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Afridigest Week in Review: A new unicorn from Egypt, MNT-no-ride-Halan

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Afridigest Week in Review: A new unicorn from Egypt, MNT-no-ride-Halan

+Africa's current unicorn list +Gokada & Sendy layoffs +Techstars Lagos' dirty dozen +The Collison decision-making framework +Jumia's Jazz +More

Emeka Ajene
Feb 6
7
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Afridigest Week in Review: A new unicorn from Egypt, MNT-no-ride-Halan

afridigest.substack.com
The Afridigest Week in Review is a must-read weekly recap for Africa-focused founders, executives, and investors.
Welcome back, friends! The most clicked link last week was Paul Graham’s short piece, 'How to get ideas.' And over the weekend, we published a piece on founders that raised $1M or more in Francophone Africa last year in English and in French.
📌 Wsh kho, wsh khti & marhaba to all the new subscribers from Algeria & Morocco last week 🙌🏽 — please do reply and say hello. In other news, I had a great convo with Fleri’s Sam Baddoo last week about the actual & potential value of this newsletter to startup founders, and it reminded me of this tweet. Many thanks for the dose of clarity, Sam 🙏🏽
If you’re new, welcome — this Week in Review is sent on Mondays, the Fintech Review on Sundays, and from time to time, an original essay/article goes out on Saturdays. For past essays and digests, visit the archive.
[We often link to older editions of this newsletter, but if you’re a free subscriber, you won't have access to the historical archive. Remember to upgrade your subscription to enjoy everything.]
💡 “Bitter truth is better than a sweet lie.” — Swahili proverb
» Today’s edition is a smidge long, but top notch. Go ahead and open it in your browser.

Week 5 2023: Jan 29 - Feb 4

📰 Deal of the Week

🇪🇬 MNT-Halan, an Egyptian ‘super app’ turned ‘fintech ecosystem,’ raised $200M+ in equity from Dubai’s Chimera Investments.

About MNT-Halan: Launched in 2017 by Mounir Nakhla (CEO) and Ahmed Mohsen (CTO) as Halan, a ride-hailing and delivery app on a quest to become one of Africa’s super apps, the formal link to MNT didn’t come until four years later.

In June 2021, Halan entered into a (share swap) merger agreement with microlending holdco MNT, following MNT’s 100% consolidation of Raseedy, the first independent, interoperable digital wallet licensed by the Central Bank of Egypt.

And so MNT-Halan was created.

Despite its ride-hailing origins, the company is all in on fintech today. It derives most of its revenue from lending — over $300M in 2022 it says — and has even shut down its ride-hailing operations.

MNT-no-ride-Halan

In addition to disbursing over $2 billion in loans of various types (BNPL, vehicle financing, payroll lending, & more) since inception, MNT-Halan also offers a variety of digital payments and e-commerce services (both B2C and FMCG B2B).

Deal details: You may have seen the $400M number floating around in various press reports linked to this deal, and to clarify things a bit: that includes Chimera’s new ~$200M in equity, ~$140M in a previously announced securitized bond issuance program (see, for example, Week 26 2022’s Week in Review), and an additional $60M in equity from the IFC (& perhaps others) that hasn’t closed yet, but is in “advanced stages” and expected to be finalized “in the coming weeks.”

Unicornucopia: Chimera’s $200M equity investment is in exchange for a 20% stake, making MNT-Halan Africa’s newest unicorn and Egypt’s first, depending on your definition. (Fawry & Swvl weren’t privately held when they first crossed the $1B valuation threshold.)

Here’s a look at Africa’s current unicorn list:

P.S. Go1 is still South African Australian :)

Investor tidbit: UAE-based Chimera previously participated in InstaDeep’s Week 4 2022 Series B ($100M), and now joins Sequoia, Tiger Global, Softbank, and others among Africa Tech’s unicorn makers.

Investor (partial) exit: With this deal, Apis Growth Fund II booked a partial exit of its Week 36 2021 investment in MNT-Halan, according to press reports.

