments provider. The fresh funds will help Ryd expand its service into international markets and build out its offering, according to a statement.

Ryd’s service allows users to lump together online payments for services like fuel purchases, EV charging and car washing via the startup’s app or integration with smart car systems. BP already offers digital payment options in the UK and the Netherlands through its BPme app. As part of its investment and partnership with Ryd, the legacy company hopes to expand its digital offerings as it learns from the startup’s secure and flexible digital payment options. Ryd will get the benefit of scaling its technology to BP customers across Europe.

“In-car digital payments are an integral part of the seamless and convenient experience that customers increasingly expect at our retail sites,” Alex Jensen, bp’s senior vice president mobility and convenience, Europe and Southern Africa, said in a statement. “Ryd’s technology can help deliver just that, and for an increasing range of services.”

This isn’t the first bet BP is taking in the smart vehicle space, and it likely won’t be the last. In June, the firm also invested $7 million in IoTecha, a smart EV charging company that connects chargers with the electricity grid using IoT and automates charging payments. Strategic investments like these ultimately add to BP Ventures’s ecosystem which is designed to help BP reinvent itself as an integrated energy company, as well as help it reduce its carbon footprint.

Ryd is already accepted today at 3,000 partner service stations across seven countries, according to the company. It has 1.4 million direct customers, as well as access to up to 100 million additional customers through its partnerships with Mastercard and several car manufacturers. With the connected car data market expected to reach $19 billion globally by 2030, and the non-fuel retail sales market expected to reach $285 billion globally by the same year, the startup is now homing in on its strategy to integrate its tech into more vehicles.

“With Ryd we want to enable hassle-free and secure interactions with cars,” said Oliver Goetz, founder and chairman of Ryd, in a statement. “BP is the final piece to our puzzle and completes our ecosystem with strong strategic partners in all of our business areas: finance, automotive and energy. BP expects tens of millions of car drivers to move to direct digital payment systems, which are both connected to car data and to payment systems at gas stations and beyond. This new payment form is much faster, easier and more comfortable. Ryd is on its way to lead this movement in Europe.”

Ryd expects to go live at the first BP filling stations in the fourth quarter of 2021, according to Ryd’s CEO Sandra Dax.

Indian crypto exchange CoinSwitch Kuber is in advanced stages of talks to raise a new financing round at up to $2 billion in valuation, several sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

If the talks materialize in a deal, CoinSwitch Kuber will become the second crypto startup in the world’s second largest internet market to attain the unicorn status.

The four-year-old startup, which counts Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital India, and Ribbit Capital among its existing investors, was valued at over $500 million valuation in its Series B financing round in April this year.

It’s unclear who is positioning to lead the round. The firm has engaged closely with Andreessen Horowitz and Coinbase in recent weeks, several people aware of those discussions told TechCrunch.

A deal may finalize within this month, sources said. The size of the deal, according to one source, is over $100 million. Usual caveats apply: terms of the proposed deal may change or the talks may not result in a deal.

The startup declined to comment. Coinbase and A16z, which has yet to back any Indian startup, did not respond to a request for comment Monday. Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital India did not respond to a request for comment last week.

The investment talks come at a time when CoinSwitch Kuber has almost doubled its userbase in recent months — even as local authorities push back against crypto assets. Its eponymous app had over 7 million monthly active users in India last month, up from about 4 million in April this year, according to mobile insight platform App Annie (data of which an industry exec shared with TechCrunch).

B Capital backed CoinSwitch Kuber’s rival CoinDCX last month in a $90 million round that valued the Indian startup at about $1.1 billion. CoinDCX reported 3.5 million users last month.

Policymakers in India have been debating on the status of digital currencies in the South Asian market for several years. India’s central bank, Reserve Bank of India, has expressed concerns about private virtual currencies though it is planning to run trial programs of its first digital currency as soon as December.

More than two dozen Indian startups have become a unicorn this year, up from 11 last year, as several high-profile investors, including Tiger Global, SoftBank and Falcon Edge, have increased the pace of their investments in the South Asian market. TechCrunch reported last week that Tiger Global is engaging with Apna to fund a new round that values the 21-month-old Indian firm at over $1 billion.