CDP Institute

South African API fintech startup Stitch has raised a US$21 million Series A funding round to expand its team, launch new product offerings, and enter new markets across the continent. The Stitch API allows developers to connect apps to financial accounts within minutes, allowing their users to share their transaction histories and balances, confirm their identities, and initiate payments. This tool allows companies to innovate with new and improved services including personal finance, lending, insurance, payments and wealth management. Stitch also enables fintechs to work with traditional financial institutions in... Read More >

Cyara was co-founded in Melbourne in 2006, its flagship offering is the SaaS-based Automated CX Assurance Platform, which has more than 250 global brands clients. The $485 million investment will be used to accelerate product innovation, expand CX assurance into new emerging digital channels, fund strategic acquisitions of complementary technologies and fuel geographic expansion.

Google saw that replication of Australia’s framework would force information to be consumed in a particular manner, “favouring a narrow range of sources for the diffusion of knowledge.” In effect, this would carry the huge implication of undermining democratic discourse and media diversity.

Covid gave Reckitt Benckiser a snapshot of just about every Australian who could possibly buy cleaning products – and along with retailers, a huge trove of shopper data to fuel digital campaigns. Harnessing that data has already driven 2.5x better returns, says Reckitt Hygiene product marketing boss Saurabh Jain.

Singapore’s fintech industry hit a five-year high at 191 deals transacted in 2021, a 37% increase compared to 2020’s deal count (139 deals) and a 91% increase from 2019’s figures (100 deals), said a KPMG report.

Indonesian online grocery platform Happy Fresh said Tuesday it has launched HappyFresh Supermarket to extend fresh and dry grocery accessibility by significantly growing its dark store presence in the Southeast Asian region.

LinkedIn has filed a lawsuit against Mantheos, a Singapore-based data solutions provider, and its founders for “unauthorised scraping of millions of LinkedIn member profiles”. LinkedIn said in a statement that Mantheos “fraudulently obtained” LinkedIn Sales Navigator subscriptions by using a network of hundreds of fake LinkedIn member accounts and virtual debit cards under fake names. The company then used the subscriptions to scrape member profile information that should only be available for viewing on LinkedIn in the logged-in environment by other real, logged-in LinkedIn members.

According to a study released by Cisco, investments in data privacy among Brazilian organizations are falling below the global average. The study interviewed 4,900 professionals in 27 countries and found that Brazilian firms invest a yearly average of $2.2 million in data privacy, compared with the global average of $2.7 million a year.

Acquisition enables Paysafe to further scale in the high-growth Latin American region, taking advantage of the nascent open banking ecosystem and building on its recent acquisition of PagoEfectivo. Together the two acquisitions are expected to drive multiple cross-selling opportunities across all Paysafe business units, enhancing long term growth prospects.

Egyptian FinTech Start-up Thundr has raised $20 million for product development and to expand its presence across MENA. Launched in 2020 by Ahmad Hammouda and Seif Amr after it took part in the Silicon Valley-based Y Combinator accelerator, Thndr initially offered users a commission-free, mobile first equities trading platform that makes it easy to invest in stocks, bonds, and funds. The US$20 million Series A round was co-led by Tiger Global, BECO Capital and Prosus Ventures, with participation from Base Capital, firstminute and existing investors Endure Capital, 4DX Ventures, Raba Partnerships... Read More >

South African startup ParkUpp, a marketplace that connects owners of parking spaces with companies and individuals who need parking, has been acquired by real estate investment company Docklands Ventures. Initially launched in 2016 with the goal of improving the parking experience for shopping centres, ParkUpp pivoted in 2018 after realising the market was too small and launched with its new model in 2019. It allows property owners to list their parking spaces on the platform for free, with users able to book spaces for short or long periods, pay via... Read More >

Influencer marketing platform Kofluence on Tuesday said it has raised USD $4 million (about Rs 30 crore) in funding led by Indian discount brokerage Zerodha’s co-founder Nikhil Kamath. Kunal Shah of fintech Cred, filmmaker Karan Johar, Dharma Productions’ Apoorva Mehta, Udaan’s Sujeet Kumar, microblogging site Koo’s Aprameya Radhakrishna and venture capital fund Upsparks were among other investors who participated in the round.