Kenyan women-only taxi service An Nisa is planning expansion to Saudi Arabia after clocking up 10,000 users in its home market. Founded by Mehnaz Sarwar in 2018, An Nisa Taxi went app-based last year, and has more than 10,000 users.
Nigerian payment service provider Nomba has raised $30 million in a pre-Series B investment to support the delivery of bespoke payment solutions for African businesses. The round, which values the company at $150 million+ according to YCombinator data on its most valuable companies, was led by San Francisco-based Base 10 Partners.
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.
Salesforce kicked off its big Connections conference yesterday, and if you’re surprised the focus was on generative AI, you haven’t been paying attention. Still, the focus this time was on marketing applications that draw on Salesforce CDP data, so it’s right up our alley. They also announced direct access to Google BigQuery data, ticking the “zero-copy” box as well.