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Equity

The hottest fintech market you aren't paying attention to

Equity

TechCrunch

Entrepreneurship, Business News, News, Business, Technology

4.2372 Ratings

🗓️ 18 August 2021

⏱️ 12 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

For our Wednesday show this week, Natasha and Alex and Danny had colleague Tage Kene-Okafor on the show to chat about the burgeoning African startup scene. Tage has become TechCrunch's key correspondent in the area, chronicling the continents expanding venture capital totals, public company performance, and startup ecosystem. Given that we've paid attention to just how much money African startups are raising, we wanted to have Tage on to give us a better, deeper understanding of the continent's technology activity. Here's what we got into: The power of Y Combinator in Africa: Is the well-known American accelerator a kingmaker in Africa? Or are we merely seeing more of its activity thanks to our own information biases? Fintech as core focus: As in many markets, fintech investment and startup activity stand out in Africa. We wanted to better understand why that's the case in Africa, and what startups are building in the realm of financial technology. African ecommerce: The continent's ecommerce market is perhaps best known through the lens of Jumia, a public tech company that works in the sale of goods online, and their delivery. How quickly is ecommerce growing in Africa, and which startups could be the next breakouts? We asked Tage. Equity is back on Friday with our weekly news roundup! Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PDT, Wednesday, and Friday Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello and welcome back to Equity, Tech Wrenches Venture Capital Focus Podcast, we unpack the

0:14.6

numbers behind the headlines.

0:16.1

My name is Alex and I'm here with a whole crop of excellent people.

0:19.1

I have Danny Crichton.

0:20.2

Danny, your birthday just happened, happy birthday and how are you I'm older theoretically wiser but just hung over I think is really what happened

0:27.4

Yeah, I wasn't gonna say that but we heard a little bit about your exploits and we're not surprised. We also had Natasha

0:32.8

Moscowanes here, Natasha hello. I'm kind of feeling the same way as Danny but I didn't

0:36.6

have a birthday. That's a problem. Am I the only not hungover person on the

0:41.8

show today.

0:43.0

Listen, this is our Wednesday episode.

0:45.0

We are talking about Africa, especially African startups,

0:47.4

looking at e-commerce and FinTech in particular.

0:50.2

Before we introduce our special guest,

0:51.9

Natasha, can you run us through a couple of the numbers to help set the stage for what's going on in Africa?

0:56.2

It's not hard to make an argument on why we should all be paying attention to Africa, but if you need some numbers,

1:01.8

the investments that are raised in the first half of 2021 were more than 1 billion according to some reports.

1:07.1

And that's about double the amount raised in the same time period last year.

1:10.6

Last year, of course, was a down year due to COVID, but we have seen a lot of money go into the continent,

1:16.0

obviously due to a bunch of things we're going to talk about today, but just know big exits,

1:20.1

funding rounds, and high valuations are pretty commonplace there these days.

1:24.0

Our special guest today is Tege, one of the finest technical reporters of all time.

1:28.0

Tege is on the ground for us in Africa.

...

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