TechCentral

Payments company Stripe and private equity firm Advent International have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal Holdings for US$60.50/share, in a deal that would value the payments company at more than $53-billion, two people said. The offer, submitted earlier this month, is backed by about $50-billion in committed financing from banks, said one of the people. The offer represents around a 28% premium to PayPal’s closing share price on Tuesday.

In August 1602, more than 1 100 investors – from wealthy merchants to ordinary craftsmen – subscribed to the world’s first initial public offering. The Dutch East India Company, the VOC, raised Gld6.4-million to build a maritime trade network stretching from Amsterdam to the East Indies. On 12 June 2026, SpaceX raised US$75-billion in the largest IPO in Wall Street history, pricing at $135/share and closing its first session more than 19% higher.

The world is getting a live demonstration of what happens when a fifth of its oil is forced through a single, contested waterway. Since late February, Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has slashed tanker traffic and rattled global energy markets, with Brent crude trading at around US$82/barrel this week. The internet, it turns out, shares this design flaw.

I sat at a garage on Spondo Street, in Zwide, Gqeberha, for 40 minutes without buying a single litre of fuel, and left having watched more real economic activity than most business parks generate in a week. It was a Friday afternoon, nothing staged for a photographer. Just the corner going about its business at full volume.

The Cue team Cue, a Cape Town-founded customer service software company, has raised US$5-million (R82-million) in a funding round co-led by South African venture capital firm Knife Capital and FAM Investments, to accelerate development of its AI agent platform and expand internationally. It is the largest raise to date for the company, which was founded in 2015 and built its early business helping companies manage customer conversations over WhatsApp and other messaging channels.

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket lifts off carrying Amazon Leo internet network satellites from the Cape Canaveral in the US in April 2025. Steve Nesius/Reuters By any sensible measure, this was a race Starlink could not lose. Elon Musk’s satellite broadband service has more than 10 000 satellites in orbit and millions of customers across dozens of countries. It is live almost everywhere in Southern Africa – Mozambique, Malawi, Madagascar, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Eswatini and Lesotho.

Amazon’s Leo satellite broadband service is coming to South Africa – and it has found a way in that sidesteps the licensing impasse that has kept rival Starlink out of the country. Herotel, the Maziv-owned internet service provider and fibre/wireless network operator, has signed a distribution agreement with Amazon Leo, the e-commerce giant’s low-Earth orbit satellite constellation, and will launch a new service called Evry to bring satellite broadband to homes and small businesses nationwide.

Standard Bank has provided African telecommunications tower operator Helios Towers with a US$29-million (R475-million) documentary credit facility – the first the bank has structured in a sustainable finance format. The facility will fund the procurement and importation of telecoms infrastructure and related services across Africa, while providing payment certainty to Helios Towers’ suppliers and supporting the company’s working capital needs and infrastructure expansion programme.

Eighteen months ago, one of South Africa’s largest retailers wasn’t worried about AI. Onboarding worked. Compliance checks passed audits. Fraud was a known, managed cost of doing business. Then a syndicate found them. The attack looked ordinary. Customers submitted genuine South African ID documents. Except they weren’t genuine anymore. Using AI, fraudsters had altered key information directly onto photographs of legitimate IDs, creating documents that appeared authentic to both people and systems.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna IBM said it had “faltered” in keeping pace with a shift in corporate spending from software to data centre infrastructure and would take a big earnings hit in the second quarter, in the clearest sign yet of AI’s growing toll on the sector. IBM’s shares tanked 25% on Tuesday, an even steeper single-day decline than it suffered during the 1987 “Black Monday” crash. Other software stocks also fell.