Africa’s Talking, the Kenyan based enterprise software company, has recently raised $8.6 million Series A . This new financing was led by IFC Venture Capital, and other companies like Orange Digital Ventures and Social Capital.
According to the CEO, Samuel Gikandi, The money raised by the software solutions comapany will be used to hire and build capacity at the company’s Nairobi headquarters. They would also expand their reach in other geographies around Africa, while also investing in research and development in different fields like IoT, analytics, payments, and cloud offerings.
He also went further to reveal that the company will open a tech studio for “engineers and developers to collocate with Africa’s Talking for 12-18 months…to build new products and companies”.
“We’re helping software developers in Africa connect to local infrastructure,” said Gikandi. “We find companies that have local infrastructure, whether its mobile operators, banks, or data-centers, then we partner with them and build a platform that simplifies access to that local infrastructure and open it up to software developers”.
With a network of 20,000 software developers and 1000 clients, Africa’s Talking operates in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Malawi, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Tanzania and maintains a private cloud space in London through Rackspace. Basically, what they do is working with developers to create solution focused APIs across SMS, voice, payment, and airtime services.
