Author: Elan

Bamba Lo, co-founder and CEO of PAPS Interview with Bamba LoCO-FOUNDER AND CEO, PAPS Lives in: Dakar, Senegal Bamba Lo founded logistics company PAPS after observing that while businesses in Dakar could successfully sell products, inadequate delivery infrastructure meant those goods frequently failed to reach buyers. To solve this local delivery gap, he started the company with two scooters and a Facebook page. Today, PAPS serves nearly 90% of Senegal’s banking sector, moves goods across borders in a region where addresses do not always exist, and operates a partnership with UPS. In 2024, Lo was one of the top 20…

Opportunities at the Lagos Summit for 2026 and beyond  – African Business Opportunities at the Lagos Summit for 2026 and beyond  – African Business

FIFA has confirmed that a technical error on its ticketing platform enabled around 60 fans to secure tickets for the 2026 FIFA World Cup at no cost. As a result, these tickets have been cancelled, and the affected fans are being asked to repurchase them at full price. The world football governing body said the fans received a communication on Wednesday, June 3, notifying them that tickets had been allocated to their accounts at no cost due to a payment processing error during checkout. FIFA said it “regrets any inconvenience caused” but made clear the free allocations would not stand.…

There is a type of entrepreneurs who start a company because they have seen a gap in the market. Then there is the kind who start one because they are trying to make sense of the world around them. When I met Eric Asuma, founder of The Kenyan Wall Street, he struck me as belonging to the second group. He grew up watching his parents run small businesses, where every shilling mattered, and every decision carried far-reaching consequences. Long before he became a founder, he had a front-row seat to the realities of building a company from scratch. He credits…

Practical guide on how to reduce drifts, minimize mistakes, maintain context, and improve the quality of AI-generated prototypes. Brought to you by Design Patterns For AI Interfaces, friendly video course on UX and design patterns by Vitaly.AI-generated prototypes often don’t deliver consistently decent results because of tiny inconsistencies scattered all across a design system. I’s decisions made but not documented, hard-coded values never cleaned up, or relying too much on AI making sense of mock-ups or design flows on its own.Yesterday I stumbled upon a useful practical guide by Hardik Pandya from Atlassian — on how to reduce drifts, minimize…

Sumsub, a leading full-cycle verification platform that enables scalable compliance, launched Adaptive Deepfake Detector. The new model tackles the prevailing issue of traditional offline solutions being unable to detect the newest deepfake scams. Unlike its predecessors, Sumsub’s deepfake detector effectively spots emerging types of sophisticated fraud through its ML-driven detection tool with instant online self-learning upgrades. While the solution is launching globally, its relevance is especially clear across Africa, where fraudsters are shifting from low-effort scams to more sophisticated AI-enabled attacks. This shift is reflected in Sumsub’s Identity Fraud Report 2025–2026, which found that Tanzania recorded the highest fraud rate…

** For the best experience, download the free Africa Private Equity News app Android | iOS **DEG Impact, a subsidiary of German development finance institution DEG, is launching a new private equity fund-of-funds. The industry magazine Portfolio Institutionell has published a detailed feature on the plans for the Global Growth Guarantee Fund (3xG Fund). The article outlines how the fund is intended to facilitate institutional investors’ access to high-growth markets in developing and emerging economies.The 3xG Fund is a private equity fund-of-funds that invests in selected target funds in emerging markets. These, in turn, provide capital to fast-growing local companies.…

Aions Ventures has launched a R100m seed fund aimed at supporting early-stage South African technology startups and helping businesses bridge the funding gap between initial traction and larger growth-stage investment rounds.The new fund, Aions Seed Fund I, combines R60m from the High Impact Seed Fund of Funds (HISFoF) and a further R40m committed by the Technology Innovation Agency (Tia).Addressing a funding bottleneckAccess to capital remains one of the biggest challenges facing South African startups, particularly those that have moved beyond the idea stage but are not yet ready to attract large-scale investment.While later-stage funding often attracts the bulk of venture…

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As a retail investor in Africa, buying cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin has become more accessible through apps and peer-to-peer marketplaces.Users can buy digital assets through crypto apps after completing identity checks and funding their accounts, or trading directly with other users on peer-to-peer platforms. For institutional investors such as pension funds, asset managers, and insurers, the process has been far more complicated. The rules for institutional investment in digital assets in Africa are either unclear or restrictive, or require fund managers to hold virtual asset licences. Even if these funds are allowed to buy digital assets directly from regulated exchanges, they…