Olumide Soyombo is one of the well-known active angel investors in Nigeria tech startups and Africa at large. Since he began angel investing in 2014, Soyombo has invested in 33 startups, including Stripe-owned Paystack, PiggyVest, and TeamApt. Today, the investor is announcing the launch of Voltron Capital, a Pan-African venture capital firm he co-founded with…
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Andrew Steele Contributor Andrew Steele is an investor at Activant Capital. He focuses on fintech and e-commerce infrastructure and is based in New York. The COVID-19 pandemic cemented e-commerce into everyone’s daily habits in 2020, and as we look ahead, B2B e-commerce is quickly becoming the next frontier for founders and investors. Businesses have shifted…
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Sorry Mr. Putin, but there’s a race on for Russian and Eastern European founders. And right now, those awful capitalists in the corrupt West are starting to out-gun the opposition! But seriously… only the other day a $100 million fund aimed at Russian speaking entrepreneurs appeared, and others are proliferating. Now, London-based Untitled Ventures plans…
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Stripe, with its $95 billion valuation, has been taking on the payment landscape with a whole platform approach, bringing in dozens of adjacent services to snag a wider and deeper set of customers that use these services by way of APIs. But in the world of so-called “embedded finance” there still remains a lot of…
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Almost overnight, platforms that offer non-dilutive capital for recurring revenue businesses have become white-hot. It was only in March that Pipe — which aims to be the “Nasdaq for revenue” — raised $150 million, but two months later had raised $250 million at a $2 billion valuation. This fever is now reaching Europe, where today…
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Lee Li Contributor Lee Li is a project manager and B2B copywriter with a decade of experience in the Chinese fintech startup space as a PM for TaoBao, MeitTuan and DouYin (now TikTok). The fintech sector has been hugely successful (and hugely profitable) for much of the last decade, and even more so during the…
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On June 18, Babajide Duroshola, ex-Country Head, SafeBoda Nigeria, stepped down from his role two years after taking the job post-Andela. Less than a month later, the executive has found a new role as General Manager in another Kenyan company, M-KOPA. His appointment coincides with M-KOPA’s broader expansion strategy, which includes a move to Nigeria.…
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It’s been quite the year for crypto capital, what with Coinbase’s blockbuster debut earlier this year in a direct listing and A16Z raising $2.2 billion for its third crypto-focused fund. But as the numbers in this frenetic market continue to skyrocket to dizzying highs, there is an open question for a lot of crypto founders:…
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Just a Spotify used VC and PE backing to acquire the assets of the music industry so that we must now all rent our music via subscription, rather than own it for life, so a PropTech startup plans to follow a similar strategy for single-family homes. Casafari, a real estate data platform in Europe based…
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Influential entrepreneurs like Paul Graham and Naval Ravikant always preach the need for startups to have founders-turned-investors on their cap table. As Ravikant puts it, “founders want to know that the people they are taking money from have first-hand experience.” His platform AngelList has helped individual founders-cum-investors source and participate in deals via collectives. However,…
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