East Africa’s private equity market has experienced significant growth in recent years.
Per the East Africa Venture Capital Association, a total of 478 deals worth $8.6 billion closed over the past decade. The region also recorded a jump in exit activity in FY 2022, marking the highest numbers in a decade.
The financial services sector recorded 14 exits, while the healthcare and energy sectors had nine and seven exits, respectively.
Kenya led with 36 exits, followed by Uganda with eight, and Rwanda with three. Tanzania and Ethiopia reported two and one exit, respectively.

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Amazon has agreed to invest up to $4 billion in the AI startup Anthropic as the e-commerce group steps up rivalry against Microsoft, Meta, Google and Nvidia in the fast-growing sector that many technologists believe could be the next great frontier.
The e-commerce group says it will initially invest $1.25 billion for a minority stake in Anthropic also operates an AI-powered, text-analyzing chatbot.
Amazon says it has an option to increase its investment in Anthropic to a total of $4 billion.

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have required a human safety operator to be present any time a self-driving truck operated on public roads in the state.
The win for the autonomous trucking industry comes after the California Senate passed the bill in mid-September.
The bill would have effectively banned driverless autonomous heavy-duty trucks from operating in the way they were designed.
Companies have to go through many rounds of permits in order to test and deploy in the state, per the rules set out by the California Department of Motor Vehicles.

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South Africa’s electricity utility Eskom has stated that loadshedding is projected to be worse than it has ever been over the next 52-week period.
Eskom’s Week 36 system status report that the South African power utility projects that over the next 52-week period, rolling blackouts, known as load-shedding, will be much worse than it has ever been.
The report states that electricity generation capabilities will fail to meet the demand for all 52 weeks, the first time in the 15 years of load-shedding that this will happen.
The projection comes at a time when South Africa’s high-ranking officials have been promising less load-shedding in the coming months.

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U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema declined to order a Justice Department official to stay out of the government's advertising antitrust lawsuit against Google but said the department should think about it.
Google asked the Justice Department to consider requiring Jonathan Kanter, assistant attorney general in charge of antitrust, to recuse himself because of his work for a long list of Google critics.
The government has argued that Google should be forced to sell its ad manager suite. Google has denied any wrongdoing. The Justice Department filed the advertising lawsuit in January in Arlington, Virginia, along with eight states, and nine other states joined in April.

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Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd has told Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan it plans to invest $2 billion in Turkey.
Michael Evans, president of Alibaba, made the comments in a meeting with Erdogan, according to a statement from the company's Turkish unit. It did not specify when the investment would be made.
Evans says Alibaba has invested $1.4 billion in Turkey through its unit Trendyol, one of Turkey's best-known e-commerce platforms.
Evans shared details about new investments such as a data centre and a logistics centre in Ankara and an export operation centre at Istanbul Airport.

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TikTok has been fined 345 million euros for breaching privacy laws regarding the processing of children's personal data in the European Union.
Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner says the Chinese-owned short-video platform breached a number of EU privacy laws between July 31, 2020, and Dec. 31, 2020.
The DPC says TikTok's breaches included how in 2020 accounts for users under the age of 16 were set to "public" by default and that TikTok did not verify whether a user was actually a child user's parent or guardian when linked through the "family pairing" feature.
TikTok says it plans to further update its privacy materials to make the differences between public and private accounts clearer and that a private account will be pre-selected for new 16-17-year-old users when they register for the app from later this month.
The DPC gave TikTok three months to bring all its processing into compliance where infringements were found.

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Kenyan mobile money provider Safaricom is working on a partnership with Apple Inc. to integrate MPESA.
M-Pesa executed a similar move by integrating with the American payment platform PayPal, enabling customers to deposit funds from M-PESA into the American payment system.
Users had the option to transfer funds from PayPal into their M-PESA accounts.

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Ethiopia has partnered with Madras Security Printers Private Limited to produce new digital IDs, known as Fayda, for its 120 million people.
The government initiated Fayda ID enrollment last year, and since then, over 1.4 million Ethiopians have registered. Fayda IDs will incorporate biometric information, ensuring secure access to various public services and streamlined identity verification when opening new bank accounts.
Notably, the National Bank of Ethiopia, the nation’s central bank, will use Fayda as the primary ID for banking operations.
This ID system will rely on unique personal identifiers using iris and facial biometrics along with fingerprint identification.

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Flutterwave has launched Swap, a new product that will digitise the process of getting foreign exchange for Nigerians with the backing of the CBN.
The fintech is leveraging a partnership with Wema Bank, a commercial bank, and Kadavra BDC, a bureau de change, to provide liquidity and foreign exchange for the product.
Mr Folashodun Shonubi, the acting governor of the CBN, says that Swap could solve two major problems facing Nigeria’s foreign exchange market: the lack of collaboration between institutions and the dependence on cash.
Flutterwave will leverage its International Money Transfer Operator license from the CBN to bring in the foreign currency, Kadavra will use its BDC license to sell it, and Wema Bank will support the entire process.

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