Tag: m-pesa
Sequoia Heritage, Stripe and others invest $200M in African fintech Wave at $1.7B valuation
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…
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Africa Roundup: Visa connects to M-Pesa, Flutterwave enters e-commerce
It seems the demand for Safaricom’s M-Pesa payment product never eases. Since its 2007 launch in Kenya, the fintech app has commanded over 70% of the mobile money market in that country. When COVID-19 hit the East African nation of 53 million in March, the Kenyan Central Bank turned to…
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Visa and Kenya’s Safaricom partner on M-Pesa, payments and tech
Visa just connected to Africa’s most powerful mobile payments network. The global financial services company and Kenyan telecom Safaricom — operator of the M-Pesa mobile money product — announced a partnership today on payments and tech. The arrangement opens up Visa’s global merchant and card network across 200 countries to…
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Africa Roundup: Africa’s tech ecosystem responds to COVID-19
In March, the virus gripping the world — COVID-19 — started to spread in Africa. In short order, actors across the continent’s tech ecosystem began to step up to stem the spread. Early in March Africa’s coronavirus cases by country were in the single digits, but by mid-month those numbers…
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African turns to mobile payments as a tool to curb COVID-19
Africa is using digital finance as a means to stem the spread of COVID-19. Governments and startups on the continent are implementing measures to shift a greater volume of payment transactions toward mobile money and away from cash — which the World Health Organization flagged as a conduit for the…
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CcHub funds tech to curb COVID-19 on concerns of an Africa outbreak
Africa’s largest innovation incubator, CcHub, will offer funding and engineering support to tech projects aimed at curbing COVID-19 and its social and economic impact. The Lagos and Nairobi based organization posted an open application on its website this week, CcHub CEO Bosun Tijani told TechCrunch on a call. CcHub will…
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