Author: Elan
Grindstone Ventures has launched a R500m venture fund targeting high-growth, technology-enabled African businesses from Seed through Series A, with a focus on addressing the funding gap between early commercial validation and institutional-scale investment.Thandiwe Maqetuka, Keet van Zyl, and Catherine Young | image suppliedLed by Thandiwe Maqetuka, the fund has been established in partnership with Knife Capital and Thinkroom. It follows the deployment of Grindstone Ventures Fund I, which invested in seven portfolio companies and helped catalyse further seed investment from South African funders.The new fund is targeting a first close of R150m and plans to build a portfolio of 15…
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StablecoinX appointed former Franklin Templeton digital asset executive Christopher Jensen as CEO, putting him in charge of the largest corporate holder of Ethena’s ENA token.Jensen succeeds Ted Chen, who led StablecoinX through its public listing in June and will remain chairman of the company’s board.StablecoinX, which trades on Nasdaq under the ticker USDE, is a publicly listed company focused on the Ethena ecosystem. Ethena issues USDe, a synthetic dollar that ranks as the fifth-largest stablecoin with nearly $4.4 billion in circulation, according to DefiLlama data. ENA, Ethena’s governance token, gives holders voting rights over changes to the protocol.StablecoinX holds about…
For years, Sheriff Issaka kept running into the same problem while building language technology for Africa: there was not enough data. The data needed to train systems for African languages was scarce, and much of what was available was not good enough. That problem changed what African Languages Lab, the AI research and deployment company Issaka founded in 2020, spent its time doing. Instead of building systems only with the available data, the company began collecting the data it could not find. The company says it has since built the largest collection of African-language data in existence, covering more than…
Every website peaks on launch day and slowly drifts from there, not because it breaks, but because nobody has time to keep it current. Autonomous websites, continuously optimized by agents after launch, aim to change that. But take the idea seriously, and you quickly run into a problem that has nothing to do with technology: almost nobody wants a website that changes entirely on its own. Pierre Burgy shares what they learned building for full website autonomy and the deeper design problem they uncovered along the way.Every website is at its best the day it ships. The final branch merges,…
** For the best experience, download the free Africa Private Equity News app Android | iOS **Africa Jobs Fund has invested in Velocity, a labour mobility company that trains African nurses in German and places them in jobs at German hospitals.The investment will support Velocity’s expansion into Malawi and Zambia.Africa Jobs Fund seeks to invest in companies that can create jobs at scale for Africans and raise incomes. It focuses on two areas: international labour mobility and export manufacturing.Velocity was founded by Lalit Kumar, Siddharth Gusain and Betty Chelangat, and launched in Kenya in June 2025.The company takes qualified nurses,…
Nigeria has facilitated the safe return of former Sierra Leone President, Ernest Bai Koroma, to the country, following more than two years of temporary relocation to Nigeria. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Bianca Odumegwu-Ojukwu, who accompanied Koroma to Freetown on the instruction of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, said his return marked the successful conclusion of a regional diplomatic and confidence-building process. According to a statement signed by her spokesperson, Dr Magnus Eze, on Sunday, she said Koroma’s relocation to Nigeria in January 2024 followed engagements by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) aimed at promoting peace, stability…
The Minister of Energy and Petroleum, Eng. Al-Motasem Ibrahim Ahmed, welcomed Saudi Arabia’s Twaik Group’s interest in investing in Sudan, affirming that the ministry’s doors are open to companies and investment groups seeking to enter the energy and petroleum sector and take advantage of the investment opportunities available in Sudan. He made the remarks during a meeting on Sunday with a delegation from Saudi Arabia’s Twaik Group, headed by the group’s Chief Executive Officer, Sheikh Sultan Al-Anzi, who was delegated by the group’s Chairman of the Board of Directors, Sheikh Twaik bin Meqa’ad Al-Otaibe. The meeting discussed investment and cooperation…
For years, the crypto industry in Africa thrived in the shadows. It operated as a high-stakes, speculative arena where retail traders chased volatility while institutional capital watched nervously from the sidelines. Today, the landscape is rapidly shifting. Regulatory sandboxes are replacing regulatory vacuums, and the conversation has pivoted from anonymous tokens to auditable infrastructure. At the recently concluded GITEX Nigeria 2026, the friction between legacy finance and digital assets took centre stage. If fiat currency’s enduring dominance is built on generational trust rather than technical efficiency, native digital asset platforms face a colossal challenge in convincing the everyday Nigerian to…
Working at a Nigerian bank may seem like a typical day in the life of an accountant or a cashier. But behind every seamless transaction could be a woman in tech handling the complex world of technology, cybersecurity, and identity management. The world is evolving, and so are the institutions in it. This is why today’s tech trivia spotlights Eniola Peace Adenuga, a Cybersecurity Analyst at First Bank of Nigeria. With over three years of experience in the tech industry, her career spans data centre operations, IT infrastructure, networking, cybersecurity, and financial technology. Today, she works in cybersecurity within the…