Propel, a Lagos- and Berlin-based startup, wants to build sustainable talent pipelines for communities and help global companies de-risk the process of hiring remote talent from emerging markets, particularly in Africa. The firm has secured €2.5 million (US$2.74 million) in seed investment.
Zambia’s Union54, a leading provider of innovative digital financial solutions, has partnered with Mastercard to launch social commerce platform ChitChat. A Y-Combinator alumni, Union54 has developed a number of tools to propel African commerce forward. The startup works with financial technology companies across Africa and has issued millions of debit cards to African consumers from almost every country on the continent.
Connect Ads by Aleph launched a new brand called Mediam Group, dedicated to advertising sales and account management for Google. The partnership aims to reinforce and expand Google’s presence in Iraq and Morocco, providing Google solutions to more customers and agencies in order to grow their businesses through dedicated local support.
CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million. It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge. (See this blog post for more analysis.)