Techparley

Nigerian startup SecVite is seeking to transform how people organise and manage events by bringing invitations, guest management, ticketing, payments and attendance tracking into a single digital platform. Launched in last October by software engineer Hameed Yusuf, the mobile-first platform was born from the founder’s personal experience of planning his wedding and struggling to coordinate hundreds of guests using different tools.

UAE-based financial AI platform Oro has raised $3 million in a strategic funding round as it seeks to simplify access to decentralised finance through artificial intelligence and expand its reach globally. The round was co-led by MH Ventures and Mapleblock Capital, with participation from M2M Capital, Archer Capital and X21 Digital, alongside follow-on backing from Disrupt.com and ZIGLabs.

Raff, a Saudi Arabia-based retail technology startup, has raised $1.7 million in a pre-seed funding round as it seeks to transform how consumer brands enter and operate within physical retail markets across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The round was led by Vision Ventures, with participation from 500 Global, Palm VC, Oqal Group, Salla co-founder Salman Butt and other investors.

UAE-based artificial intelligence and geospatial intelligence startup, Stellaria, has raised $6.8 million (AED25 million) in a seed funding round as it seeks to expand its satellite-powered intelligence technology across the UAE and international markets. The funding, secured from a group of angel investors, values the company at $114.4 million (AED420 million) and provides fresh capital for technological development, talent acquisition and wider deployment of its solutions.

TechAble, a Nigeria-based digital skills and youth empowerment initiative, is seeking to bridge the digital divide confronting young people with disabilities by expanding access to technology, STEM education and future-ready skills. Established in 2024 as an initiative of the Deafzion Foundation, the programme responds to what its organisers describe as a significant gap in disability-inclusive technology education.

Kenyan fintech startup, Flowt, has secured an undisclosed pre-seed funding round to expand its AI-powered financial intelligence platform, which is designed to help climate-smart businesses across Africa gain easier access to working capital.

Nigerian voice technology startup, Intron, has unveiled Sahara v2.5, a major upgrade designed to make artificial intelligence better understand how Africans naturally communicate, particularly when speakers switch between languages during the same conversation. What is Intron?What is Sahara?Talking Points The new platform introduces bilingual language-mixing speech recognition across 12 African languages and adds trilingual speech recognition for Kinyarwanda, English and French.

South African artificial intelligence startup, Verascient, has raised ZAR19.5 million (US$1.2 million) in pre-seed funding to help businesses build faster, more capable teams through AI. The Cape Town-based company, founded by Keagan Stokoe and Emile Ferreira, is developing infrastructure designed to help organisations move beyond giving employees access to AI tools and toward embedding AI into operations.

Nigerian retail technology startup, SalesUnbox, is expanding its ambition beyond online shopping by building an integrated software ecosystem designed to help medium-scale businesses manage their operations, sales, finances, inventory and customer relationships from one platform. Founded in 2024 by Mayowa Oladunjoye, Peace Oladunjoye and Ayodeji Adelowo, the startup says more than 5,000 businesses are now using its products, despite having been entirely self-funded since inception.

The decision by the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) to invite social media activist, Martins Vincent Otse, popularly known as VeryDarkMan (VDM), to speak on insecurity at its 66th Annual General Conference in Port Harcourt has triggered critical conversation about expertise, institutional communication and the influence of new media.