CDP Institute

Early-stage VC firm Launch Africa Ventures has made its 100th investment, making it probably the most active investor in African tech startups, and closed its first fund at US$36.3 million.

Egyptian startup DXwand, an omnichannel conversational AI and digital assistant tool, that easily helps businesses turn conversations into growth insights, has closed a pre-Series A funding round of US$1 million to expand across the region and accelerate its AI research.

Nigeria has announced plans to regulate internet companies like Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram (all owned by Meta), Google and TikTok in a draft shared by the country’s internet regulator.

Innovations in digital technology has led to enhanced customer experience in the Indian insurance industry. Customer experiences have been higher due to technological innovations and increased usage. Scope of digital insurance penetration expected to grow significantly in future. That said, the digital insurance penetration in India is a mere 2 per cent when compared to China (6 per cent) and US (14 per cent).

CleverTap, a retention marketing platform has acquired Leanplum a San Francisco multi-channel customer engagement platform. With this acquisition, CleverTap has strengthened its footprint in the US and Europe. CleverTap will combine the product stack of both organizations and extend its world-class solutions and technology to all its customers and prospects worldwide.

India’s data centres market is seeing health growth that is driven by large hyper-scalers like Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM among others, who are outsourcing their storage needs to third party data centre providers. The favourable regulatory support, rapidly growing cloud computing, increasing internet penetration, government effort on digital economy, growing needs of hyper-scalers are some of the major factors driving the demand for data centres in the country.

Zitcha has officially launched with the ambition to empower retailers to become publishers by monetising their owned and external media ecosystem. It connects the media assets of a retail brand including email, apps, digital in-store screens, Web and social media, allowing retail suppliers to connect directly with consumers.

Head of data and analytics Glen Shields shares the journey to bring together multiple marketing and data systems together to start driving personalisation. Shields dives into how to form the data team, get the data side of things happening better and also to manage the Salesforce environment that Leukaemia consolidated all of those different CRMs into.

Southeast Asian internet giant Sea Ltd’s e-commerce arm Shopee will lay off some workers in its ShopeeFood and ShopeePay teams in the region. It will also let go part of its teams in Mexico, Argentina and Chile, as well as a cross-border team supporting the market in Spain.

Capital A Bhd is planning New York listings for its low-cost carrier AirAsia and its digital Super App. The company, which was previously known as AirAsia Group Bhd, began compliance work towards having two separate listings, one for AirAsia planned sometime next year, followed by one for the Super App, which offers services, such as e-hailing and food delivery.

Talently offers training and an employability marketplace and announced its new capital raising of a US$3 million seed round. The startup that connects talent with technology companies announced that it has grown 50x since the pandemic, maintaining a monthly growth of 30%. Talently has an intensive training platform for software developers in tools that allow them to access positions in leading technology companies.

Ecuadorian payments infrastructure company Kushki has raised $100 million in an extension to its Series B round, more than doubling its valuation to $1.5 billion. Kushki aims to help make it easier, cheaper and more secure for businesses across Latam to send and receive/process digital payments. It enables Latam businesses to accept payments globally and receive money in their local currency. The end goal is to help these businesses grow faster online and drive consumer adoption of digital payments.