Today, the 23rd of May 2024, President William Ruto of Kenya, which is dubbed Silicon Savannah of Africa, is making an official state visit to the United States of America, the home of Silicon Valley. It is the first official visit by a Kenyan President in the last two decades, facilitated by Ambassador Meg Whitman who used to …
I conclued my last oped on the prognosis that exits would follow African scaleups and by that I meant some of the deals would be mergers, others would be acquisitions, whilst a third category may go public. The drafting and publication of this paper was delayed by the massive internet outage in West Africa¹, caused …
Mergers, Acquisitions and IPOs would follow African ScaleUPs Read More »
In February 2023, Universal Music Group (UMG) annouced a majority strategic investment into Mavin Global – a leading African records label based in Nigeria – the deal is subject to regulatory approval by the end of Q3 2024. By some estimates the deal is between $125M and $200M giving UMG about 80% of Mavin Global. …
Capital, Capacity and Community for ScaleUPs in Africa Read More »
The African continent has a land area of 30.37 million square kilometers (11.7 million square miles) — large enough to fit in the U.S., China, India, Japan, Mexico, and many European nations, Africa. Which begs the question “how do you scale up on a continent so big, yet so fragmented into 54 individual countries that …
The year is 2010, a young Eric Osiakwan is engaged in two experiments; getting the West Africa Backhaul Company (WABco) off the ground as an entrepreneur during the day and backing early-stage tech startups by night. Over the next three years, the former faces major headwinds whilst the latter takes off, and with it his …
Kenya has transformed itself from a leading tourist destination to an innovation hub resulting in an entrepreneurial tech revolution and earning the name “Silicon Savannah”. I hosted leading photographer, Lou Jones in Kenya to capture incredible images that depict this transition as part of the panAFRICAproject. The project’s mission is to create a contemporary, visual …
On the 1st of March, South Africa based cryptocurrency exchange, VALR announced their $50M series B raise at a $240M valuation led by Pantera Capital. On that same day, Africa’s leading mobile operator MTN announced their purchase of 144 plots of virtual land in Africarare – the first African virtual reality metaverse featuring digital land. …
On 12th January 2022, Warner Music Group (WMG) announced their majority acquisition of Africori – the first major acquisition of the year in the entertainment industry. Momentum has been building toward this as WMG first invested in Africori in April 2020 at the height of the pandemic, followed in December 2020, with Africori signing a …
The global pandemic has had the unintended consequence of speeding up Africa’s digital economy. The transition to digital services and the adoption of transformative mobile technologies have been rapid in the last two years with e-commerce being the biggest beneficiary. This digital transformation has been driven by home grown solutions – some of which are …
When I first coined the KINGS (Kenya, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa) term in September 2013, Cote d’Ivoire also known as Ivory Coast was a small “i” in the KiNGS. The country was just emerging from a tumultuous civil unrest that followed a disputed election in 2010 that ousted then incumbent, Laurent Gbagbo …
