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May Mobility, a Michigan-based startup that is operating autonomous shuttle services in three U.S. cities, has has raised $50 million in a Series B round led by Toyota Motor Corp.

The funding, which comes less than a year after May Mobility raised $22 million, will be used to expand every aspect of the company, including its AV shuttle fleet as well as its engineering and operations staff.

May Mobility has 25 autonomous low-speed shuttles spread out between Detroit and Grand Rapids, Michigan and Providence, Rhode Island — the three cities it operates in. The startup wants to build that number up to 25 vehicles per city, co-founder and COO Alisyn Malek told TechCrunch. That fleet size improves the economic picture for the startup and begin to meaningfully impact transportation in that city.

This latest round does more than provide May Mobility with capital. The startup, which launched in 2017, has has gained a customer as well. Toyota has picked May Mobility as one of its “autonomous driving providers for future open platforms,” according to the startup.

Toyota and May Mobility didn’t share specifics of about what this partnership will lead to. But it will likely pair the startup’s autonomous vehicle technology with the Toyota e-Palette, a platform the automaker unveiled in 2018 at CES, the annual tech trade show in Las Vegas.

The e-Palette was presented as a concept vehicle, but really it’s a platform that fits into Toyota’s vision for mobility ecosystem that will transition from a company that just produces and sells cars to one that handles all aspects of moving people and things from point A to point B.

The e-Palette is designed for flexibility. The platform, which theoretically will be outfitted with autonomous vehicle technology, could be used as a shuttle, for delivering packages to customers or even as a roving mobile shop.

May Mobility will be working with Toyota to identify market opportunities, Malek said, adding that the company will be one of the automaker’s primary partners in co-development to bring those platforms out to market.

“They really believe in the transportation-as-a-service work that we’re doing and want to support that,” Malek said.

Kustomer, a CRM startup that’s taking on the likes of Zendesk, Salesforce, and many other bigger and older providers, has closed yet another round of funding — no less than its third fundraise of the year — as it continues to double down on its new approach to managing customers in today’s digital world.

The New York-based company has picked up another $60 million, a Series E led by new investor Coatue with participation from existing investors Tiger Global Management and Battery Ventures. Other investors in the company include Redpoint Ventures, Cisco Investments, Canaan Partners, Boldstart Ventures and Social Leverage.

CEO Brad Birnbaum — who co-founded the company with Jeremy Suriel (the two worked together across a range of other places including Airtime, Salesforce and AOL) — said the valuation is now “definitely above $500 million” but he declined to be more specific.

The New York-based company has been on a growth tear and has raised more than $161 million in the last 18 months (this $35 million raise and this $40 million raise were the other two 2019 rounds), and it has now racked up a total of $173.5 million in outside funding since it was founded in 2015.

“We’re exceeding all our business metrics and so we’re rapidly investing in the business,” Birnbaum said of the recent quick succession of funding rounds. A focus for the company will be to put more into its R&D and product development, also to use the funding to support the opening of its first European office in Q1 of next year.

Kustomer works with a variety of retailers and has seen a boost in its business with the proliferation of direct-to-consumer brands which — by foregoing the traditional retail channel — have found themselves needing to build out their own customer service operations. Current customers in that category are a who’s who of some of the more successful in the wider D2C trend: they include Glossier, Ring, ThirdLove, Rent the Runway, Sweetgreen, Glovo, Away, and UNTUCKit.

In addition to those, Birnbaum said Kustomer has been working with government agencies, B2B companies and Fortune 50s, “a pretty diverse group.”

Companies like Zendesk and Salesforce built their businesses around the concept of really useful tools for customer service agents to use in largely traditional environments, where phone, email and possibly web-based chat made up the majority of inbound contact from customers.

But in the grand tradition of building something new from the ground up that reflects new digital patterns among consumers, rather than trying to tweak legacy products to be more updated, Kustomer has taken a different route with an “omnichannel” concept: the idea is to be able to capture conversations anywhere, whether it’s social media channels, messaging apps or — yes — phone, email and website chat, and bring them into a single customer view.

This is different from much of what is on the market today, he said, where different channels will generate different tickets, statuses and resolutions.

“We are the only company doing proper omnichannel, where you have a single threaded conversation that allows you to converse with customers in any channel you support,” he said. “To do that in a single threaded conversation sounds obvious, but I would challenge you to find others doing it the same way we do.”

