Baubap offers micro loans ranging from $500 to 5,000 Mexican pesos (US$25 to US$258) through an Android-compatible mobile app. The company says it uses alternative data and a proprietary AI system to assess the likelihood of repayment. It has granted loans to 500 thousand people and expects to exceed 1.5 million in 2023.
Addem Capital, a Mexico City fund focused on Latin America, granted $3.1 million to Atria, a start-up that offers loans for the purchase of pre-owned cars in the country. Atria was founded in 2022 as a disruptive startup that is revolutionizing the pre-owned market by offering simple, transparent, and agile loans. Atria’s proposal is backed by a team that has in-depth knowledge of the sector and expertise in loans, risk management, analysis, and technology.
Orda, a Nigerian food tech platform that provides a cloud-based restaurant operating system for small, independent restaurants, is announcing that it has secured a $3.4 million seed investment. The two-year-old startup raised $1.1 million in pre-seed funding this January, bringing its total funding raised this year to $4.5 million.
Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents. You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better. It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange. Price was not announced.