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Last February, Djamo announced that it got accepted into Y Combinator, the first from Ivory Coast. Months later, the two-year-old fintech has raised $14 million in funding from the famed accelerator, as well as from three lead investors — Enza Capital, Oikocredit and Partech Africa — and other participating investors, including Janngo Capital, P1 Ventures, Axian and Launch Africa.

As with most fintechs across Africa, Djamo, launched by Régis Bamba and Hassan Bourgi last year, provides financial services for the underbanked and unbanked population. Its focus is on French-speaking markets where fewer than 25% of adults have bank accounts. One reason why this is so is that banks concentrate on affluent customers and those they deem profitable for business. But as banks slacked, mobile money from the region’s telcos filled in the gap, and in the last 10 years, their wallets have reached more than 60% of the population — proof of how many millions of French-speaking natives were hungry for financial services.

Today, this mobile money infrastructure and reach allows startups like Djamo to build upon their existing payment infrastructure to democratize financial access across banking and mobile money spheres. Djamo’s app allows for interoperability between banks and mobile money, meaning that its customers in Ivory Coast can send money from their bank accounts to mobile money wallets, and back; it has leveraged this characteristic to build a full suite of financial services.

Djamo’s first product is a Visa-powered debit card that lets users make online purchases on sites such as Amazon, Alibaba, or Netflix. Other products include virtual accounts for peer-to-peer transactions, a product to receive salaries, and an autosaving product that offers guidance into customers’ financial goals. Kuda, Telda, PiggyVest, TymeBank and Koa are a few examples of comparable products across Africa.

“Before Djamo, it was a real challenge for an average customer to receive salaries digitally because they weren’t integrated into the banking system,” CEO Bourgi told TechCrunch over a call. “We found the right partner to launch that product and any company can pay salary to employees with a Djamo account. When you look at Djamo, alongside other products, we want customers to be able to better manage their money and help them plan for their future. We’re not necessarily to digitize cash like mobile wallets. We are here to work on the personal finance side.”

Customers see so much value in the different use cases Djamo has assembled so far that the fintech still relies on word of mouth to scale across Ivory Coast, according to Bamba, the company’s chief product officer. The platform currently has registered over 500,000 customers, a more than 5x increase from the 90,000 customers Djamo had onboarded as of February 2021.

“In our region, users pay amongst the highest fees in the world but do not always receive adequate service in return and that can be extremely frustrating. The one thing that we want to achieve is to offer a product where customers get real value for their money,” said the CPO. “The app has been growing organically like crazy and to get such numbers in a market like this within a short period, is proof that we’re nailing the overall user experience and building something very relevant for users.”

While they didn’t provide an update to the 50,000 monthly transactions recorded during the February interview, the founders say the fintech platform has processed over $400 million since inception. Djamo is also experiencing a revenue growth of 20% to 25% month-on-month, spurred by an amendment to its pricing plan that includes a free option and two premium options with varying services: $2/month and $3.5/month. They say these options are 80% cheaper than other bank accounts offered by financial institutions — including microfinance banks that Djamo views as direct competition due to their adoption of digital channels to provide financial services — in Ivory Coast.

Bourgi said 60% of Djamo customers have never used a Visa debit card before joining the platform. It’s a feat the chief executive is proud of and deems crucial in Djamo’s bid to make financial services accessible to the masses, including those outside the Ivory Coast. The $14 million in funding capital, which it claims to be the largest-ever equity round for a startup in Ivory Coast, will help the startup advance into two other countries across Francophone Africa before the end of next year and expand product offerings to include investments and lending.

Tidjane Deme, the general partner at Partech Africa, speaking on the investment, said, “Francophone Africa offers a large integrated market, with [a] fast-growing demand for frictionless services from a new cohort of digital-native young adults. We are excited to join forces with high-caliber local investors who bring sector and regional expertise to enable Djamo to unlock this opportunity.”

Consumer finance app Djamo eyes Francophone Africa expansion, backed by new $14M round by Tage Kene-Okafor originally published on TechCrunch

When Female Invest launched in 2019, it did so with the goal of creating a community where women who wanted to invest in the stock market, but weren’t sure where to start, could gain the knowledge and confidence to take the plunge. Now, its users will be able to do so all within the Female Invest platform.

The Copenhagen-based startup announced the acquisition of fellow Danish fintech Gaia Investments this week with plans to integrate the trading platform, which focuses on investing in companies with sustainability goals, into its app. The purchase price of Gaia was undisclosed, but the startup raised at a $3 million valuation, three months prior to the transaction, Female Invest told TechCrunch.

