Kenyan startup Fingo has partnered with Ecobank to launch a new app aimed at powering financial inclusion across Africa. Fingo, which took part in Y Combinator in 2021, empowers Africa’s youth by enabling them to open a bank account via their mobile phone in less than four minutes, send money to other Fingo users for free, and to M-Pesa users and paybills via Paybills and Till numbers at subsidized rates.
South African e-health startup Quro Medical has raised ZAR25 million (US$1.3 million) in funding from the Mineworkers Investment Company (MIC). Founded in 2018, Quro Medical has developed an affordable and accessible hospital-at-home solution that combines state-of-the-art hardware and software with clinical excellence to manage acutely ill patients in the comfort of their homes.
Nigeria’s Towntalk has built a data infrastructure that leverages “hard to collect” location data and implements AI methodologies to develop a range of risk protection solutions for security, logistics and agriculture companies in Africa. Formed in 2020, Towntalk has built a “data ecosystem” that is further enhanced by industry partnerships with leading security companies.
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.)