The Africa SMME Tech Report

Issue No. 28. Africa-Middle East local and small business tech news for 31 March 2022. This issue features Waitroom, Grubtech, Leaf Global Fintech, Sticitt, and more...

This issue of The Africa SMME Tech Report is brought to you by Duda

Vinny Lingham’s Online Meeting Refresh

Keywords: Online meetings, startups, entrepreneurs, influencers

Entrepreneur and Shark Tank SA panelist Vinny Lingham has raised a US$3 million seed round for a new company designed to slay Zoom fatigue and make online meetings better.

Waitroom is a meeting platform with a hard time limit aimed at making conversations more efficient and relevant.

Waitroom certainly resembles Zoom and Microsoft Teams. It also borrows elements from Cameo, TikTok, and Instagram. There is also a little hint of MasterClass embedded in the concept.

Waitroom is about hacking the endless routine meetings you hold at your company. But it’s also about facilitating efficient (i.e., brief) one-to-one conversations between B2B influencers and their followers. This gives the concept a gloss of mostly B2B glamour to get it off the ground. Early participants in Waitroom sessions include Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, fashion designer Tan France, and others.

Waitroom’s founding team has South African roots and connections. In addition to Lingham, co-founders Margaret Grobler and Michael Gaylord are South Africans who worked with Lingham at his previous startups Gyft and Civic Technologies. Lingham is also a co-founder of the freemium website builder Yola.

Civic is a blockchain-based identity verification startup, which left many of Lingham’s crypto followers wondering if there will be a Web3/NFT angle to this startup.

Lingham tossed his crypto followers a bone in a reply to his own Tweet announcing Waitroom.

South African roots notwithstanding, Waitroom is actually based in San Diego, California, where Lingham lives. And Lingham says he plans to make this his full-time pursuit, leading the company as its founder and CEO.

Waitroom’s first group of investors includes Hollywood super-agent Ari Emmanuel, plus David Sacks of Craft Ventures, Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate, and David Frankel of Founders Collective.

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GrubTech and Paymob Partner in Egypt

Keywords: Foodtech, payments, MENA

UAE-based foodtech platform GrubTech announced a partnership this week with Egyptian digital payments company Paymob designed to make the digital payments process easier for Egypt’s F&B industry.

Cairo-based Paymob was launched in 2015 by Alain El Hajj, Islam Shawky, and Mostafa Menessy. The company enables digital payments online and in-store for small and large merchants, with an emerging markets focus.

“We’re very excited to be partnering with Grubtech’s expertise, redefining the traditional payments reconciliation norms for the F&B sector by offering a bundled solution that seamlessly manages restaurant operations and payments from a single platform,” said Paymob CEO Shawky.

Grubtech was founded in 2019 and has raised $18.4 million to date to build a foodtech platform that supports in-person and virtual restaurants. While based in Dubai, the company has global ambitions.

"Restaurants who used to wrestle with fragmented solutions and had to grapple with the burden of managing multiple vendors and disjointed data, now experience a massive shift in operational efficiencies and increase in sales. And that will only get better as we combine it with Paymob’s expertise in digital payment solutions,” said Moe Al Fayed, GrubTech’s Co-founder & CEO.

Grubtech also has ambitions beyond the terrestrial world as well.

Moe was a speaker at the recent BigFive Digital MENA Summit in Dubai, where he spoke about Grubtech’s plans to build a food hall in the metaverse.

While this may sound like an initiative that is 90% PR-driven, Grubtech appears to be quite serious. In fact, Moe says he expects the metaverse to account for a third of his company’s business within the next three years.

Grubtech describes its metaverse food hall as an environment where our avatars (mirroring our real-world appearance, personality, even clothing) can visit stations in the food hall, place orders, and have the (real, not virtual) food delivered to our homes.

“We are working on it as we speak and expect to launch the trial within the end of Q2 2022,” Al Fayed told us after the conference.

Notably, Dubai recently announced plans to create a virtual version of the city in the metaverse. Another data point that makes Grubtech’s virtual ambitions seem a little more real.

