Hi guys,
It’s midweek, welcome to another edition of the Big 5 Daily.
Let’s go!
We have news that, Bolt (former taxify), has announced its plan to launch a food delivery service in South Africa. This launch will make South Africa one of the three countries worldwide to kick off the service. The others are Estonia and Finland. They hope to leverage on this development to grant South Africans access to a convenient and cost- efficient app-based food delivery service.
Next on the Big 5, the Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF) announced, at the Transcorp Hilton Abuja the 3,050 selected African entrepreneurs from 54 African countries for the fifth cycle of its TEF Entrepreneurship Program. The selected entrepreneurs will each receive $5,000 seed capital, access to mentors, and a 12-week business training program. The entrepreneurs will gather on July 26th and 27th at the TEF Entrepreneurship Forum, the largest annual gathering of African entrepreneurs on the continent.
There is also news that, Tofino Capital, an early-stage investor in emerging market technology companies, invested $150000 in Lagos-based SeamlessHR, a human resource technology company with a commitment to help African businesses become more productive and successful. SeamlessHR said that the fund will be used to grow the team, double down on expansion into Anglophone Africa and to strengthen marketing efforts.
Moving on, Morocco’s Outlierz Ventures, an early-stage VC fund backed by private investors from Silicon Valley, Middle East and Africa has made five investments in fast growing tech-enabled companies. The investment is focused on startups that solves fundamental problems across fintech, insurtech, agritech, healthtech and logistics industries in Africa. The fund focuses primarily on Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Egypt and Morocco, but plans to explore other untapped Francophone and West African ecosystems.
Finally, MTN on Tuesday, 28 March 2019 launched a channel platform on WhatsApp that will grant customers access to top-up and buy data bundles. Customers will also have access to receive notifications and check balances through WhatsApp. MTN plans to expand the channel offering in the near future. To sign in, customers need to save the MTN Chat number 083 123 0011 to their contacts and send “hi”. A link to opt-in will be sent and once they’ve opted in, they’ll be offered a menu from which to choose their preferred service.
That’s it for the Big 5 Daily.
Thanks for joining!