Big Tech This Week

Showmax is getting phased out completely and all content and subscribers will be moved to DSTV stream. The end of an era indeed. But how can streaming and entertainment platforms in Africa become more profitable?

Partech just closed €300 million for its European impact fund. 🌍In 2024, Partech Africa Fund closed at €280 million. The VC has since made notable investments in over 31 African startups, the most recent being immigrant credit startup, Kredete. 💰This new fund seeks to serve clean tech companies past Series A and making at least €10 million in revenue. 🌳The fund will focus on companies in clean manufacturing, green construction, new mobility, sustainable agriculture and digital health. 🇱🇺A Luxembourg-based climate verification and certification platform, SustainCERT, is the funds first investment although the amount has not yet been disclosed.

Rwanda is coming for Africa’s AI throne. - Racking in top tier partnerships from Anthropic and Open AI within weeks of each other. - Then being ranked by Microsoft in the top 5 African countries for AI readiness and adoption in 2025. And this is just the tip of the AI iceberg that has been solidifying for over a decade in the country. Read @fatuogwuche’s explainer on why Rwanda was ready and stays ready. 👇🏾 bigtechthisweek.com/p/rwanda-is-co…

Ghana announced its 11-startup Virtual Asset Regulatory sandbox yesterday, on this list we have famous actor, Idris Elba’s startup, Akuna Wallet (@akunawallet). “…the financial system charges them [creators] on average more than 8% simply to access their earnings. This is not just a fee; it is a barrier.” - Denelle Dixon, Co-founder, Akuna Wallet. 💳The wallet was built for creators, freelancers and digital entrepreneurs to access payments at an affordable rate. Users get to receive, hold, convert and spend in local currency, all with one wallet. 🧔🏾‍♂️In the words of Co-founder, Idris Elba, “Across Africa there are millions of creators, freelancers and digital entrepreneurs doing incredible work but the financial systems supporting them haven’t always kept pace…Moments like this represent real progress toward building a financial system that works for the next generation of African talent.” 💸There has been a rise in the stars interested in African tech. Akon tried building a tech city, Trevor Noah joined Stitch’s Series B round, and just recently, Jared Leto put some big bets behind defence startup, Terra Industries. 🗣️CEO, KJ Owusu-Agyeman, says “The Bank of Ghana’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Sandbox is the first step in a much larger journey as we build the financial infrastructure and modern monetisation models that will allow African creators to compete on a global level.” Will Akuna Wallet change the game?

Ghana is on a regulatory push for crypto after the Virtual Assets Service Providers Act was passed in December of last year. 🪙The act allows for Crypto companies to operate legally in the country. But first, they have to go through a sandbox that may last up to 12-months. 

🇬🇭11 startups will participate in this pilot edition. They’re Africoin, Blu Penguin, Goldbod, Hanypay, Hyro Exchange GH Ltd, HSB Global, Koinkoin, Whitebits, Vaulta, Xchain, and Bsystem Ltd. 

1️⃣Any of the companies can transition to a full license within 6 months if their products meet all the requirements.

The 3MTT, AI fund and the national fibre network doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.

Nigeria’s tech minister, Bosun Tijani is in his 3rd year of office. The same question reigns among tech folk in the country; what is Bosun Tijani doing? Resident tech observer and analyst, @fatuogwuche gives us all the different angles so that you can find the answers yourself.

MTN Zambia and Starlink kicked off the best connection of the year. Everywhere you go. 😉

For good news, Safaricom is celebrating adulthood with a majority market share.

Last Week: Sam Altman has been getting smoked for his collaboration with the US government.

No better way to start the work week! Get into it👇🏾👇🏾

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Intron, based in Nigeria’s industrial capital, Lagos state, started as a health AI startup. In 2022, it started a clinical speech recognition platform to help patients in hospitals by offering real-time communication aid using AI. 🤖 Overtime, the startup grew into many other industries, doing the same thing. Helping Africans communicate clearly. 🎤The goal is speech recognition for Africans with the AI recognizing over 500 distinct African English accents and now 57 African languages. All using its latest AI tool, Sahara-V2. 🗣️Intron is changing the culture of Africans being misunderstood even with popular AI assistants like Siri, Alexa of ChatGPT whose speech recognition has been relatively poor for Africans and African languages.

10 years later, these founders are active as ever! @fatuogwuche story on how these 10 year olds transformed Nigeria’s payment space is riveting and relevant as ever. Want to know what’s next? The full gist is here: bigtechthisweek.com/p/the-10-year-…

Meta Ray-bans may not be as private as you think. At least not according to investigations by Swedish newspapers, Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posgen. 🇰🇪Kenyan data agency, Sama annotates and modifies data and content for big tech companies like Meta and Open AI. 👩🏾‍💻Sama employees alleged that they were able to see footage captured or seen by the Meta Ray-ban glasses. This includes many intimate moments in random people’s days across the world. 👩🏾‍🎓Kenya’s tech economy is partly populated by data modulators who are mostly students or young adults, paid a stipend to assess data gotten from these accounts, and use this data to train AI models. 🕶️Meta says it doesn’t use A LOT of data to train its models. And Sama staff are pretty much sworn to secrecy. However, in the terms of use and privacy for the Ray-bans, it indicates that some of the data will be processed remotely. 👀Like all the way in Kenya, maybe?

Spiro’s growth and continued raise is proof that Africa is still ready for climate tech as long as it’s on a larger scale. Sorry Koko. 😩

Nigerians get AI, everybody gets AI generation. Good news?

A thread of some exciting tech news in Africa from last week! (The last one is our favorite)