A new version of its CRM platform, which will be coming out soon he said, will see Kustomer moving deeper into what he described as “RPA-like” business process automations. These are not just basic business rules based on key words, but a wider set of algorithms that can understand what a customer is asking and start to action a set of mundane but routine tasks that customer service agents have to do regularly, such as reordering an item of clothing in a different size. It packages these and other AI-based functions together in a technology set it calls KustomerIQ.

“AI is a big area of focus for us,” he said.

While Kustomer had already raised a lot of money in recent times, there was another reason that the startup chose to take more: the investor itself.

Birnbaum describes Coatue as “one of the most modern and prolific investors, and by that I don’t mean the cash but their network and people, which are tremendous.” The idea is that Coatue is making many introductions and opening doors for Kustomer as it continues to scale.

“Kustomer’s differentiated, omnichannel approach is fundamentally reshaping the industry standard as trends in customer service continue to shift and consumers seek increasingly personalized interactions with brands,” said Coatue Co-Founder Thomas Laffont, who is now on the startup’s board. “We look forward to working with Brad and his team as they continue to execute their strategic growth plan.”

A lot of companies talk about the value of your data, and about helping you get more control over the information you share, but Toronto-based Delphia is unique in aiming to build a viable, sustainable and scalable way to take a person’s data and turn that into real monetary gain. It’s not aiming to do this by putting a price tag on your social graph – instead, Delphia wants to pool the resources of a large group of individuals to derive real economic power through collective action.

“If you’re going to create a solution that effectively captures the value from our data, then it has to be one where we are going to aggregate it together, act as an act as a collective,” explained Delphia CEO Andrew Peek in an interview.

Other attempts, Peek notes, have often focused on individual data in terms of its value to advertisers – and in that arrangement the value of an individual’s data is actually quite low. Delphia, by contrast, is looking to the capital markets, and hopes to replicate and improve upon a model that has and continues to work. Hedge funds and other large institutional investors use machine learning algorithms based on user data all the time, but users don’t have any active participation in this process, either in terms of the data they contribute or in terms of reaping any significant reward.

Delphia wants to change that, by launching an app that will allow individuals to opt in to doing this kind of investment themselves, working together with other users. Users will also go beyond what these hedge funds can accomplish by actively providing additional info on top of what’s available via their passive participation through traditional online signals, which should translate to an advantage in investments.

“We ask you a series of questions every day, usually pertaining to current events,” Peek says. “So, Apple puts up the new AirPods, or Nike puts up the Colin Kaepernick ad – something’s happening every day. For us, that’s an opportunity to engage. But once we do, like, we really want to learn a little bit more about you. So there’s a handful of questions, those generate points. And then there are also points that you generate from connecting accounts: That could be connecting anything from a Twitter profile, to a Venmo account, to your phone’s location history to your Amazon purchase history – YouTube, Reddit, etc.”

This data will help Delphia make strategic picks in the stock market on behalf of their overall user base. It’ll collect fees, but will redistribute half of those back to its users who are investing their data, something which Peek notes will allow people to participate without even putting in any money. Users can also contribute funds, however, as with a traditional investment vehicle – though Delphia will be strictly focused on retail investing at launch, while it works on the trickier issue of institutional investment with regulators. For now, operating in a retail investment environment means all of its users can participate without any special requirements.

As mentioned, Delphia’s model requires that there’s a certain volume of users on the platform participating before it can work as designed by the data scientists on the team, who have published academically regarding the company’s model. That’s why they’re kicking off their public launch today with a sign-up page, with the goal of achieving a critical mass of 100,000 pre-registered users before officially launching their app. They’ve also built the calculator below, which is designed to show how their model will work based on the volume of users they sign-up, as compared to more traditional retail investment advisor and robot-advisors.

Delphia’s model is definitely ambitious, and it also requires a lot of trust on the part of users, something Peek freely admits. The difference, he says, is that their model only works so long as they continue to earn that trust, since users have to continue to participate to ensure their advantage remains in place. It’s also worth noting that there doesn’t seem to be any realistic way of putting the genie back in the bottle when it comes to data generation and sharing, but Delphia’s vision does re-introduce an element of control, as well as a way for those who might be locked out of traditional stock market investing to participate in generating true economic power.

Plex today is launching its own ad-supported streaming service, a rival to The Roku Channel, Tubi, Crackle, Vudu’s Movies on Us, and others that offer a way to stream movies and TV for free without a subscription. The service will feature several thousand movies and shows from studios like MGM, Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution, Lionsgate, and Legendary — deals which were previously announced leading up to today’s launch.