For Female Invest co-founder and partner Camilla Falkenberg, adding the ability to invest directly through Female Invest is a great next step for the subscription edtech platform.

“Since day one, we have always been very focused on building the features and products that were requested by our community,” Falkenberg said. “And we get requests every day for the possibility to trade directly through us.”

She added that she thinks the platform gets that request so often because its users trust it. A recent survey of customers found that 96% of them would trust Female Invest with their money more than their bank.

Female Invest has spent the last year building up the company in a way to more easily integrate trading, too. Falkenberg said since they raised their $4.5 million seed round last November, they’ve built out an app, expanded their tech team and raised an additional $3 million in funding.

But when they came across Gaia Investments in July, they realized it might make more sense, and save time, for Female Invest to partner with an existing trading platform as opposed to building their own.

“Gaia has a strong brand here in the Nordics and such a strong focus on ethics and sustainable investing, something we are also very interested in,” she said. “As the talks progressed, it became more and more clear it was a great move for us.”

The team at Gaia felt the same way, Mads Sverre Willumsen, a co-founder and CTO told TechCrunch.

“We knew Female Invest and saw the journey they had been on in the past three years,” he said. “After we talked and saw we had alignment, the decision was not that difficult.”

The two companies also shared similar founding stories — both looked to create an investing product that they felt was needed and didn’t exist.

For Female Invest, it was in 2019 when the founders realized there wasn’t a good resource that taught women how to start investing. For Gaia, it was when co-founder and CEO David Bentzon-Ehlers’s mother asked him in 2020 if there was a safe place to invest in sustainable companies, and his realization that the platform she was looking for didn’t yet exist.

While it isn’t super common for startups to get acquired so early in life — Gaia had just completed a TechStars accelerator program a few months earlier — Sverre Willumsen said the transaction made sense for Gaia because they were more interested in expanding the reach of their product than being startup founders.

“I didn’t become a founder in the first place to be a founder,” he said. “I did it because it was an opportunity to make a lot of innovation and a difference for people quite quickly.”

The current Gaia users will be offloaded — with their money returned in full — in the near future as the platform starts to integrate into Female Invest. Falkenberg said from there they don’t have a specific launch date yet for Female Invest users, but that the ability to trade will launch first in the European Union and in the U.K. after that.

Consolidation of early-stage startups has been a rising trend this year, and as the fintech sector has struggled in 2022’s uncertainty, it seems wise that some of these smaller companies will combine to avoid getting left behind. I’m sure we will start to see more of this heading into next year.

For Female Invest though, the long-term plan, regardless of market conditions, is all falling into place.

“Our vision is to create an extremely user-friendly, and easy to navigate, platform with a focus on sustainability to invest in the values that matter to them,” Falkenberg said. “We have a very loyal user base who is just waiting for us to launch the next product which is a great starting point.”

Female Invest acquires sustainability-focused investment platform Gaia Investments by Rebecca Szkutak originally published on TechCrunch

The FTX drama is not over yet — and Amazon wants a piece of it. The company is partnering with Russo Brothers, best known for Marvel movies, to make a show on the spectacular collapse of the giant cryptocurrency empire.

Amazon has partnered with the duo’s production house AGBO to make the show, which will go into production in Spring 2023, Variety first reported. Amazon is also trying to rope in the brothers to direct the show, the report added.

The company confirmed the news in a statement and said “Hunters” creator David Weil will write the pilot.

“We are excited to be able to continue our great working relationship with David, Joe, Anthony, and the AGBO team with this fascinating event series I can’t think of better partners to bring this multifaceted story to our global Prime Video audience,” Amazon Studios head Jennifer Salke said.

The Russos are also working with Amazon to create a multinational international spy series called “Citadel.”

“This is one of the most brazen frauds ever committed. It crosses many sectors — celebrity, politics, academia, tech, criminality, sex, drugs, and the future of modern finance,” the Russos said of the upcoming show surrounding FTX in a statement. “At the center of it all sits an extremely mysterious figure with complex and potentially dangerous motivations. We want to understand why.”

FTX collapse

FTX and its former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried have been at the center of media coverage across the world after the celebrated cryptocurrency exchange imploded earlier this month.

Coindesk reported earlier about the concerning finances of Alameda Research, the trading firm founded by Bankman-Fried and intertwined closely with the exchange. The report triggered a set of events, culminating in Binance chief executive Changpeng “CZ” Zhao unveiling plans to sell FTX’s native token FTT that it had received as part of an investment exit from the firm.

