There’s a band called The Velvet Sundown. They racked up hundreds of thousands of listeners on Spotify last year. Nobody could find a single member who actually existed. No interviews. No faces. No proof of life. Just a catalogue and a growing audience that had no idea they were streaming a ghost. That’s the story…
Gigbanc, a Nigerian fintech that built cross-border payment services for freelancers, creators, remote workers and businesses, is shutting down after three years as it struggled to secure fresh funding, and the startup is now in acquisition talks with an undisclosed Nigerian fintech infrastructure provider. Customers have until July 31 to convert their balances into naira…
Refiant, a South African AI startup, just launched Protea, a family of language models that can hold up to 10 million tokens in a single prompt. That’s roughly 7.5 million words, or about 15,000 pages, sitting in the model’s working memory at once. No waitlist, no approval process. You go to refiant.ai and use it…
Three countries, three completely different bets on how to win the AI race in Africa. Ghana said, “Come build here, Google.” Kenya said, “We’ll regulate first, build second.” Then came Rwanda, “we’ll build our own agency and skip the middleman.” Only one of these approaches will survive the next decade, with the country still in…
The Automotive industry in Africa is evolving. Quick fact to sit with for a second: in 2025, Morocco built more passenger cars than South Africa did, 493,004 units against South Africa’s roughly 330,000 in a country most people still associate with tagines and the Sahara, not assembly lines. Between them, Morocco and South Africa now…
There’s a question that should keep African policymakers up at night: how does a continent sitting on more than half the world’s cobalt and nearly all its coltan not have a single company that can build can a competitive smartphone from scratch? I’m not talking about assembly. I’m talking about actually building chips, boards, the…
New data from a Wall Street Journal report says EV batteries are ageing way better than the industry predicted degradation rates that used to justify panic are now closer to a rounding error. For African buyers who’ve been burned by every “miracle import” before, that’s either genuinely good news or another spec sheet promise waiting…
Every night across the Niger Delta, the sky glows orange not from city lights, but from gas being set on fire at oil fields because nobody bothered to build a pipe to catch it. The World Bank’s 2026 Global Gas Flaring Tracker just confirmed what people living under those flames already know: in 2025, the…
The global crude oil market is going through one of its most dramatic rollercoaster rides in recorded history. Prices spiked to near $150 a barrel when the Strait of Hormuz effectively shut down after the US-Iran conflict in February 2026, then came crashing back toward $82 by mid-June as ceasefire talks gathered pace. For Africa’s…
Let me tell you something about corporate speak. After years of reading IT vendor proposals, infrastructure RFPs, and energy company procurement documents, I’ve developed a very specific skill: translating beautiful, vague language into actual intentions.So when PlayStation CEO Hideaki Nishino sat down with Japanese publication Famitsu and said Sony plans to leverage technologies that can…