Though there are plenty of similar offerings on the market, what makes Plex’s new streaming service unique is its broad availability. Unlike many competitors, Plex has structured its deals in order to stream content outside the U.S. Plex told TechCrunch the majority of its content will stream in some 220 countries worldwide. This immediately makes it the largest ad-supported video service, in terms of reach — if you’re not counting platforms for user-generated video, like YouTube.

Like other free streaming services, Plex’s free content won’t require a subscription or any other commitments, but will instead be fully supported by ads.

Today, the service will feature both pre-roll ads and traditional ad breaks, but Plex promises an ad load that’s 50%-60% less than what you’d otherwise find on broadcast television. Currently, Plex is leveraging ad network partnerships to sell these ads, but says it may move into direct sales in 2020.

The service itself lives right within Plex’s media organization software. This app has evolved over the years to become more than just a DIY media player for home media. Today, Plex organizes your own media collections alongside podcasts, web shows, streaming news, and music courtesy of a TIDAL partnership. The free, ad-supported content will now appear on the Plex sidebar under a new “Movies & TV” heading.

In this section, the content is organized in a somewhat Netflix-style layout with image thumbnails for easy browsing and hubs for finding popular, trending or genre-specific content, for example.

Plex has also introduced several editorially curated hubs as well as those personalized to the user, based on their cross-platform, cross-content watch history.

In total, there are around 70 different hubs that could potentially show up here, Plex says.

Meanwhile, clicking through to each title will show you details like genre, rating, year, length, description and even critic scores and audience ratings from Rotten Tomatoes, among other metadata. The titles will stream in 1080p and you can mark items as played, as you can with personal media.

Sample titles available at launch include a number of classics, cult classics, and even award winners, like Rain Main, The Terminator, Overboard, Frequency, Evil Dead (1 & 2), Teen Wolf, plus music concerts and documentaries featuring Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj, Deadmau5, and more.

The content is available across Plex platforms, including Roku, Apple TV, Android TV, smart TVs,
Android and iOS mobile platforms, Xbox, PlayStation, Amazon Fire TV, and others.

“Plex was born out of a passion for media and entertainment, and offering free ad-supported premium movies and TV shows is just the latest step in our mission to bring all your favorite content together in one place,” said Keith Valory, CEO of Plex, in a statement. “What started more than a decade ago as a passion project to make accessing media on connected devices easier has evolved into the most comprehensive streaming platform in the industry, used by millions of people around the world,” he added.

TechCrunch first broke the news regarding Plex’s plans to enter the ad-supported movies market back in January, when it described a strategy similar to that of The Roku Channel.

Today, Plex has 15 million registered households using its service. Though the service is profitable, the percentage of customers who pay for its advanced features through a Plex Pass subscription is much smaller. That’s driven Plex to find new ways to generate revenue from its free users — and ad-supported content is an obvious choice, in that case.

Pandora’s redesigned mobile app experience is today available to all users, following a limited rollout that began in October. The update expands on Pandora’s personalization capabilities with the addition of a new “For You” tab offering an entirely unique experience for each Pandora user, along with more station customization features, and other changes. Pandora hopes the features will help it better compete with rivals like Spotify and Apple Music in the months ahead.

Personalization has become a key selling point for today’s streaming music services. And though Pandora led in this area in years past thanks its Music Genome, thumbs up and down signaling buttons, and its personalized stations, it has since ceded ground to Spotify whose bevy of algorithmically-updated playlists, led by Discover Weekly, have addicted users to its service.

This revamped Pandora app is a way for the now SiriusXM-owned company to fight back by highlighting what it does have that others don’t.

For example, the new “For You” tab gives Pandora a place to showcase its exclusive content like its music-and-podcast combos, called “Pandora Stories,” and its dozens of SiriusXM talk shows that became Pandora podcasts following the company’s acquisition.

Pandora also recently announced a multi-year deal with Marvel to create a “substantial number” of exclusive podcasts for its service, both scripted and unscripted, along with live events and more. And it will run many of Marvel’s podcasts before they can be heard elsewhere. These, too, will be featured in the new “For You” tab.