Key personalities:

  • Mounir Nakhla, Founder and CEO, MNT-Halan

  • Seif Fikry, CEO, Chimera

In the Founder’s words: “[This fundraise is] a testament to our ability to significantly increase our revenues and open new revenue streams while growing our bottom line, despite the macro-economic situation… We continue to grow both organically and inorganically by offering cutting edge financial products and services locally and internationally to empower the underserved.”

In the Investor’s words: “We are thrilled to be part of Egypt’s greatest fintech success story. MNT-Halan … transform[s] a high touch business by seamlessly infusing an unparalleled proprietary tech platform while increasing product depth for its target customer segment.”


🔦 Deals
EQUITY DEALS ACROSS THE CONTINENT
  • 🇿🇦 Lulalend, a South African digital lending platform & digital bank targeting SMEs, raised a $35M Series B led by Lightrock, with participation from German development finance institution DEG, Triodos Investment Management, Women’s World Banking, the IFC, and Quona Capital.

  • 🇰🇪 Mawingu, a Kenyan Internet service provider, raised a $9M Series B led by InfraCo Africa’s $6M, with E3 Capital and Dutch Entrepreneurial Development Bank FMO also participating with $1.5M each.

  • 🇳🇬 SunFi, a Nigerian solar energy financing platform that connects supply (providers/installers), demand (businesses & consumers), and financing options, raised a $2.3M seed round co-led by Factor[e] and SCM Capital Asset Management, with participation from Voltron Capital, Norrsken Impact Accelerator, Ventures Platform and Sovereign Capital.

  • 🇲🇦 Gwala, a Moroccan earned wage access platform, raised an undisclosed pre-seed from Ingressive and others. 

    • Pair with: The rise of earned wage access across developed & emerging markets (Afridigest)

  • The ARM Labs Lagos Techstars Accelerator announced its inaugural class. (Techstars offers $20K in exchange for a 6% equity and an optional $100K convertible note.)

    • .🇳🇬 Nigeria:

      • CDcare, an installment payments platform

      • Flick, a unified payments platform

      • Keble, a platform enabling fractional real estate investments

      • Keza, a smartphone financing platform

      • Oystr Finance, a provider of micro-lending infrastructure

      • Peppa.io, an e-commerce enablement platform offering escrow-as-a-service

      • Salad, an earned wage access platform

      • Sidebrief, a platform facilitating pan-African expansion by simplifying company incorporation & administration

      • Towntalk, a real-time analytics & operational intelligence platform targeting FMCG & logistics companies

      • Vittas, a B2B digital lender targeting healthcare providers

    • 🇰🇪 Kenya:

      • alphabloQ, a platform enabling fractional real estate investments

      • Cladfy, a provider of micro-lending infrastructure

ADJACENT DEALS
  • RapidDeploy, a South-African-born cloud-based, emergency response platform serving the American market, raised $34M led by Edison Partners. It’s a HAVAÍC portco.

DEBT
  • 🇿🇦 Teraco Data Environments, a South African data center operator (Africa's largest) raised $680M in debt funding

  • 🇿🇦 Yellow, a South African pay-as-you-go asset-backed financing platform, received a $5M loan facility from Oikocredit

  • 🇰🇪 MyCredit, a Kenyan digital lending platform, received a $2.6M loan facility from Oikocredit

INVESTOR ACTIVITY
  • Andile Ngcaba’s Convergence Partners, a private equity growth investor focused on tech infrastructure investments across sub-Saharan African, closed its Digital Infrastructure Fund (CPDIF) at ~$296M, surpassing its initial target by +18%.

  • Dutch entrepreneurial development bank FMO announced that it’s considering a $10M investment in Accion Venture Lab II.

  • British International Investment (BII), the UK's development finance institution, appointed Chris Chijiutomi as MD, Head of Africa. 


