Recent Funding – Africa Tech Digest

YC-backed Amenli raises $2.3M to provide insurance to Egyptian consumers

5Oct

By Africa Tech DigestNo Comments

Africa, Start-ups

YC-backed Amenli raises $2.3M to provide insurance to Egyptian consumers

The average penetration rate for insurance in Africa is between 3% to 5%. South Africa makes up a large bulk of it; without it, the continent is on a 1% to 2% rate even with other developed technology and financial markets like Kenya, Nigeria and Egypt. The insurance market is still one of the industries least disrupted by technology on the continent. The reasons vary, from bad experiences and poor satisfaction on the part of consumers to high distribution costs for providers. Recently, some startups such as Lami, Ctrl and Naked have sought to take on each regional market by storm, armed with the necessary capital to scale. Y Combinator Summer 2021 graduate Amenli is taking its operations up north and is announcing a $2.3 million seed round to provide insurance services for Egyptian...

VertoFX picks up $10M for cross-border payments play in emerging markets

VertoFX, a global B2B payments platform that allows small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to make payments to their suppliers, today announced that it has closed $10 million in Series A funding. Quona Capital, an emerging fintech-focused venture capital firm, led the round. Other firms also participated, including The Treasury, founded by Betterment’s Eli Broverman and Acorns’ Jeff Cruttenden; Middle East Venture Partners (MEVP); U.K.-based TMT Investments; Unicorn Growth Capital; Zrosk Investments; and P1 Ventures. The lack of interoperability between African currencies is primarily behind why a Kenyan business owner who wants to pay an invoice to another business owner in South Africa with either shillings or rands ends up using the dollar — the currency that powers almo...

Nigerian agritech startup Releaf secures $4.2M to scale its food processing technology

The distance between their farms and the nearest processor is key for smallholder farmers who need to process their crops. And though Nigeria’s food processing systems have a keen resemblance to the West with respect to big factories and huge economies of scale in high-demand cities, farmers still suffer from poor logistics networks. With distance and logistics problems, farmers’ crops can go bad and when factories buy them, it affects their processing yields and price. Farmers, witnessing post-harvest loss, also get paid less and miss the opportunity to invest in their crops production. Nigerian agritech startup Releaf is solving this by building proprietary hardware and software solutions to make these farmers and food factories more efficient and profitable. Today, the company is...