The move shook the confidence of retail investors and prompted a bank run on FTX and unraveled fraudulent misuse of FTX customers’ data.

Bankman-Fried, who along with his firm have attracted regulatory scrutiny in recent weeks, attempted to salvage FTX by signing a deal to be acquired by Binance, its chief rival then. Binance pulled out of the deal after finding FTX had dug too deep of a hole in its balance sheet. Within days, FTX filed for bankruptcy with Bankman-Fried stepping down from the CEO post.

In the aftermath of this chaos, Bankman-Fried gave a Vox reporter an interview over Twitter direct messages in which he criticized regulators and expressed regrets about filing for bankruptcy and walked back on many of the long-believes he had portrayed about himself to the world. Reports have since also found that FTX used corporate funds to purchase houses for employees and owes the top 50 creditors over $3 billion.

Bankman-Fried is scheduled to speak at the Dealbook summit next week, so we may hear more about what is going on with FTX soon.

Time for the show

All of this makes for a good TV, for sure. It also helps that startup founders doing things has become a sleeper hit of a genre in recent years as evidenced by hits like “WeCrashed” (Apple TV+) on the WeWork and Adam Neumann fiasco, “Dropout” (Hulu) on the Theranos-Elizabeth Holmes saga, and “Super Pumped” (Showtime) on Uber led by Travel Kalanick. So Amazon is keen to get a hit show centering on a controversial tech founder on its catalog. But we could see more adoption of the FTX story.

Earlier this week, Deadline reported that buyers — including Apple — are chasing to sign celebrated author Michael Lewis’ yet-to-be-published book. Lewis — who has previously written hits that were later adapted into movies such as “The Big Short,” “Moneyball,” and “The Blind Side” — had been closely following Bankman-Fried for over six months before the recent implosion.

Amazon’s show will be based on “insider reporting” from various journalists who have covered the issue extensively, according to Variety.

Amazon is working on a TV series about FTX drama with Russo Brothers by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

Google Cloud has partnered with SuperGaming to offer the Indian gaming startup’s proprietary gaming engine, SuperPlatform, to developers worldwide, the latest in a series of recent steps from the Android-maker to expand focus into the gaming industry.

The cloud arm of the search giant said Thursday that as part of its partnership, it will offer the Pune-headquartered startup’s gaming engine to help developers worldwide to help them manage their live ops, matchmaking, player progression and data, analytics, server scaling and merchandising. These tools are designed to help firms maintain, optimize and scale their games.

The upstart SuperGaming, which uses its gaming engine in its own titles as well as the official PAC-MAN game for mobile devices, has garnered millions of downloads to its mobile titles such as MaskGun, Silly Royale and Tower Conquest.

SuperGaming initially developed SuperPlatform to power its own games, and started to license the service to other developers in 2019.

The two firms aren’t stranger to one another. SuperGaming originally relied on AWS for its cloud needs, but moved to Google Cloud a couple of years ago after seeing advantages including “a significant amount of savings,” SuperGaming co-founder and chief executive Roby John told TechCrunch in an interview.

That move put wheels in motion to make the platform available via Google Cloud as an independent software vendor for developers, said John. “I’m very excited to bring our platform to Google Cloud, which powers 70% of our top customers already,” he added.

Developers will continue to have the choice to use SuperPlatform on AWS as well as Azure, though Google Cloud will be SuperGaming’s preference as a result of the partnership, he said.

Prior to talks about a potential partnership, John said SuperGaming had been working closely with Google Cloud engineers to use the cloud platform for the upcoming battle royale game Indus. The teams on both sides exchanged insights that helped bring the partnership very organically, he said.

“The partnership is beyond just saying, okay, here’s computers and infrastructure and all the rest. It’s about saying, how can we come collectively together and with the business objective of succeeding,” said Bikram Singh Bedi, managing director, Google Cloud India, in the joint conversation.

The two did not disclose financial terms of the deal.

Google Cloud’s competitors AWS and Azure do offer native liveOps solutions for game developers to let them run their games as a service and get real-time telemetrics. Google Cloud, however, seems to utilize SuperGaming’s expertise — alongside its platform — to bring some distinctions.

“It’s always about developers, or it’s about players. And this partnership allows us to influence both,” said Bedi.

SuperGaming, which counts Texas-based Skycatcher, Tokyo’s Akatsuki Entertainment Technology Fund, Kirkland-based 1UpVentures and Ant Group-backed BAce Capital among its investors, has so far raised $6.8 million, with $5.5 million infused through a Series A round last year.

