Autochek, a Nigerian automotive online marketplace, announced that it has purchased Cheki Kenya and Cheki Uganda from Ringier One Africa Media (ROAM) for an unspecified sum. The company had previously acquired Cheki Nigeria and Ghana as part of its West African launch.
Founded in July 2019, Mexico City-based Flat.mx started out with a model similar to that of Opendoor, buying properties, renovating them and then reselling them. Flat.mx is growing sales by 70% quarter-over-quarter and has increased its inventory by 10x over the last year, according to its founders. It has also nearly tripled its headcount from 30 at the middle of last year to over 85 today.
Safaricom’s flagship mobile money platform M-Pesa has hit 50 million active customers in Africa, boosting its position as the continent’s largest fintech company. M-Pesa is run by Safaricom and Vodacom and is now available in Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Lesotho, Ghana and Egypt. It provides customers with access to the widest agent network across the continent with more than 430,000 agent outlets and cashless payments in more than 400,000 businesses.
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.