Investor Insights: Visa opens first African innovation hub

Visa unveils first innovation hub in Africa

Highlights

• Global digital payments giant Visa has opened up an innovation studio in Kenya, its first in Africa and sixth globally, after posts in Dubai, London, Miami, San Francisco, and Singapore.
• The studio will bring together developers, Visa’s internal and external clients, and other partners to co-create payment and commerce solutions.
• Visa has previously used its existing innovation hubs to design products for the African market, including a collaboration with Nigerian Fintech Paga to develop new merchant acceptance solutions involving QR codes and NFC technology.

Source: TechCrunch

Our Takeaway

Visa has been a key player in the growth of digital payments adoption in Africa, working with mobile money players like Nigeria’s Paga and Kenya-based mPesa. As the region’s digital ecosystem grows, with an increasingly tech-savvy population, the new innovation hub is vital to Visa deepening its collaboration to develop solutions designed around the unique needs of Africa. More so, the decision of the US giant to double down on efforts in Africa further validates the region’s huge growth opportunity for investors willing to bet on it.

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SA HR startup SmartWage raises $2m seed round

Highlights

• South Africa’s SmartWage, an HR and communications technology startup, has raised a $2 million seed round to support its vision of transforming Africa’s workforce through digital inclusion, particularly for frontline employees.
• Founded in 2019, SmartWage started off by allowing companies to provide their employees with instant access to a percentage of their salaries and wages for work they have already done. It has since expanded beyond that, giving enterprises a simple yet effective way to digitize their most time-consuming HR processes. 
• The product gives employees without email the ability to receive company-wide communication, access their payslips, request leave and get access to financial wellness products, all via WhatsApp.

Source: Venture Burn

Our Takeaway

SmartWage is one of the many startups digitizing the administrative stack for companies in Africa and on the continent, they have a big market opportunity considering the growing appetite for cloud computing solutions by organizations small and large. The Middle East and Africa’s cloud computing industry is expected to grow to $31.4 billion by 2026, from $14.2 billion in 2021.

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Nigerian lending app Sycamore closes seed round to expand operations

Highlights

• Nigerian peer-to-peer (P2P) lending startup Sycamore has closed an undisclosed seed funding round as it looks to expand its operations.
• Founded in 2019 by Babatunde Akin-Moses, Onyinye Okonji, and Mayowa Adeosun, Sycamore uses proprietary risk assessment tools to disburse business loans on the same day via its web and newly-released mobile app.
• The startup has already disbursed millions of dollars to thousands of small businesses in Nigeria and has also released a feature allowing users to manage loans given to loved ones.

Source: Disrupt Africa

Our Takeaway

Small and medium enterprises play a major role in most economies, especially in developing countries but access to finance has always been a major constraint to their growth. As many as 65 million firms, or 40% of formal MSMEs in developing countries, have an unmet financing need of $5.2 trillion every year, per the IFC. Many startups like Sycamore have found ways to profitably finance these businesses across the continent at reasonable interest rates. Float, Prospa, Brass, and Sparkle are a few others that provide financial support to businesses.