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A high court in Zimbabwe ended the government’s restrictions on internet and social media last month.

After days of intermittent blackouts at the order of the country’s Minister of State for National Security, ISPs restored connectivity per a January 21 judicial order.

Similar to net shutdowns around the continent, politics and protests were the catalyst. Shortly after the government announced a dramatic increase in fuel prices on January 12, Zimbabwe’s Congress of Trade Unions called for a national strike.

Web and app blackouts in the southern African country followed demonstrations that broke out in several cities. A government crackdown ensued, with deaths reported.

On January 15, Zimbabwe’s largest mobile carrier, Econet Wireless, confirmed that it had complied with a directive from the Minister of State for National Security to shutdown internet.

Net access was restored, taken down again, then restored, but social media sites remained blocked through January 21.

Throughout the restrictions, many of Zimbabwe’s citizens and techies resorted to VPNs and workarounds to access net and social media, as reported in this TechCrunch feature.

Global internet rights group Access Now sprung to action, attaching its #KeepItOn hashtag to calls for the country’s government to reopen cyberspace soon after digital interference began.

The cyber-affair adds Zimbabwe to a growing list of African countries — including Cameroon, Congo and Ethiopia — whose governments have restricted internet expression in recent years.

It also provides another case study for techies and ISPs regaining their cyber rights. Internet and social media are back up in Zimbabwe — at least for now.

Further attempts to restrict net and app access in Zimbabwe will likely revive what’s become a somewhat ironic cycle for cyber shutdowns. When governments cut off internet and social media access, citizens still find ways to use internet and social media to stop them.

Partech doubled its Africa VC fund to $143 million and opened a Nairobi office to complement its Dakar practice.

The Partech Africa Fund plans to make 20 to 25 investments across roughly 10 countries over the next several years, according to general partner Tidjane Deme. The fund has added Ceasar Nyagha as investment officer for the Kenya office to expand its East Africa reach.

Partech Africa will primarily target Series A and B investments and some pre-series rounds at higher dollar amounts. “We will consider seed-funding — what we call seed-plus — tickets in the $500,000 range,” Deme told TechCrunch for this story on the new fund. Partech is open to all sectors “with a strong appetite for people who are tapping into Africa’s informal economies,” he said.

Partech Africa joined several Africa-focused funds over the last few years to mark a surge in VC for the continent’s startups. Partech announced its first raise of $70 million in early 2018 next to TLcom Capital’s $40 million, and TPG Growth’s $2 billion.

Africa-focused VC firms, including those locally run and managed, have grown to 51 globally, according to recent Crunchbase research.

Andela, the company that connects Africa’s top software developers with technology companies from the U.S. and around the world, raised $100 million in a new round of funding.

The new financing from Generation Investment Management (an investment fund co-founded by former VP Al Gore) puts the valuation of the company at somewhere between $600 million and $700 million—based on data available from PitchBook on the company’s valuation.

The company now has more than 200 customers paying for access to the roughly 1,100 developers Andela has trained and manages.

With the new cash in hand, Andela says it will double in size, hiring another thousand developers, and invest in new product development and its own engineering and data resources. More on Andela’s recent raise and focus here at TechCrunch.

Fintech startup Flutterwave announced a new consumer payment product for Africa called GetBarter, in partnership with Visa.

The app-based offering is aimed at facilitating personal and small merchant payments within and across African countries. Existing Visa  cardholders can send and receive funds at home or internationally on GetBarter.

The product also lets non-cardholders (those with accounts or mobile wallets on other platforms) create a virtual Visa card to link to the app.  A Visa spokesperson confirmed the product partnership.

GetBarter allows Flutterwave  — which has scaled as a payment gateway for big companies through its Rave product — to pivot to African consumers and traders.

The app also creates a network for clients on multiple financial platforms to make transfers across payment products and national borders, and to shop online.

“The target market is pretty much everyone who has a payment need in Africa. That includes the entire customer base of M-Pesa,  the entire bank customer base in Nigeria, mobile money and bank customers in Ghana — pretty much the entire continent,” Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga Agboola told TechCrunch in this exclusive.

Flutterwave and Visa will focus on building a GetBarter user base across mobile money and bank clients in Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa, with plans to grow across the continent and reach those off the financial grid.

Founded in 2016, Flutterwave has positioned itself as a global B2B payments solutions platform for companies in Africa to pay other companies on the continent and abroad. It allows clients to tap its APIs and work with Flutterwave developers to customize payments applications. Existing customers include Uber,  Facebook,  Booking.com and African e-commerce unicorn Jumia.com.

Flutterwave added operations in Uganda in June and raised a $10 million Series A round in October The company also plugged into ledger activity in 2018, becoming a payment processing partner to the Ripple and Stellar blockchain networks.

Headquartered in San Francisco, with its largest operations center in Nigeria, the startup plans to add operations centers in South Africa and Cameroon, which will also become new markets for GetBarter.

