Kenyan B2B e-commerce platform Twiga has raised a US$50 million Series C funding round to help it scale its affordable food solutions across Africa. Founded in 2014, Twiga is a B2B food distribution company that builds fair and reliable markets for agricultural producers and retailers through transparency, efficiency and technology.
Kenyan startup WorkPay, which builds human resources (HR) and payroll solutions for Africa, has expanded into Nigeria. Originally called TozzaPlus until it rebranded in 2019, WorkPay is a cloud-based human resources management and payroll solution for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in Africa. The startup’s time tracking and salary disbursement tools help African businesses save money and time by eliminating ghost workers from their payroll and inefficiencies associated with cash payments.
Coinbase is acquiring the startup Agara, which operates an AI-powered customer support platform. The size of the deal is between $40 Mn and $50 Mn. Four-year-old Agara, which started its journey in India and runs operations in the U.S. as well, had raised about $7 million from Blume Ventures, RTP Global, UTEC Japan and Kleiner Perkins prior to the acquisition.
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.