Nigerian startup Peppa is making it safer to shop online in Africa, with a focus on social buying and selling, via a payment protection scheme that means buyers are protected from fraud and sellers are protected from losses that come from cancelled orders. Founded in September 2021, though conceived of much earlier, Peppa allows users to safely and seamlessly make payments for purchases on social commerce platforms.
Smile Identity, a KYC compliance and ID verification partner for many African fintechs and businesses, has acquired Inclusive Innovations, the parent company of Appruve, a Ghanaian developer of identity verification software. This strategic acquisition will expand Smile Identity’s footprint across Africa and solidify its position as the continent’s leading identity verification and digital KYC provider.
South African startup Maholla, a viral consumer rewards app, has concluded a US$1.5 million seed funding round to help it continue to scale. Maholla is a viral consumer app that rewards users for scanning any receipt from any store, allowing users to earn rewards irrespective of where they shop. Rewards come in the form of instant airtime, vouchers, in-app games and more.
The second half of 2024 saw the CDP industry continue its shift towards embedding CDPs in customer-facing systems, according to the CDP Institute’s latest Industry Update report. Nearly all firms new to the report had added a CDP to an existing product, and major acquisitions including ActionIQ, Lytics, and mParticle were all made by customer management vendors. The new report adds coverage of composable CDP vendors, which is still a much smaller sector than conventional CDP systems.