Investor Updates: August 22 2022

Cape Town’s stock exchange closes $5m funding round

Highlights

• The Cape Town Stock Exchange (CTSE), South Africa’s technology-driven stock exchange for small and medium-sized businesses, recently closed a $5-million funding round.
• In addition, the company has expanded its board, adding Mark Fitzjohn, Bruce Ndidi (both from Empowerment Capital), and Stephan Van Der Walt (Pallidus Alternative Investments).
• The oversubscribed round was led by a new investor to the group, Imvelo Ventures, a venture capital investment company founded by Capitec Bank and Empowerment Capital Investment Partners, with participation from several existing investors in the CTSE.

Source: ITNewsAfrica

Our Takeaway

Raising funding via traditional capital markets has historically been a long and complicated process. However, CTSE’s cloud-based technology and end-to-end exchange architecture, combined with a marketplace of supporting partners, help reduce cost, risk, time, and complexity in the capital raise process. Africa-wide, CTSE is a leading name in the next wave of exchange and investment banking technologies, and the fresh funding round is a much-needed fuel for its bid to change the fundraising experience for many small businesses in South Africa. 

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Africa Data Centers gets $83m for continental expansion

Highlights

• Cassava Technology’s pan-African data center group Africa Data Centres (ADC) has today announced a drawing of the first portion of its $300-million strategic investment made by the United States International Development Finance Corporation (DFC).
• The company says that this first $83 million is being applied towards expanding ADC’s data centers in South Africa.
• Subsequent disbursements from DFC will be used to realize the expansion of the company’s footprint of data centers in other DFC-eligible African cities, including Abidjan, Accra, Lagos, Cairo, and Casablanca.

Source: ITNewsAfrica

Our Takeaway

The increasing demand for cloud and other digital technologies on the continent has directly increased the demand for African data to reside within the continent. The huge untapped potential in Africa’s cloud computing market has pulled big operators like Microsoft, Amazon, Huawei, and Equinix Inc. along with huge investments into data centers on the continent. Furthermore, the investment by DFC follows ADC’s recent announcement of a $50 million investment by C5 Capital into Cassava Technologies and a partnership to build Cyber Security Operations Centres across six markets in Africa.

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Facebook owner Meta to host African AR/VR Hackathon

Highlights

• Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has announced that applications for the AR/VR Africa Metathon in partnership with Imisi 3D and BlackRhino VR are now open.
• The Metathon is a series of programs and activations under the Meta global extended reality (XR) fund aimed at supporting African XR talents to build innovative solutions and use cases of the metaverse in Africa.
• Three significant components will feature at the AR/VR Metathon, including a training program. The Africa-wide hackathon will take place across 16 countries physically and open to everyone virtually, followed by an intensive boot camp to further develop solutions.

Source: ITNewsAfrica

Our Takeaway

On a continent where over half of the population don’t have access to electricity and hundreds of millions are without smartphones, concepts like extended reality and the metaverse may be seen as peripheral. However, many startups on the continent have shown that low-cost XR can be leveraged to tackle pressing challenges, from education to healthcare. The AR/VR Africa Metathon is an opportunity to demonstrate how artificial intelligence, augmented reality and virtual reality technologies, are core to the future of the metaverse and what Africans are building in the industry.