The startup also launched TowerConquest: Metaverse Edition as its free-to-earn Web3 game, which it said will also run on Google Cloud — alongside the existing titles and upcoming Indus.

Google Cloud partners with Indian startup SuperGaming to offer gaming engine to developers by Jagmeet Singh originally published on TechCrunch

Tesla investors are begging CEO Elon Musk and the board of Tesla to consider buying back shares as the company’s stock price slumps to a two-year low. Tesla stock was trading at $183.20 after hours on Wednesday, and its market capitalization has plunged by almost $700 billion since its peak a year ago.

Musk said during Tesla’s Q3 earnings call that the company is likely to do a “meaningful buyback” next year, possibly between $5 billion and $10 billion. Last week, he said it would be “up to the Tesla board” to decide.

Buying back shares from the marketplace would reduce the number of outstanding shares available, which increases the ownership stake of current shareholders. That’s because reduced supply of shares often causes a price increase. Tesla bull and influencer Alexandra Merz recently put up a petition on Change.org to advocate for a swift buyback before the end of the year. Merz said this would allow Tesla to “benefit from a currently very unvalued stock price” and avoid the 1% excuse tax that any buybacks exceeding $1 million will be subject to by January 1, 2023.

Merz and other investors have also argued a stock buyback would be a show of confidence in Tesla’s future results and would return wealth to shareholders.

“I’m a huge Tesla fan and past stock holder but in order to preserve my capital I’ve been forced to go to the dark side,” commented one petitioner, of which there are currently 5,807. “I’ve recently began to short the stock and have earned back roughly half my loses. I believe in Tesla’s long term growth but I need to see some action from the board before going long again. A nice buy back would show confidence from the board that Tesla is still a good investment.”

Tesla’s stock has taken a hit lately for a variety of reasons, including decreasing investor confidence in Musk to run the company effectively. Many have complained that Musk is, at best, distracted by his recent purchase and takeover of Twitter, a social media platform on which the executive has lately been airing his politics even more than usual. Musk and certain members of Tesla’s board are currently in court over the CEO’s $56 billion pay package after a Tesla shareholder accused Musk of being a “part-time CEO.”

Drops in Tesla shares also followed massive stock sales by Musk who needed liquid cash to finance the $44 billion Twitter deal.

Some analysts, like Adam Jones at Morgan Stanley, worry the Twitter fiasco and Musk’s rampant tweeting could hurt consumer demand for Tesla, as well as commercial deals and government relations.

Musk’s involvement in Twitter isn’t the only reason for plunging shares. While Tesla still remains the market leader of electric vehicles in the U.S., the company is rapidly losing market share to other automakers as new models come online. In the third quarter, Tesla held 64% market share in EVs, which is down from 66% in Q2 and 75% in Q1. Ford, GM and Hyundai brands are quickly catching up as they scale production of popular EV models like the Mustang Mach-E, the Chevy Bolt and the Ioniq 5.

Tesla is also losing ground to Chinese EV makers like BYD and Wuling Motors in China, where the automaker recently slashed prices to lure buyers, receiving reportedly lackluster enthusiasm. On top of that, Beijing is now on lockdown and more restrictions have been imposed in China as coronavirus cases surge. This might not only affect Tesla’s ability to run its gigafactory in Shanghai, but further restrictions will affect China’s weakened economy further and reduce demand for luxury products like Teslas.

Then there are the back-to-back recalls that Tesla issued over the weekend — over 350,000 vehicles from U.S. customers with software glitches that disable tail lights or activate air bags during minor collisions in some cars. That’s on top of the 17 other recalls this year.

Finally, Tesla has gotten plenty of bad press this year around its advanced driver assistance systems Autopilot and “full self-driving,” or FSD, which have been tied to some fatal crashes in the worst case and in the best case have simply not performed as expected. In September, drivers filed suit against the company for falsely advertising the autonomous capabilities of its tech.

All of the above, coupled with a down market, have resulted in Tesla’s market cap going from $1.2 trillion last November to $574 billion as of Wednesday’s close.

Billionaire Leo Koguan, who says he’s the third largest individual shareholder in Tesla, has been advocating for a buyback for months. Last week he tweeted that Musk should stop selling shares and should take advantage of the “right timing” to buy back shares “before Q4.” Musk responded to the tweet saying it was “up to the Tesla board.”

In October, Koguan called on Tesla to buy back at least $5 billion worth of stock, and in the past has argued for up to $15 billion worth of buybacks, saying Tesla should use its free cashflow to fund the buyback.

