Nigerian credit-led digital banking platform FairMoney has acquired PayForce (sub-brand of YC-backed CrowdForce), a merchant payment services that serves small businesses, as the digital lender looks to broaden its financial services proposition to merchants.
Naspers, Africa’s most valuable tech company by market capitalization, has wound down the operations of its R1.4 billion ($100 million) South Africa-focused venture capital fund Naspers Foundry, according to local news outlet BusinessDay.
NTT, the world’s third-largest data centre service provider, said increasing competition in the sector in India will likely lead to short-term margin pressure as clients become pickier about using cloud services. In addition to global technology giants Microsoft and Amazon, many local companies have cropped up since the pandemic to build data centres in India. However, NTT said the increasing competition isn’t expected to be a threat beyond the current short-term margin pressure.
Disney has agreed to license more than 200 characters, costumes, and environments (but not voices or talent likenesses) to OpenAI for Sora, its gen AI video platform. This is highly unusual for Disney, which generally sues AI models for copyright infringement; in fact, it sued Google for that a day before announcing the OpenAI deal. Disney will also invest $1 billion in OpenAI, nicely illustrating how very eager they are to join the AI party.