Author: Insider Editor

Swoop, a food delivery startup founded in Eswatini, has raised $7.3 million in seed funding as it prepares to enter Nigeria marking its first expansion beyond its home market and a major step toward its super-app ambitions. The round, backed by Silicon Valley investors including Long Journey, Variant, Version One, Dune Ventures, Soma Capital, and Zero Knowledge Ventures, will fund the rollout of its consumer platform, beginning with food delivery. For a young African consumer startup, the raise stands out coming close to the $9 million Series A secured by Chowdeck in 2025 after years of scaling operations. Swoop is…

Glovo has named Nigeria its fastest-growing market in 2025, underscoring the country’s rising importance in the company’s global expansion plans. The on-demand delivery platform, which launched in Nigeria in 2021, revealed the milestone at its Future of Commerce 2026 summit held in Lagos on Wednesday. Over the past year, Glovo says it has invested more than ₦37 billion ($27 million) in the country and delivered 38 million items figures that highlight both growing consumer demand and increased activity from businesses on its platform. The company’s Nigeria growth story reflects a deliberate long-term strategy. From the outset, Glovo positioned the country…

Absa Bank Kenya is set to invest up to KES 3 billion ($23.2 million) annually in technology as it doubles down on its digital banking strategy, according to a Business Daily report. The lender says the recurring investment will support its efforts to shift more customer activity away from physical branches and into mobile and self-service platforms, as competition in Kenya’s banking sector intensifies and customer expectations increasingly tilt toward faster, always-on digital services. “Typically, we now do KES 2 billion ($15.4 million) to KES 3 billion ($23.2 million) of investments per year [in technology], and 2025 was no different…

BuuPass is pushing into Kenya’s corporate travel market with the launch of a new platform, Gavanpass, as it looks to digitise a largely manual segment of Africa’s enterprise economy. The Nairobi-based company said that more than 20 organisations across Kenya, including banks, fintechs, insurers, and manufacturers are already using the product to manage business travel. The launch marks a strategic shift for BuuPass, which has spent the past eight years building a consumer marketplace for bus, rail, and flight bookings. Since its founding in 2017, the company says it has sold over 30 million tickets and processed more than $100…

As many African countries push to scale artificial intelligence, Mauritius is taking a different route, starting with governance and ethics, rather than treating them as an afterthought. At the heart of its approach is the FAIR framework, a set of guidelines that defines how AI systems should be built, deployed, and managed. It covers the full lifecycle from development to eventual retirement and sets expectations that cut across industries. This signals a broader shift in how African nations are positioning themselves in the AI race. While countries like Nigeria and Kenya are focused on growth and ecosystem expansion, and South…

Recognised at the Visa Africa Fintech Accelerator Cohort 5 Demo Day held during GITEX Africa in Marrakech, Kredete, the financial technology platform helping African immigrants and diaspora communities access stablecoin-powered financial services, has emerged as one of the programme’s standout alumni driving innovation in stablecoin card issuance. The announcement comes as Visa celebrates a milestone of supporting over 100 startups across Africa through the accelerator, with participating companies collectively representing a valuation of $1.4 billion. Kredete, a member of Cohort 3 of the Visa Africa Fintech Accelerator, has leveraged the strategic guidance, mentorship, and global network access provided through the…

A Nigerian-founded tech startup, Hokfam, has clinched Second Prize at the Lloyds Bank Tech Hackathon in Leeds, England, with its community-focused innovation, LeedsLink. Led by entrepreneur Ikechukwu Emmanuel Arum, Hokfam competed against leading tech teams in Leeds and impressed judges with LeedsLink, a B2C application designed to connect local businesses and service providers with people within their immediate communities. The platform helps residents, students, and small businesses access trusted services quickly and affordably, while keeping value circulating within the local economy. The recognition earned Hokfam second place in the competition and also paved the way for potential collaboration with Lloyds…

Payaza has recorded two major credit rating upgrades, moving from A to AA- with DataPro and securing an A- investment-grade rating from Intelligent Africa. The milestones mark its fourth credit rating, further underscoring its financial strength, governance standards, operational discipline, and long-term strategy. The latest ratings add to Payaza’s growing institutional credibility, strengthening confidence in its business model, performance, and resilience. They also position the company as a more established, future-ready player within Africa’s financial services ecosystem, with rising relevance in the global fintech space. According to the Chief Executive Officer of Payaza Africa, Mr. Seyi Ebenezer: “This milestone is…

Africa’s most heavily funded defence technology startup, Terra Industries, is expanding its manufacturing footprint with a new 34,000-square-foot drone factory in Accra, Ghana, in what the company says will become the largest facility of its kind on the continent once operational in June 2026. The facility, called Pax-2, marks Terra’s first production site outside Nigeria and more than doubles the size of its existing 15,000-square-foot factory in Abuja. The company says the new plant is designed to scale output to about 50,000 drone units annually by 2028, as demand for unmanned aerial systems continues to rise across security and industrial…

Central Bank and the Nigerian Communications Commission have signed a new agreement aimed at tightening oversight of digital financial transactions by giving banks real-time access to telecom data, in a move designed to plug one of the most exploited gaps in the country’s payments system. At the heart of the Memorandum of Understanding is a data-sharing framework known as the Telecom Identity Risk Management System (TIRMS). The system will allow banks and other financial institutions to instantly verify the status of mobile numbers used in transactions checking whether a number has been recently swapped, recycled, flagged for suspicious activity, or…