As of the third quarter, Tesla has a free cash flow of $3.3 billion.

Koguan has said Tesla can still invest in FSD, its Optimus bot and new gigafactories while also buying back “undervalued stocks.”

What it would mean for Tesla to buy back shares by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

The market for corporate training, which Allied Market Research estimates is worth over $400 billion, has grown substantially in recent years as companies realize the cost savings in upskilling their workers. One PwC report found that teaching employees additional skills can save a company between 43% and 66% of layoff costs alone, depending on the salary.

But it remains challenging for organizations of a certain size to quickly build and analyze the impact of learning programs. In a 2019 survey, Harvard Business Review found that 75% of managers were dissatisfied with their employer’s learning and development (L&D) function and only 12% of employees applied new skills learned in L&D programs to do their jobs.

Searching for an answer, a trio of Cambridge scientists — Chibeza Agley, Sarra Achouri and Juergen Fink — co-founded Obrizum, a company that applies “adaptive learning” techniques to upskill and reskill staff. Leveraging an AI engine, the co-founders claim that Obrizum can tailor corporate learning experiences to individual staffers, identifying knowledge gaps and measuring things like learning efficiency.

“It’s becoming increasingly apparent that businesses will need to continue to invest heavily in efficient, successful training and knowledge sharing regardless of their workplace setup,” Agley, Obrizum’s CEO, told TechCrunch in an interview. “We are solving the widespread industry issue of efficiency. Businesses have less time available than ever before to create programs of learning or assessment. Meanwhile, there is more and more information to be taught.”

So how does Obrizum purport to achieve this? By creating what Agley calls “knowledge spaces” rather than linear training courses. Obrizum works with a company’s existing training resources, analyzing and curating webcasts, PDFs, slide decks, infographics and even virtual reality content into white-label modules that adjust based on a learner’s performance on regular assessments.

Obrizum’s algorithms can both reinforce concepts and emphasize weaker areas, Agley claims, by detecting guessing and “click-through cheating” (i.e., fast-forwarding through videos).

“Obrizum makes it much easier to surface and make use of valuable information that might not traditionally be used to learning or training,” Agley said. “In Obrizum, the individual’s data is used to benefit the individual — which is how it should be. Then, at an organizational level, machine learning can be used to spot trends and patterns which can benefit the majority. . . . Managers can see real-time summary data including usage statistics and a breakdown of performance relative to core concepts for groups of learners. Management level users can also drill down into the performance and activity of individual users.”

For employees uncomfortable with Obrizum’s analytics in an era of pervasive workplace surveillance, fortunately they can anonymize themselves and — in compliance with the GDPR — request the deletion of their personal data via self-service tools, Agley says.

As Obrizum looks toward the future, the company will invest in more comprehensive content automation and analytics technologies, integrations with third-party services and capabilities for collaboration and sharing, according to Agley. The pressure is on to stand out from rival platforms like Learnsoft, which lets set training happen automatically and track metrics like accreditation, as well as generate proof of credentials and certifications for management reviews and audits.

Obrizum also competes with Workera, a precision upskilling platform; software-as-a-service tool GrowthSpace; and to a lesser extent Go1, which provides a collection of online learning materials and tools to businesses that tap content from multiple publishers and silos. The good news is, corporate learning software remains a lucrative space, with investors pouring more than $2.1 billion into an assortment of startups focused on “skilling” employees between February 2021 and February 2021, according to Crunchbase data.

Agley claims that Obrizum is working with about 20 enterprise clients at present, including a growing cohort of government, aerospace and defense organizations. He demurred when asked about Obrizum’s revenue, revealing only that it has increased 17x since year-end 2020 — mostly due to client digital transformation efforts kicked off during the pandemic.

“Obrizum is a sector-agnostic solution which is key to our ability to scale quickly and resiliently even in the challenging macroeconomic climate. . . . Even when it comes to learning experience platforms, Obrizum stands out on its own by way of the level of automation, the granularity of its adaptability and the diagnostic detail of the analytics it offers,” Agley said. “We are incredibly optimistic about the opportunities in our sector despite the broader economic outlook. Learning has, and always will be, required in the world of work and in a post-pandemic world the corporate learning market is expanding fast.”

To date, Obrizum — which employs a staff of 38 — has raised $17 million in venture capital. That includes a $11.5 million Series A led by Guinness Ventures with participation from Beaubridge, Juno Capital Partners and Qatar Science & Tech Holdings and Celeres Ventures, which closed today.

Obrizum uses AI to build employee training modules out of existing content by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch