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Wednesday, 12 October 2022
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Partners
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Good morning!
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African investors are picking up the pace. As the ecosystem begins the process of being rigorous in throwing out funds, a new report shows that African founders have been part of more than half of fundraising rounds above $1m+.
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VCs are beginning to "fight tooth and nail" to be on the cap table of African founders like it was in this new $3.3 million round by Stears Inc. But this is not to say that the ecosystem is out of the woods.
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Stears has had to give a board seat to MaC Venture Capital which led the round. It means that investors will be watching their investment like a hawk.
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Stears can definitely use the advice from MaC.
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Below are the tech stories and news you need to know to start your day, carefully curated by Technext.
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Summary of the news
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- Stears Inc. has raised $3.3 million
- NFTs trading volume has declined by 97% in 2022
- African investors have creased their participation in $1m+ funding rounds
- Google will start accepting payment in crypto
- Meta has announced its $1,499 Quest Pro
Amazon will invest €1 billion to electrify its delivery fleet in Europe
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Stears Inc.'s $3.3 million raise
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Serena Williams’ venture capital firm is backing Nigerian data and insights firm, Stears Inc. in a $3.3 million seed round led by MaC Venture Capital, as the company makes more ambitious plans to expand across the continent.
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Stears, based in Lagos, offers data collection, production, advisory and analysis services. Its products include Stears Insights, the company’s flagship digital publication, which provides analysis-driven content to its subscribers, Bloomberg reports.
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Serena Williams said of the investment:
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One of the main reasons I invested in Stears is not because of my love and appreciation for Africa, but because Stears has strategically thought of how to increase the investment community on the continent.
They’re aware of the complexities and have leverage with data and technology and I truly respect what they’re doing.
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Stears Inc. co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Preston Ideh said:
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Our mission has always been to be the world’s most trusted provider of African data and insight...We know what we must do next: focus on making proprietary data, models, tools and forecasts directly available to our users.
It means building the most valuable database on African economies and markets. It means expanding our intelligence team into Kenya, South Africa, and Egypt. It means developing local expertise that cannot be replicated with remote offices.
To become the most trusted source of data and insights, we have to do three things that haven’t been done in Africa before; first, identify all existing sources of data; second, design a shared language to understand all the data; and third; combine these datasets to create proprietary views of the African market that don’t exist anywhere else.
Marlon Nichols, a co-founder and managing general partner at MaC Venture Capital will be joining Stears as a board member.
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Data is a huge business, and I think Stears has figured out a unique process of acquiring and analyzing data, and also visualizing that data in a way that really resonates with both companies and governments.
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Read the full statement from Stears Inc. here.
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A word from our partners!
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NFTs trading volume has declined by 97% in 2022
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According to data from Dune Analytics, NFT trading volume is on a downward spiral. After reaching an apex of $17 billion in January 2022, Non-fungible tokens trading volume has fallen to around $470 million in September 2022, a whopping 97 per cent drop in just 9 months, Technext reports.
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This shows that the upheaval experienced in the blockchain market has not only affected cryptocurrencies but has also stunted the growth and adoption of NFTs.
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Specifically, the Dune Analytics report says that the monthly trade volume dropped to $466 million in September after reaching about $17 billion at the beginning of 2022.
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A deeper analysis shows that this crash is in tandem with a five months period of consecutive decline, as the interest in NFTs started to wane. Recall that in August, Technext did an analysis which says there was a 26% decline in the total volume of NFT sales between June and July 2022.
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African investors have creased their participation in $1m+ funding rounds
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The Big Deal, the newsletter that tracks funding in a new dispatch reveals that African investors have increased their investment in funding rounds above a million dollars. About 58 per cent of all the $1m+ deals so far this year on the continent had African investors as participants.
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See an excerpt from the report below:
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More than half of $1m+ deals in Africa since 2019 have had at least one Africa-based investor as one of the main investors. And this percentage has grown quite a bit since 2019 (36% then vs. 58% this year so far). Participation of Africa-based investors as a main investor is comparable - if a little lower - for the subset of larger $10m+ deals (53% in 2022YTD). However, they are still less represented in the [$100k-$1m] range (39%).
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Africa-based investors are more active in deals with start-ups HQ’ed in one of the Big Four (involved as a main investor in 59% of $1m+ deals since 2019) compared to those HQ’ed elsewhere (37%).
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They are particularly active in Egypt (67%), South Africa (65%) and Nigeria (59%); less so in Kenya (47%). In terms of sectors, they play a strong role in Education & Jobs (involved as a main investor in 66% of $1m+ deals since 2019), Healthcare (63%) and Fintech (58%) but not so much in Agriculture & Food (34%), Energy & Water (36%) or Logistics & Transport (31%).
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They are slightly more active in deals involving a start-up with a female CEO (they participated as a main investor in 59% of such deals since 2019) than a male CEO (53%), and start-ups with at least a female co-founder (58%) vs. all-male founding teams (53%).
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A word from our partners!
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Google will start accepting payment in crypto
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Google said Tuesday that it will rely on Coinbase to start letting some customers pay for cloud services with cryptocurrencies early in 2023, while Coinbase said it would draw on Google’s cloud infrastructure, CNBC reports.
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Coinbase shares rose as much as 8.4% in Tuesday’s trading session, although the stock is still down over 70% for the year.
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The deal, announced at Google’s Cloud Next conference, might succeed in luring cutting-edge companies to Google in a fierce, fast-growing market, where Google’s top competitors do not currently permit clients to pay with digital currencies. The cloud business helps diversify Google parent Alphabet away from advertising, and it now accounts for 9% of revenue, up from less than 6% three years ago, as it is expanding more quickly than Alphabet as a whole.
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Coinbase, which generates a majority of its revenue from retail transactions, will move data-related applications to Google from the market-leading Amazon Web Services cloud, which Coinbase has relied on for years, said Jim Migdal, Coinbase’s vice president of business development.
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The Google Cloud Platform infrastructure service will initially accept cryptocurrency payments from a handful of customers in the Web3 world who want to pay with cryptocurrency.
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Meta announces the $1,499 Quest Pro
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At Meta Connect 2022, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company’s latest virtual reality headset, but after years of striving to bring down the cost of entry to the VR world, the newly announced Quest Pro appears to be all about pushing technical boundaries.
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The new device shares the Quest name but has little in common with the more mass market-geared headset, which Meta will continue to sell, albeit at the $399 starting price that it recently announced. With a much higher price point of $1500, Meta is pitching the Quest Pro as a productivity device, TechCrunch reports.
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The Quest Pro’s headline feature is full colour passthrough, which uses four cameras on the outside of the device to capture and display the space outside of the headset to users wearing the device. A black-and-white version of this is available on the Quest 2. The feature will allow for “mixed reality” experiences which overlay digital content onto the user’s real-world environment.
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These use cases are enabled by a lot of significant hardware changes.
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The new “pancake” lenses mean a significantly reduced size with a 40% thinner display stack compared with the Quest 2. The headset utilizes a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2+ chipset and 1800 × 1920 per-eye mini-LED displays. The headset comes with 12GB of RAM onboard and 256GB of storage. The Quest Pro integrates eye-tracking as well.
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Latest in funding
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Other stories we are following
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