Apple has quietly acquired a Mountain View-based startup, WaveOne, that was developing AI algorithms for compressing video.
WaveOne’s former head of sales and business development, Bob Stankosh, announced the sale in a LinkedIn post published a month ago.
WaveOne was founded in 2016 by Lubomir Bourdev and Oren Rippel, who set out to take the decades-old paradigm of video codecs and make them AI-powered.
Before joining the venture, Bourdev was a founding member of Meta’s AI research division, and both he and Rippel worked on Meta’s computer vision team responsible for content moderation, visual search and feed ranking on Facebook.


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South African fintech Stitch has announced the addition of card and debit order pay-ins, as well as a payments management system PayOS, for payments orchestration and reconciliation.
Stitch becomes an end-to-end Payments Service Provider (or PSP, defined as a third party that enables businesses to accept, manage and send digital payments through a variety of methods).
Stitch president Junaid Dadan says they operate as a client-first business and have found that clients see us as a thought partner in the way they run their payments environments.

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Twitter is actively seeking the person responsible for the recent leak of parts of its source code, which was posted on Microsoft-owned GitHub.
The New York Times, says the code had been available online for months before Twitter took action to have it removed on Friday.
Executives investigating the matter say the leak may have been done by an employee who left the San-Fransico-based company last year.
GitHub, which took down the code on that same day, has also been subpoenaed by Twitter to identify the individual who leaked the code, as well as any other parties who may have downloaded it.

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Rwazi, a market intelligence startup that helps the world to understand consumers in emerging markets, has raised $4 million in a seed round led by Bonfire Ventures.
With this fresh capital, Rwazi will double down on its penetration into emerging markets like Africa and South Asia.
Rwazi crowdsources data collection through an app, working with on-the-ground consumers who are paid for sharing details about the products they buy.
Joseph Rutakangwa, co-founded Rwazi says they have already built a network of 50,000 local consumers across Africa who provide our paying subscribers, including Fortune 500 global brands, with unparalleled insight into who’s buying what, for how much, from where, when, and why.

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India will not tolerate the use of abusive language in movies and TV shows on on-demand video streaming services handed over direct ministerial power for censorship.
Anurag Thakur, Union Minister of Information Broadcasting and Sports and Youth Affairs, says that the use of abusive language in the name of creativity will not be tolerated and that the government is receiving a growing list of complaints about increasing abusive and obscene content.
Thakur warned that New Delhi will not shy away from making any changes in the rules to address this situation.

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Google announced that it had flagged several apps made by a Chinese e-commerce giant as malware, alerting users who had them installed, and suspended the company’s official app.
Multiple Chinese security researchers accused Pinduoduo, a rising e-commerce giant that boasts almost 800 million active users, of making apps for Android that contain malware designed to monitor users.
Ed Fernandez, a Google spokesperson, says that off-Play versions of this app that have been found to contain malware have been enforced via Google Play Protect, referring to apps that are not on Google Play.

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The precision-punching European privacy rights campaign group has used data donated by users of the ‘Who Targets me‘ browser extension, which analyzes political microtargeting on Facebook, to build a case against every political party in Germany.
The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation classes information on political opinions as so-called ‘special category data’ which has a higher bar for processing (either explicit consent; or it was expressively made public by the data subject themselves; or some vital/public health or other not-for-profit interest applies, none of which looks likely here, given this is Facebook political ads we’re talking about).
Noyb says neither Facebook nor the political parties who paid the tech giant to run microtargeted ads, obtained express consent from the users whose information was processed.

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Bloomberg reports that Chipper Cash, one of Africa’s more prominent fintech companies and unicorns, is reportedly considering selling the company or seeking new investors.
Bloomberg says the conversations are private, but Chipper Cash told the publication that it never sought to be acquired.
Chipper Cash, says It’s been fairly common practice for them to receive various M&A proposals from different parties, which they evaluate to varying degrees.

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Flutterwave has obtained its Electronic Money Issuer and Remittance Licences from the National Bank of Rwanda.
With these licences, Flutterwave can now offer money deposit and withdrawal, electronic funds transfer, as well as inbound and outbound remittance services to the lovely people of Rwanda.
Flutterwave will be offering a range of products to Rwanda’s e-commerce industry, including its cross-border money transfer solution, Send by Flutterwave. Flutterwave for Business and its suite of products, including Store, payment links, invoices, and checkout, will also be opened to Rwanda’s booming eCommerce market.

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The Nigerian government has launched a $672 million fund for tech for young people in its tech and creative sectors six months after passing the Nigerian Startup Act,
Vice president Yemi Osinbajo says the African Development Bank (AfDB) will lead the fund with $170 million, while $116 million will come from Agence Francaise de Developpement.
AfDB, says the fund will “marks the rollout of a flagship initiative that will drive vital funding for Nigeria’s digital and creative industries.
AfDB noted that the fund will see investments across 200 tech and creative startups, and 450 tech-powered SMEs. Over 175,000 young Nigerians will also receive direct access to capacity-building services.

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