And sadly, Africa’s tech community mourned losses in January. A terrorist attack on Nairobi’s 14 Riverside complex claimed the lives of six employees of fintech startup Cellulant and I-Dev CEO Jason Spindler. Both organizations had been engaged with TechCrunch’s Africa work over the last 24 months. Condolences to  family, friends and colleagues of those lost.

More Africa Related Stories @TechCrunch

• Facebook is launching political ad checks in Nigeria, Ukraine, EU and India in coming months

African Tech Around The Net    

• Naspers targets Africa’s financial services industry
• Microsoft South Africa gets new MD as Zoaib Hoosen calls it quits
• Why Everyone Is Confused By “African Startups” Funding Figures
• New $10m VC fund to invest in tech startups from Kenya, Nigeria, SA

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2TBK4ES

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Airbnb made it easier for travelers to find a place to crash. Now it wants to make it easier for them to get around.

The $31 billion home-sharing giant has hired Fred Reid as its first-ever global head of transportation. Reid served as the founding chief executive officer of Virgin America from 2004 to 2007 after a three-year stint as the president of Delta Airlines. Most recently, Reid was president of the Cora Aircraft Program, a division of Kitty Hawk focused on the development of an autonomous electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft.

The hire suggests Airbnb has broad ambitions to further disrupt the travel and hospitality industry and given the 500 million guest arrivals to Airbnb listings the company says it will have recorded by the first quarter of 2019, integrating transportation services to better serve customers is a no-brainer.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2WKx4P8

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Tony Haile, who previously led analytics company Chartbeat, is trying to rethink the business model for news at his new startup Scroll. Now he’s adding aggregation and curation to the mix with the acquisition of Nuzzel.

Scroll is still an invite-only product, but Haile explained the idea succinctly: “We deliver this amazing, clean, ad-free experience, and we do it for a low monthly price.”

In other words, after you subscribe and download Scroll, anytime you load up one of its partner sites (including USA Today, BuzzFeed and Vox), you should get an ad-free experience, which should work regardless of whether you’re accessing the site directly from your desktop or mobile browser, or from social media. In exchange, the publishers share the subscription revenue.

Nuzzel, meanwhile, was founded by Jonathan Abrams (who previously founded Friendster), and its core product allows you to see the stories that are most-shared by the people you follow on social media.

Haile said that by acquiring Nuzzel, Scroll can also start experimenting with different models for news curation — which is particularly important because if “we have just two algorithms determining who gets traffic and who doesn’t, then that’s not a healthy web ecosystem.”

“It’s really hard to [build] a scalable business as an amazing curation service,” he added. With Nuzzel, he hopes to “start finding ways in which we can build in that value and drive a new model for our user experience services.”

NEW YORK, NY – OCTOBER 01: Tony Haile speaks onstage at the Buyer Beware! panel during AWXI on October 1, 2014 in New York City. (Photo by Andrew Toth/Getty Images for AWXI)

That doesn’t mean existing Nuzzel users shouldn’t expect any dramatic changes to either the app or the newsletters — Haile said they will continue to operate as separate products, and his team is taking the approach of “first do not harm.”

However, Scroll does plan to remove any advertising from the newsletters, and the engineering team behind the Nuzzel Media Intelligence productwill be spinning that out as a separate company.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. According to Crunchbase, Nuzzel had raised $5.1 million from investors including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. Scroll, meanwhile, has raised a total of $10 million.

Haile said there won’t be anyone from the Nuzzel team joining Scroll in a full-time capacity, though some of them may remain involved as contractors. Abrams, meanwhile, told me via email that he and Nuzzel COO Kent Lindstrom are starting a new, yet-to-be-announced company.

“I think current Nuzzel users should see this as great news, since Scroll wants to make sure that Nuzzel’s services continue to operate,” Abrams said. “As you know, a lot of other news app and news aggregation startups were unfortunately shutdown between 2015 and 2018, so like I said, this is good news for Nuzzel users.”

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2WQatk3

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Substack started out by providing individual writers and publishers with a set of tools enabling them to charge a subscription fee for their newsletters. Now it’s giving them the ability to do the same thing with podcasts.

In fact, Morgan Creek Digital Assets founder Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano is already using the platform to introduce a daily podcast to complement his existing, crypto-focused Off the Chain newsletter.

“We’ve always thought the magic of what Substack is doing is the fact that we’re disintermediating the people creating stuff and the people who are consuming it — you are the brand they’re paying for,” Substack CEO Chris Best told me. “That whole model works incredibly well for newsletters, and to us, there’s no reason why it wouldn’t be a great model for podcast content.”

Substack’s podcasting capabilities will allow publishers to either offer a podcast-specific subscription — or, like Pompliano, to include it as part of a broader package with their newsletter subscription. The podcast itself will be distributed through an audio player that can be embedded in both newsletters and on the web.

A web-based audio player might seem like a clunky way to listen to podcasts, but Substack’s player (which you can try out here) works pretty smoothly and includes features like the ability to jump backward and forward 30 seconds, and to play podcasts at various speeds.

Best added that he’s also open to the idea of creating a private, subscriber-only feed that can be accessed by podcast apps.