📚 Quick hits
FOR YOUR READING PLEASURE
  • The Collison decision matrix: How to make the right decision — Taylor Pearson unpacks a decision-making framework from Stripe’s CEO: “Most ‘bad’ decision making isn’t bad in a generic way, but “bad” in the sense that it is contextually incorrect.”

  • Focus — Andrew Bosworth, CTO at Meta, on working at a startup: “I was something like the tenth engineer hired at Facebook… The best time to stop a distraction is before it starts. The second best time is now.”

  • Everything you can’t have — another gem from Morgan Housel: “If you want something and can’t have it, you drive yourself mad.”

AFRIDIGEST ARTICLES
  • 27 founders that raised over $1 million in Francophone Africa in 2022 — Comes with a shareable infographic

PUBLIC BOOKMARKING
  • The sober potential and rising in Southeast Asia — “Christopher Schroeder: I just returned from two weeks in Southeast Asia, meeting over sixty venture investors, entrepreneurs, journalists, policy experts and alike… there is no comparison being on the ground.”


👀 Visual of the Week

Share


🕵️‍♀️ In case you missed it
NEWS
  • Nigerian mobility platform Gokada laid off ~50 employees after previous layoffs in November; the company apparently held discussions to be acquired by Kwik Delivery last year; and news reports last week highlighted the company’s turn to crowdfunding — Busy times for CEO Olutosin Oni who joined the firm in July 2022 from EchoVC

  • Kenya’s Sendy is ceasing ‘on-the-ground operations’ in Nigeria, but will continue to connect sellers to logistics providers — Sendy confirmed to TechCrunch that some Nigerian employees will be laid off, but not how many

  • Elon Musk’s Starlink is now available in Africa — Nigeria is the first country on the continent to receive service

  • Kenya withdrew its financial impropriety case against Flutterwave

    • Pair with: ‘Will Flutterwave move ahead with its IPO plans this year?’ (TechCabal)

ESSAYS & OP-EDS
  • Dr. Ola Brown, Founder at HealthCap Africa, writes ‘The private equitalization of venture capital & the effect it will have on tech founders/GPs in Africa’

  • Abraham Augustine
    writes ‘Schrödinger’s value and uncertainty in informal markets’

  • Ighosime Oyofo, Executive Director at Lion's Head Global Partners, writes ‘Bring back brick and mortar’

  • Lotf Belych and Yassin El Hardouz published the Morocco Startup Ecosystem report 2023

  • Danladi Momodu, Business Development Executive at Drug-IT Solutions, writes ‘How technology can help close Nigeria’s gender gap’

  • Christopher Ball, co-founder of Finch Technologies, writes ‘Superapp mentality drives large enterprise success in Africa’

    • Pair with: ‘How Africa’s super app landscape is evolving’ (Afridigest)

OTHER ARTICLES
  • How Bitcoin mining saved Africa's oldest national park from bankruptcy (Cointelegraph)

  • How women entrepreneurs thrive in Nigeria's burgeoning tech scene (CNN Marketplace - Video)

  • Why 1% of venture financing matters more than you think in Africa (Briter Bridges)

  • InstaDeep’s acquisition is a classic case of an African startup gone global (TechCrunch)

  • Nigeria’s mobile Internet space needs more competition (Techpoint)

PROFILES/INTERVIEWS
  • Andile Ngcaba, chairman and founding partner at Convergence Partners: “Building digital infrastructure is really the foundation for the continent”

  • Adeola Ayoola, Co-Founder & CEO, Famasi Africa: “What you find in emerging markets like Nigeria and Africa at large is that pharmacists are the first point of access.”

  • Mareme Dieng, Africa Lead for 500 Global: “We believe there is a continued need to digitize sectors and services across the continent.”

  • Tidjane Dème, General Partner at Partech: “When a very big deal happens in the market, like what happened in Algeria in 2022 and what happened in Senegal in 2021, it clearly signals to everybody that you can build a big valuable business in that market.”

  • Jessica Hope, Founder of Wimbart: “[PR] is an important part of the ecosystem… Tech startups continue to realize how important professional services are.”

