What does the much-publicised rise and sudden death of a firm that boasted friends in Silicon Valley and Washington DC tell us about the climate crisis, structural underdevelopment in Africa and the frugal innovations designed to mitigate it? The closure of Koko Networks at the beginning of February elicited an interesting range of reactions in…
From left, Carl Wazen (Yoco chief business officer), Thalentha Ngobeni (Dyner CEO), Christopher du Plessis (Dyner CTO) and Lungisa Matshoba (Yoco chief product and technology officer) Payments company Yoco has acquired Dyner.ai, a local start-up that builds AI-driven operations software for restaurants and other small businesses, for an undisclosed sum. The deal appears to be…
Cape Town-based e-commerce logistics start-up Shiprazor has raised US$2.65-million (about R44.6-million) in a seed round led by pan-African venture capital firm Norrsken22, taking its total funding to $3.3-million. AAIC, E4E and Tremis Capital also participated, alongside angel investors that include senior leaders at Google. Founded in 2023, Shiprazor sits between online merchants and courier companies,…
Cape Town-based medtech start-up AI Diagnostics has raised R85-million in a pre-series-A funding round to scale the deployment of an AI-powered digital stethoscope, which is designed to detect tuberculosis through lung-sound analysis at the point of care. The round was led by The Steele Foundation for Hope, with participation from the iFSP Group and the…
Johannesburg — Uganda’s TWave Ltd , who have pioneered an automated, solar-powered fish feeding system that optimizes aquaculture productivity, have been selected as one of 10 startups for the fourth year of the Qualcomm Make in Africa Mentorship Program. For this year’s edition of the one-of-a-kind equity-free African mentorship program, 10 early-stage startups were chosen…
Cinergy’s CineRay mobile solar PV system powering production for season 2 of Netflix’s One Piece A Cape Town start-up has powered an entire Netflix production base camp on the sun for six months, with no diesel generator running the main site – and at roughly the same cost as renting a conventional generator. Cinergy Mobile…
Charge chairman Joubert Roux Off-grid EV charging infrastructure company Charge (formerly Zero Carbon Charge) is planning a public investment offering in the coming months, bypassing the JSE in favour of a token-based exchange called Mesh. Joubert Roux, the company’s founder, revealed the plans in an interview with TechCentral on Wednesday and said Charge is currently…
Mazen Mroué, CEO of MTN Digital Infrastructure MTN Group’s digital infrastructure arm has joined a US$45-million funding round in ORAN Development Company (ODC), a US-based start-up building AI-native radio access network technology, alongside Nvidia, Cisco, Nokia, AT&T and Telecom Italia. The series-A round, announced on Thursday, positions ODC to develop software that would transform conventional…
Happy Pay raises $5 million (R86 million) in seed funding to scale its ad-subsidised payments network.
HyperDev’s Anton Moulder Vibe coding tools have made it trivially easy to build an app. But almost nobody is turning those apps into actual businesses — and a South African start-up thinks it knows why. HyperDev is an AI-powered software development tool that aims to address gaps in the vibe coding market — such as…