Other new content coming to “For You” will include exclusive custom playlists from LeBron James, Rob Gronkowski, Odell Beckham Jr., and Angel McCoughtry; Pandora’s year-end review feature called Playback 2019; Pandora’s Top Thumb Hundred 2019 playlist; its ten-year retrospective playlist, Top Thumb Hundred Songs of 2010-2019; and new content from Drake.

The tab also gives Pandora a way to puts more of the focus on its unique personalization capabilities which allow users to listen to music by genre, mood, activity, trending, new releases and more.

The update brings the “Pandora Modes” feature to mobile, as well, following its launch on the web earlier in the year. This lets users customize Pandora Stations by tweaking them to play just the most popular songs (“crowd faves”), the deep cuts, the new releases, artist-only tracks — or you can put the station into a “discovery” mode to be introduced to more artists you may like.

Pandora says that already more than double the number of users are engaging with “For You” versus the traditional “Browse” experience the tab replaces, following the October launch. In addition, those users are engaging with the personalized content they find in “For You” three times more than the content they find through traditional browsing. Presuming these metrics hold up as “For You” launches broadly, it could give Pandora’s app a competitive advantage — something the company needs as its user numbers and listening hours fall.

Pandora closed Q3 with 63.1 million monthly active users, down from 68.8 million the year prior. Its active users were also down on a quarterly basis, from 64.9 million at the end of Q2. Meanwhile, listening hours were down from 3.59 billion in Q3 last year to 3.32 billion in Q3 2019. Gross profit, however, grew 7% year-over-year to reach $970 million.

The company plans to kick off a new brand campaign starting today to showcase its new visual identity and tagline, “life is better with sound.” The ads will feature artists like  Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa, Lizzo, H.E.R., Maren Morris, Normani, Tones & I, Halsey, Little Simz, Post Malone, Snoh Allegra, and others. Pandora will also host experiential events related to this, including a live-streamed Halsey concert in New York’s Times Square and a larger concert still to come.

“This campaign is all about showing our listeners that Pandora is still the service they know and love, but it looks and feels a whole lot different — a whole lot better. The product is at the center, and we are highlighting the personalized, on-demand content Pandora users want, but may not know we have,” said Brad Minor, VP of Brand Marketing, Creative, & Communications at Pandora. “We’re celebrating our listeners in their everyday lives and demonstrating how Pandora has the unique ability to transform each moment by adding the exact right soundtrack at the exact right time,” Minor added.

The “For You” tab and other features are rolling out to all users at all tiers of Pandora’s service including its free, ad-supported option, Pandora Plus, and Pandora Premium.

Flow, a startup that helps brands and retailers build a cross-border e-commerce business, has raised $37 million in Series B funding.

CEO Rob Keve said that thanks to the magic of social media and digital marketing, many direct-to-consumer brands are reaching consumers around the world. However, the actual shopping experience for those consumers often leaves a lot to be desired — even if there are international purchase options, the shipping is usually slow or expensive, and the site might also fail to integrate with local payment services.

Keve said that he and CTO Mike Bryzek co-founded the Hoboken, New Jersey-based startup to solve this problem: Flow sits on top of existing e-commerce platforms, so that the shopper’s experience (whether that’s a website, app or distributed buy button) is automatically tailored to their location, with local pricing and payment options.

Plus, thanks to Flow’s relationships with carriers, international shipping should be timely and affordable. And even if a business already has international shipping deals and distribution centers, they can still use Flow to manage the logistics.

Founded in 2015, the company said it’s now seeing 200% year-over-year client growth, with customers including online brands like MVMT Watches, as well as omni-channel businesses like MZ Wallace and Charles & Colvard.

With this new funding, Flow has raised around $55 million total. The Series B was led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from American Express Ventures and Latitude Ventures. NEA Venture Partner Liza Landsman (former president of Jet.com) is joining Flow’s board of directors.

“Cross-border shopping is a rapidly growing area of e-commerce, and more companies are investing in their cross-border strategy to capture that international demand,” Landsman said in a statement. “Flow is a premier vendor in this space, and their platform delivers strategic advantages for brands and retailers entering or expanding into international markets. Our team is excited to support Flow’s rapid growth.”

Keve told me that Flow will use the money to expand its sales and marketing team, and to improve the product. For example, he said he wants to continue developing the artificial intelligence that Flow uses to classify products (necessary for calculating duty and tax costs).

He also said he wants to continue building out Flow’s services business. While it’s important for the company to offer “a turnkey platform,” the technology is also “married” to Flow’s expertise about the strategies that work in each country.

