Monday, 19 September 2022

Partner(s)

Good morning!

Dennis here,

Mayday! Mayday! Kuda needs to stop the bleeding. A new report shows that the company is losing a lot of cash. I'm talking more than 6 billion naira in one year. This comes after the company slashed its workforce. Someone who knows said recently that "investors are freaking out" over the matter.

Even though it is still growing and rapidly to yield returns for its investors, it needs to stop the bleeding for multiple reasons but most importantly because now is just not to time. The PR for the ecosystem so far has been in shambles as investors begin to doubt founders.

Below are the tech stories and news you need to know to start your day, carefully curated by Technext.

Summary of the news

A new report alleges that Edukoya laid off employees and is pivoting to a fintech company
YouTube to roll out new monetisation plans for creators
A new report shows that Kuda incurred a loss of over ₦6 billion in 2021
Over 40 different meme coins of Queen Elizabeth II have been rolled out since she died

Inside Edukoya's brouhaha

Edukoya, the online learning platform which raised $3.5 million in 2021, in a pre-seed round led by Target Global may have laid off many of its staff, TechCabal reports.

A former Edukoya employee told the tech blog that the firm fired most of its workforce amidst plans to build a new fintech service.

“The truth about Edukoya is that it is shifting away from the focus at the moment,” they said. “At the moment she [CEO Honey Ogundeyin] halted a lot of things on the educational technology aspect,” the former employee said, adding that most of the employees left at the firm are software developers.

Edukoya says it only fired four employees following a quarterly employee performance review.

Former employees claim that not only did the company let several of its staff go, but it is also rebranding to Koya, a fintech for children and teenagers.

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YouTube's new monetisation plans for creators

YouTube is expected to announce more opportunities for content creators to earn money on its video service, hoping to guard its role as a home to popular personalities and gain an edge against rival TikTok, the New York Times reports.

The Google-owned company plans to let more video creators earn money from the platform, lowering the barriers to entry for its partner program, according to audio from a YouTube all-hands meeting last week. YouTube is expected to make the announcement tomorrow.

It “is the largest expansion we’ve done in several years creating new ways for creators to join the program,” Amjad Hanif, vice president of product management and creator products, said in the staff meeting.

Under YouTube’s old rules, creators made money only if audiences watched at least 4,000 hours of their videos and they had at least 1,000 subscribers.

Kuda's ₦6 billion-plus losses

Kuda MFB, a neobank operating under the Nigerian microfinance bank licence, has been recording losses for the past two years, TechCabal reports.

By the end of the 2021 financial year, the company recorded a loss of ₦6,092,554,866 ($14,214,681), a 602% rise from the ₦868,062,000 ($2,025,295) loss it made in 2020, according to its financial report.

The financial report indicated that the company’s revenue increased by 4,315% from ₦72,649,000 in 2020 to ₦3,207,177,570 in 2021. However, after every expense had been deducted, the company closed the year at a net loss, with high credit loss/impairment charge and operating expenses contributing the most to the loss.

Kuda’s personnel expenses also increased by close to 500% from ₦215,437,000 in 2020 to ₦1,285,381,188 as a result of its increasing employment of key management staff at high cost, salary review, and promotion of current staff.

This increase in staff count also subjected its depreciation and amortisation—laptop, furniture, etc—to a serious jump by 246% to ₦64,326,473, from ₦18,590,000. Collectively, all of Kuda’s operating expenses (OPEX) went up 652% to ₦7,033,275,412 in 2021 from ₦935,560,000 in 2020.

Queen Elizabeth II, the new face of meme coin

More than 40 different varieties of meme coins were produced in the days after UK's Queen Elizabeth's death, according to industry statistics and media sources, the Washington Post reports. These digital currencies are frequently established by unidentified individuals who have access to coin-creating websites and a creative name concept. And their value is known to fluctuate in violent swings.

This includes the Queen Elizabeth Inu coin, which was created and is accessible on a number of cryptocurrency platforms, and generally pays tribute to her passing. After a roughly 30,000 per cent rise and fall from its initial value, the coin is now valued at approximately $0.000003. Long Live the Queen is another coin that quickly lost popularity once it was minted.

Experts claimed that the majority of these coins are often a joke or a fraud rather than legal means of payment. Some even resemble gambling. According to David Hsiao, CEO of the crypto magazine Block Journal, “it’s no different than folks selling T-shirts outside of Buckingham Palace.”