littlefish, the South African startup building financial infrastructure for small businesses, has raised a $9.5 million Series A round to scale its merchant operating system and expand across Africa. This raise adds to a growing pattern in Africa’s fintech ecosystem, where startups are choosing to build infrastructure for financial institutions rather than compete with them

Image Source: Tenor Nigerian fintech unicorn Moniepoint has acquired Orda, a restaurant management platform. Operating across Kenya and Nigeria, Orda powers restaurant operations for major Nigerian chains such as those under the Eat’N’Go group and processes about 5.2 million transactions annually, as of 2024, signalling the platform’s scale. The acquisition will see Orda’s Nigerian operations

Before the venture capitalists write the big cheques and the headlines follow, someone has to take the first bet on a startup. Angel investors, often with less capital and certainty but more risk, make these bets. Across Africa, this early risk has increasingly been organised and amplified by the African Business Angel Network (ABAN), a

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To...

Plus: a jury has ruled Elon Musk is liable for misleading Twitter investors. This...

Happy Pay, a South African buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) startup, has raised a $5 million seed round to scale what it describes as Africa’s first ad-supported payments network.  The funding will be used to deepen merchant partnerships, expand distribution across online and offline channels, and further develop its AI-powered recommendations and advertising engine. Partech led the round

This is Follow the Money, our weekly series that unpacks the earnings, business, and scaling strategies of African fintechs, financial institutions, companies, and governments. A new edition drops every Monday.   Nigerian artists have earned over ₦143 billion ($105.62 million) from Spotify since 2023, with annual revenues rising over the period. But that growth is beginning

At the Sentient Futures Summit, animal welfare advocates pushed to make AI care about...

M-PESA Ethiopia has expanded into government revenue collection after signing a memorandum of understanding with the Amhara Regional State Revenue Bureau, allowing taxpayers in the region to settle their obligations via the mobile money platform. The agreement, announced on March 21, paves the way for the over 450,000 individuals and businesses across Amhara to pay

For nearly two decades, the M-PESA transaction chime has come with a quiet trade-off on your privacy. Every time you send money or pay a bill, you hand over your full name and a direct line into your digital life. By late 2026, Safaricom plans to end this era of radical transparency. In a phased

Good morning. ☀️️ And welcome back to work. We never left; we hope you didn’t. Last Saturday, we published the milestone tenth episode of our talk show, Headlines by TechCabal, where our hosts broke down Africa’s creator economy spat, a South African airline now accepting Bitcoin payments (we’re officially in our “pay the milkman” era)

For eight years, Lara.ng, the WhatsApp-style chatbot that told you which bus to take, what the fare should be, and which backroad to avoid, was Lagos’s unofficial transit oracle. Samuel Odeloye, the founder behind that chatbot, now lives in the United States. But the data Lara.ng has collected never left Lagos. From an office thousands