Last year, Moe was also a guest on the BIG5D Podcast, discussing the cloud kitchens phenomenon, which is particularly active in the GCC. You can watch the interview here:

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IDT Acquires Leaf Global Fintech

Keywords: Acquisitions, financial inclusion, blockchain

Leaf Global Fintech, a company that uses a blockchain-based mobile wallet to deliver virtual banking services to vulnerable populations crossing borders in Africa, has been acquired by IDT Corp. for an undisclosed sum.

IDT is a global communications and payments company based in the United States. Its flagship product is Boss Money, which offers cross-border money transfers, focused on emerging markets. IDT gains immediate access to several African markets with this acquisition and a platform for further expansion within the Continent.

We asked Leaf Co-founder Tori Samples about the deal, and how it furthers Leaf’s mission.

"We are incredibly excited about the possibilities that come with Leaf being part of IDT,” Tori said. “IDT is entrepreneurial, innovative, and cares deeply about Leaf's markets. The acquisition will allow us to pursue new and interesting business models under the umbrella of an organization that has deep expertise in fintech, payments, and remittances."

Founded in 2017, Leaf is leveraging blockchain technology to offer a digital wallet to underserved populations in Africa. Notably, refugees, migrant workers, and small traders operating across borders. 

U.S.-based Leaf operates out of Kigali and also does business in Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda. 

We also asked Tori about the deal’s timing. Why sell now? The answer, as it often does, involves the path to scale.

"Leaf has established itself with operations in three countries, proven our blockchain-based technology is solid and shown the business model is viable,” she said. “Joining IDT represents a path to scale. Growing on our own was possible but would have involved challenges that IDT has already solved. Scaling Leaf under the umbrella of the larger organization allows us to focus on the most unique aspects of Leaf and take advantage of IDT's long history in the space."

One concrete benefit Leaf customers will gain from the acquisition is the addition of money transfers to and from the United States.

"Our customers have been asking about the ability to send and receive with the United States for years. Funds from the US are a critical lifeline for many of our customers, either as an ongoing form of support or to fill a short-term gap,” Tori said. “IDT knows that market well, having been a leading provider of communication and remittance services from the US for years.”

You can check out our interview last year with Leaf Global co-founder Tori Samples here:

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Cape Town Fintech Startup Sticitt Raises Seed Round

Sticitt, an impact-driven Cape Town startup straddling edtech and fintech, has raised a seed round that the company says was oversubscribed by 1.5X.

Sticitt’s stated purpose is to simplify payments within the South African education market. It also has a financial education mission, providing educational and adaptive financial transaction products. These are designed to teach students and families personal finance basics via its Sticitt Pay payment system.

Sticitt’s CEO says the funding will help the company expand its product set.

“Our first product, Sticitt Pay, a cashless payment platform, offers schools an integrated smart payment system that is safe and easy to use and is the first important step in our journey to simplify education-related payments and building toward a youth banking alternative,” said Sticitt Co-founder and Theo Kitshoff.

“This funding round will help us reach more schools, parents, and learners and enable our expanded product roadmap centred around education-related payments and youth banking.”

The company was founded in 2018 by Kitshoff, Mitch Dart, and Dennis Wevel. The seed round (amount not disclosed) investors included Grindstone Ventures, Nustate Capital Ventures, Hlayisani Capital, Realm Digital, and GalloProvincialis (represented by Derek Szabo and Mark Bowman). These investors join existing investor Crucis VC1, an S12J venture capital company.

“We are excited to add Sticitt to our portfolio, as it addresses a real need in the school system, and dovetails well between edtech and fintech, where the future of financial literacy and impact meets,” said Grindstone Managing Partner Catherine Young.

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Is Zambia Africa's Next Startup Hub?

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin is among those backing Zambia’s bid to become a new African startup hub. A working group of banks and foundations, including the Ethereum Foundation, are backing an initiative to create policies that will attract startups. Creating favorable tax policies and implementing “cryptocurrency-friendly regulations” are among the initiative’s objectives.

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BigFive Summit Features Telkom Consumer CEO Lunga Siyo

We are very excited to add Telkom Consumer CEO Lunga Siyo as a headline speaker at the upcoming BigFive Summit in Cape Town.

Stay tuned for more A-list speaker announcements for the Summit, which is Africa's only event focused on small business digital transformation.

Register soon to take advantage of early bird ticket prices. And use the code BIGFIVE25 for a 25% discount at checkout.

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