CDP Institute

Rwandan startup Kasha, a digital platform for last mile access to health. has raised a US$21 million Series B funding round to help it expand across the continent. Launched in 2016, Kasha is a digital retail and last mile distribution platform for pharmaceuticals and fast-moving consumer goods serving consumers, resellers, pharmacies, hospitals and clinics.

Kenyan startup Kyosk has developed a digital-first, data-led distribution platform that revolutionises the way small retail outlets, farmers, and their communities in Africa connect with high-quality and affordable goods and services through digitised value-chains.

Africa’s leading provider of identity verification solutions, Smile Identity, announced its company-wide rebranding as Smile ID. Over the past few years, Smile ID has revolutionised African identity verification, conducting over 75 million identity verifications and building Africa’s most robust KYC/AML suite of products.

ArabyAds, an AdTech company in the MENA region, has acquired the influencer marketing platform indaHash. The acquisition comes close on the heels of ArabyAds’ recent US$30 million Pre Series B funding round led by AfricInvest, which the company had said would be spent on global expansions and acquisitions.

Digital Realty, a renowned global provider of cloud and carrier-neutral data center solutions, is already a major player in the industry. In India, they’ve teamed up with Brookfield Infrastructure to create top-notch, well-connected data centers that cater to the needs of local enterprises and digital service companies.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) regulator is advocating for governmental action to protect app developers from having to paying the massive 30% fees imposed by Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store. The fees make it difficult for developers from other companies to compete and they place a burden on consumers who must pay higher prices for products when costs are passed on.

Meta has been ordered to pay A$20 million (US$14 million) for not being transparent enough with customers about how data would be used by subsidiaries, Facebook Israel and Onavo Inc. The company was found to have used data for market research and acquisition targets, but not stating that information prominently in its product advertising, though disclosures were made in the terms of service and privacy policy.

Indonesian tech giant GoTo, the parent company of Gojek and Tokopedia, has expanded the coverage for its financial services app GoPay to include all cities in Indonesia. With the expansion, people who are not Gojek and Tokopedia users will also be able to download the app, signalling the group’s move to deepen its financial services offerings beyond the ride-hailing and e-commerce ecosystems.

Starlink is now available in Malaysia, marking the 60th country where the company provides satellite high-speed Internet service. Starlink has started offering its broadband satellite Internet service in the country with a monthly subscription price of MYR220 (US$48.22), offering up to 100Mbps (megabits per second) download speed.

Foundation Chile has officially backed ScaleX, an alternative stock market created through a collaborative effort between the Santiago Stock Exchange and Corfo, driven by Start-up Chile. The project has been established to assist high-tech startups in their growth phase to obtain financing through an innovative investment core that provides processes and mechanisms tailored to the demands of potential participants in this market. Santiago de Chile is the country’s main innovation ecosystem and the fourth most important in Latin America, preceded by Mexico City, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires.

ZoomAgri, a global Argentine agricultural technology company that uses AI and machine learning for grain variety recognition, has just raised US$9 million in an investment round Investment in agtech in Latin America represents 5% of global investment and the region is one of the most important agricultural markets in the world. Supporting a sector that is growing and increasingly leaning towards the integration of new technologies can be a spicy offer for venture capital.

Adobe is updating its FireFly AI image generator with more language support. The company has announced that the generative AI model now supports support text prompts in over 100 languages, including eight Indian languages, including Gujarati, Hindi, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi, Tamil, and Telugu.