  • Massimiliano Spalazzi, Country CEO, Jumia Nigeria: “Our new strategy is to accelerate progress toward profitability with a comprehensive plan.”

    • Pair with: ‘Could Jumia’s staggering liquidity position be the company’s latest predicament?’ (TechCabal)

      Twitter avatar for @JasonNjoku
      JasonNjoku @JasonNjoku
      Jumia was using Jazz all along. The original blitzscaling that everyone was applauding and hyping. Its not where you start. Its where you ultimately end up. 💀
      Twitter avatar for @KingsNdimele
      Kingsley Ndimele: Your Reliable Consultant @KingsNdimele
      Jumia predicted that it will become profitable by 2022. Guess what? Jumia closed the year 2022 with a revenue of $177.9 million, recording losses of $226.9 million. That is, an average of $59 million per quarter. So far, Jumia has lost $2 billion since its launch.
      9:06 AM ∙ Jan 31, 2023
      46Likes16Retweets

🐤 Tweet of the Week

I’m bullish too:

Twitter avatar for @MartinGTobias
Martin Tobias (Pre-Seed VC) @MartinGTobias
Closing my first investment in Africa this week. In diligence on two more. Very bullish on Africa!🐃
4:00 PM ∙ Jan 30, 2023
803Likes79Retweets

Follow AfridigestHQ on Twitter

Bonus tweets: Do we still have unicorns in Africa?, A Twitter thread masterclass on Nigeria’s NIBSS, and 21 principles from Y-Combinator's Startup Playbook.


🗣️ Community Corner and Opportunities (feel free to send yours in)
🎰 OPPORTUNITIES
  • Women founders who are building tech startups in or for Africa are invited to apply before February 20th for the Google for Startups Accelerator Women Founders Africa program.

  • East African agtech startups focused on precision farming, sustainable supply chains, or the circular economy & renewable energy are invited to apply before February 28th to looking for Startup Africa Roadtrip’s Seeds for sustainable energy 2023 program.

  • African mobility startups with at least a proof of concept or MVP and a full-time CEO and CTO are invited to apply before March 31st for the 2023 Region I Start-up Challenge of the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile.

  • Entrepreneurially-minded Ethiopian, Kenyan and Rwandan citizens are invited to apply to Cohort 4 of the Jasiri Talent Investor Program by April 23rd. Those selected will participate in a fully-funded 13-month program offering guidance with idea generation, validation, prototyping, market entry, and venture creation. Since its inception in December 2020, Jasiri has spawned 25 ventures.

  • Africa-focused startups are invited to apply to Norrsken’s 2023 Accelerator cohort. The accelerator offers a a $125K investment and its alumni include Kwara, Asilimia, Wella Health, and others.

💼 HIRING
  • The IFC’s Disruptive Technologies and Venture Capital team is hiring a Lagos-based Investment Analyst.

  • Mercy Corps Ventures is looking for an Investment Fellow — it’s a six-month engagement with the chance to turn into a full-time position.

  • Yolélé West Africa, a joint venture of African food brand Yolélé and Haskè Ventures, is hiring a bilingual Dakar-based CEO.

  • Shared mobility platform Treepz is hiring an Accra-base Ghana Country Manager.

  • Nigerian edtech platform Edukoya is hiring a Lagos-based Marketing Manager.


Interested in attending the next Afridigest Lagos meetup? Kindly fill out this form.
🙊 The last word
WHAT I’M THINKING ABOUT

This Thursday February the 9th at 2:30pm WAT, I’ll be speaking about The State of Tech in Africa Today with Dami at the AfricaNXT conference.

If you’re in Lagos, come through. I also have several complimentary badges — if you’re interested ping me & one is yours.


If you liked today’s edition of the newsletter, don’t keep it to yourself. Be generous and share it aggressively. Thanks in advance 🙌🏽

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Afridigest Week in Review: A new unicorn from Egypt, MNT-no-ride-Halan

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