Microsoft and Uber alum raises $3M for YC-backed Munify, a neobank for the Egyptian diaspora
Khalid Ashmawy found it hard to send money home while studying in Europe. Now, he’s launched a startup to help other Egyptians with the same problem.
Nigerian profitable food delivery Chowdeck lands $9M from Novastar, Y Combinator
Chowdeck, a Lagos-based food delivery startup that has stayed profitable in a notoriously tough and low-margin market, has raised $9 million in Series A funding to launch a quick commerce strategy and expand into more cities in Nigeria and Ghana. The e…
AI-powered fintech Alaan raises $48M, one of the largest Series A rounds in MENA
When Parthi Duraisamy was a consultant at McKinsey’s Dubai office, he discovered that the American Express cards his company relied on for corporate expenses were rarely accepted in the Middle East. This forced Duraisamy to cover significant travel exp…
21-year-old MIT dropouts raise $32M at $300M valuation led by Insight
Karun Kaushik and Selin Kocalar weren’t planning to raise a Series A so soon. Their AI compliance startup, Delve, which announced a $3 million seed round in January, was growing fast and signing customers at a steady clip. Then, inbound interest starte…
Moroccan founder raises $4.2M for her YC-backed startup building the next layer of AI search
ZeroEntropy is serving up retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) through an API. It’s landed Initialized, a16z Scout and a long list of angels, as investors.
OneText raises $4.5M from Y Combinator, Khosla to reinvent shopping by text
The typical online checkout experience has become bloated with friction. And while more companies are building solutions around online checkout, few are rethinking it from scratch. One such company is OneText, which is building what it calls a “text-to…
UAE proptech Huspy raises $59M to scale in Europe
If you walked into a Dubai bank to apply for a mortgage in 2020, chances are you’d spend months buried in paperwork or face a huge price discrepancy when it came to listings. Such experiences led Jad Antoun to start Huspy, a startup streamlining how pe…
Better Auth, an authentication tool by a self-taught Ethiopian dev, raises $5M from Peak XV, YC
Better Auth offers an open source framework that promises to simplify how developers manage user authentication, and it’s caught the attention of some big name investors. It recently raised about $5 million in seed funding from Peak XV.
After raising $38M, African e-commerce startup Sabi lays off 20%, pivots to traceable exports
African B2B e-commerce startup Sabi has laid off around 20% of its workforce (~50 employees) as it pivots from its original retail-focused platform to double down on a growing business in commodity exports. The layoffs, confirmed by the company on Thur…
Stripe’s former growth lead helps African diaspora invest in startups, real estate
When Joe Kinvi joined Touchtech Payments in 2017 as head of finance, the Irish startup couldn’t afford his full salary. So he negotiated for stock to make up the difference. Eighteen months later, Stripe acquired the company, and that equity converted …