Tanel co-founders Makhtar Diop (left) and Mouhamed Ndoye Alan, the French health insurance company with footballer Kylian Mbappé as an investor, today announced the completion of its acquisition of Tanel, a Senegal-based digital health company founded in 2021 by Mouhamed Ndoye and Makhtar Diop. The transaction also provides an exit for Tanel’s founders and investors,…
Former Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov is launching a defense technology company backed by Palantir CEO Alex Karp, as the former government official looks to turn Ukraine’s wartime technology experience into products for Kyiv and its allies. Karp is set to become the company’s first lead investor, according to Fedorov’s press office. The size of…
Emile Ferreira, CTO of Verascient and Keagan Stokoe, CEO. South African-founded artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Verascient has raised $1.2 million (R19.5 million) in its pre-seed round to help companies build faster and more capable teams with AI. It will use the capital to expand its engineering team and deepen its technology to support further enterprise…
Alon Stern and James Hedley, co-founders of TurnStay. Three years after launching with two people and an idea, South African fintech firm TurnStay has grown into a cross-border payments platform processing more than R1 billion in travel payments in the first six months of 2026. The milestone marks a significant acceleration for the company, which…
Stitch now offers a multi-acquirer architecture for PayShap Request. Stitch, the payments infrastructure provider behind several South African online retailers, is now live with PayShap Request. This, in a move to give enterprise businesses in South Africa a way to collect real-time payments across all major local banks, according to a statement. PayShap Request is…
African startups raised between $1.3 billion and $1.4 billion in the first half of 2026, in line with the $1.4 billion recorded a year earlier, per data from TechCabal and The Big Deal, showing funding has stabilized despite a tougher venture capital market. The total was supported by a handful of large transactions, even as…
Just days after its historic initial public offering (IPO), SpaceX has officially agreed to acquire AI coding startup Cursor in a massive $60 billion all-stock transaction. The agreement solidifies a fast-moving corporate courtship that began less than two months ago, with the deal projected to close in the third quarter of this year. Read: Meta…
Subverted’s captivating stand at the IT Web Security Summit 2026 event held at Sandton Convention Center. Local cyber security company Subverted used its sponsor and exhibitor presence at ITWeb Security Summit 2026 in Johannesburg to announce Proactive, a unified offensive security platform now in private beta, alongside new releases inside Subverted Academy – the company’s…
Breaze Delivery co-founders Avi Maja and Braden Snyman, with courier drivers. (Image: Supplied) The Vumela Enterprise Development Fund has invested R20 million in South African logistics technology company Breaze Delivery, providing growth capital to help the business expand its technology platform, driver network and geographic footprint. The investment, according to a statement, forms part of…
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…