“There’s services and knowledge that is very country-specific and even category-specific,” Keve said. “That is always going to be a matter of consulting and advising and sharing best practices … We will continue to be investing in that layer of expertise.”

Google is expanding its suite of “Digital Wellbeing” tools for Android devices with a new feature, Focus Mode, launching today. This feature allows users to turn off distractions — like social media updates or email notifications — for a period of time, so you can get things done without interruption. Focus Mode was first announced at Google’s I/O developer conference this May, and has been in beta testing until now, Google says.

Unlike Do Not Disturb, which can mute sounds, stop vibrations and block visual disturbances, Focus Mode is only about silencing specific apps.

Within the Digital Wellbeing settings, users select which apps they find most distracting — like Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, games or anything else that tends to steal their attention. These apps can be paused temporarily, which stops those apps’ notifications. Plus, if you try to open the app, Focus Mode reminds you they’re paused.

During beta testing, Google said tester feedback led to the creation of a new enhancement for Focus Mode: the ability to set a schedule for your app breaks. This allows you to continually block app notifications for the days and times you choose — like your 9 AM to 5 PM working hours, for example.

There’s also a new option to take a break from Focus Mode, which allows you to use to use the blocked apps for a time, then return to Focus Mode without entirely disabling it to do so. In addition, if you finish your work or other tasks early one day, you can now turn off Focus Mode for that day without breaking its ongoing weekly schedule.

The Focus Mode feature is one of now many investments Google has made into its comprehensive Digital Wellbeing feature set, which was originally introduced at Google I/O 2018 but initially only on Pixel devices. Since then, Google has expanded access to Digital Wellbeing features and further integrated its features — including parent control app Family Link — into the Android OS.

It has also developed digital wellbeing apps outside of its core Digital Wellbeing product, with October’s launch of a handful of wellbeing experiments. This set of apps included a notification mailbox, unlock clock, and even an easy way to printout important information from your phone so you don’t have to keep checking your device throughout the day, among other things.

Elsewhere across Google’s product line it has developed settings and controls devoted to wellbeing, like YouTube’s reminders to “take a break,” automations for Gmail, downtime settings for Google Home, and more.

Google says the new version of Focus Mode exits beta testing today and is rolling out to all devices that support Digital Wellbeing and parental controls, including Android 9 and 10 phones.

SpaceX is set to launch its 19th Commercial Resupply Mission (CRS) for the International Space Station today, with a liftoff time scheduled for 12:51 PM EST (9:51 AM EST). The launch will take off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, and will use a Dragon cargo capsule that SpaceX has already flown twice previously, first in 2014 and then again in 2017. The stream above should start at around 15 minutes prior to liftoff, so at around 12:36 PM EST.

This launch will also include a recovery attempt for the Falcon9 booster being used, which will perform a controlled return to Earth and aim to land on the floating drone landing ship ‘Of Course I Still Love You,’ which will be waiting in the Atlantic Ocean.

On board the Dragon bound for the ISS will be around 5,700 lbs of supplies, including experiment and research materials to support the ongoing science mission of the station and the astronauts on board. One of those pieces of cargo is a new ‘robot hotel’ that will provide a protected parking space for mission-critical robots at the ISS when they’re not in use.

The CRS-19 mission has a backup window of Thursday, December 5 at 12:29 PM EST (9:29 AM PST) should today’s launch not go off as planned for any reason.

SpaceX is set to launch its 19th Commercial Resupply Mission (CRS) for the International Space Station today, with a liftoff time scheduled for 12:51 PM EST (9:51 AM EST). The launch will take off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, and will use a Dragon cargo capsule that SpaceX has already flown twice previously, first in 2014 and then again in 2017. The stream above should start at around 15 minutes prior to liftoff, so at around 12:36 PM EST.

This launch will also include a recovery attempt for the Falcon9 booster being used, which will perform a controlled return to Earth and aim to land on the floating drone landing ship ‘Of Course I Still Love You,’ which will be waiting in the Atlantic Ocean.

On board the Dragon bound for the ISS will be around 5,700 lbs of supplies, including experiment and research materials to support the ongoing science mission of the station and the astronauts on board. One of those pieces of cargo is a new ‘robot hotel’ that will provide a protected parking space for mission-critical robots at the ISS when they’re not in use.

The CRS-19 mission has a backup window of Thursday, December 5 at 12:29 PM EST (9:29 AM PST) should today’s launch not go off as planned for any reason.

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.