“We’re going to put it out there and see what people want,” he said. But he argued that the “existing feed-based podcast system” is “not living up to its potential” when it comes to enabling podcasters to make money from subscriptions.

We spoke shortly after Spotify announced that it was acquiring podcast companies Gimlet and Anchor, which Best said illustrates the importance of a tool like Substack, because it’s focused on “empowering individuals”: “We let people get paid directly by people, rather than aggregated into a wider system.”

I also brought up the patronage model for supporting content creators enabled by Patreon (which is currently how I support one of my favorite podcasts).

“We definitely think the world is big enough for both of those things,” Best replied. While he expressed admiration for the Patreon model, he argued, “There’s also room for another kind of thing, where you say, ‘Hey, I’m doing this professionally, it’s my job, I do a good job with it and you should pay for it.’”

And Best doesn’t intend to stop with newsletters and podcasts. There are plans to support other media formats, although the exact timing will depend on Substack’s customers.

“We are hyper-focused on serving the authors that we’re working with,” he said. “The timing tends to depend on when we find people that want to do it. Why we did the podcast thing now [comes from] Pomp wanting to do it now.”

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2BmAUoA

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It isn’t super common to find two entrepreneurs in one marriage, especially two entrepreneurs that want to work together. But married couple Rob and Monica Royer are making it happen with a new collaboration between Interior Define and Monica + Andy.

Interior Define, founded by Rob Royer and Steve McClearn, looks to offer super customizable, high-quality furniture at an affordable price point. Users can pick the style of their furniture, the materials used, and even specify dimensions to ensure that their stuff fits perfectly in their space.

Monica + Andy, on the other hand, was founded by Monica Royer and Brian Bloom, launched in 2014 to provide high-quality baby and children’s apparel, all of which is made with Global Organic Textile Standard certified cotton. Both Interior Define and Monica + Andy are digitally native brands, but both have various physical guide shops across the country.

One of Monica + Andy’s claims to fame is the brand’s limited edition prints. With that in mind, Monica and Rob Royer hatched a plan to collaborate on child-sized furniture using fun Monica + Andy prints. The children’s furniture is real furniture, shrunken down, according to Rob Royer. However, the slip covers are 100 percent washable to ensure that kids can still play happily without completely destroying the furniture in the play room.

“To be brutally honest, working together as married, founding CEOs is probably a really bad idea and I do not recommend trying this yourself,” said Monica Royer with a laugh. “But we stumbled into it with this idea, and we’re incredibly passionate about the brands we’ve created. And we have a unique understanding of each other, both as partners, but also as fellow founding CEOs.”

Rob and Monica said that part of the reason the collaboration made sense is because of the faith they have in their teams to execute.

“We both have fantastic teams,” said Rob Royer. “Teams are the ones that do all of the great work. We came to the table with an idea and our teams were the ones who really executed on the vision.”

The children’s furniture, which includes chairs, loveseats, couches and even sectionals, will be sold through the Interior Define website, but Monica + Andy will be selling extra throw pillows through the M+A website.

“We cut our teeth on children’s apparel,” said Monica Royer. “To expand into additional product categories is a unique opportunity for us in general, but it’s made better by working with a brand that aligns from a customer experience, aesthetic, and team perspective.”

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2MR7Ry3

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With traditional CRM tools, sales people add basic details about the companies to the database, then a few notes about their interactions. AI has helped automate some of that, but Gong.io wants to take it even further using voice recognition to capture every word of every interaction. Today, it got a $40M Series B investment.

The round was led by Battery Ventures with existing investors Norwest Venture Partners, Shlomo Kramer, Wing Venture Capital, NextWorld Capital and Cisco Investments also participating. Battery general partner Dharmesh Thakker will join the startup’s Board under the terms of the deal. Today’s investment brings the total raised so far to $68 million, according to the company.

$40 million is a hefty Series B, but investors see a tool that has the potential to have a material impact on sales, or at least give management a deeper understanding of why a deal succeeded or failed using artificial intelligence, specifically natural language processing.

Company co-founder and CEO Amit Bendov says the solution starts by monitoring all customer-facing conversation and giving feedback in a fully automated fashion. “Our solution uses AI to extract important bits out of the conversation to provide insights to customer-facing people about how they can get better at what they do, while providing insights to management about how staff is performing,” he explained. It takes it one step further by offering strategic input like how your competitors are trending or how are customers responding to your products.

Screenshot: Gong.io

Bendov says he started the company because he has had this experience at previous startups where he wants to know more about why he lost a sale, but there was no insight from looking at the data in the CRM database. “CRM could tell you what customers you have, how many sales you’re making, who is achieving quota or not, but never give me the information to rationalize and improve operations,” he said.

The company currently has 350 customers, a number that has more than tripled since the end of 2017 when it had 100. He says it’s not only that it’s adding new customers, existing ones are expanding, and he says that there is almost zero churn.

Today, Gong has 120 employees with headquarters in San Francisco and a 55-person R&D team in Israel. Bendov expects the number of employees to double over the next year with the new influx of money to keep up with the customer growth.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2MV4QNg