Kenyan startup GoBEBA says it is reimagining Africa’s utilities supply chain to help provide the infrastructure that can cope with the continent-wide explosion in urban growth. Formed in 2019 by Peter Ndiang’ui, a former OLX general manager, and Lesley Mbogo, a former head of product at Amazon, GoBEBA is an online distributor of bulky refillable essentials.
Nigerian fintech startup Earnipay, which provides flexible and on-demand salary access to income-earners, is now quickly scaling after US$4 million funding round. Founded by Nonso Onwuzulike in 2019, Earnipay integrates employer payroll and HRM systems to enable on-demand financing for employees to access their earned salary instantly, without interest.
Kenyan startup Chumz has built a goal-based mobile app that helps users save and invest money from their mobile money accounts, with as little as US$0.05. The platform works by channeling funds collected from a user’s mobile money account to a licensed fund manager, who then offers a return to the fund. Earned interest is then redistributed to individual clients. One of the unique features of Chumz is that it encourages users to save based on their behaviour.
Nearly one-third of major news publishers have blocked generative AI tools from reading their content. But that’s a drastic measure which could also exclude their results from conventional search engines. Microsoft has just given publishers the option to block access by Bing Chat without also removing their content from search results. We’ll see if competitors do the same.