Norrsken22, a Pan-African venture capital firm, has achieved the final close of its debut fund, raising a total of US$205 million, surpassing its initial target. This also highlights a keen interest from institutional investors in supporting African startups at an essential phase of their journey.
Coincidence or not, here’s another acquisition story. Getir, the “ultrafast” grocery delivery company that promises to deliver orders within 15 minutes, is buying Fresh Direct, which serves the New York regional market. Don’t get too excited; Fresh Direct services will continue as before. I think we can chalk this up to consolidation as the crazily-competitive and complex last mile delivery market adapts to post-Covid reality.
Ghanaian startup Hurupay is helping businesses and individuals across Africa overcome the negative impacts of fluctuating local currencies by allowing them to make and receive stablecoin-based payments. Formed earlier this year, Hurupay is a crypto wallet that enables users to access stablecoins, which are non-volatile cryptocurrencies pegged to the value of the US dollar at a ratio of 1:1.
Salesforce has announced a new solution, Unified Knowledge, that will pull data from third-party systems thus supplementing Salesforce Data Cloud with external information sources. Initially, this is mainly aimed at helping Service Cloud users in combination with Einstein for Service’s generative AI. It was developed through a strategic partnership with AI vendor Zoomin.