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MTN, Vodafone Submit Bid for Ethiopian License

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Vodafone

By Adedapo Adesanya

Africa’s telecommunications giant, the MTN Group and a syndicate led by Vodafone Group Plc have bid for operational licenses in Ethiopia, the fastest-growing economy in Africa.

The two services reportedly submitted bids to the government’s authorisation on Monday, which officials will review before opening the financial bids.

According to Mr Brook Taye, an adviser to Ethiopia’s finance ministry, “We always wanted quality providers and this is what we have received.”

“These are two African giants — the Safaricom-led consortium and MTN — either one or two of the operators will get a license in Ethiopia,” he added.

Safaricom Plc, Kenya’s biggest telecommunications company, bid on one license jointly with Vodafone while Nigeria’s biggest telecommunications company, MTN submitted the second one.

Ethiopia had announced plans to give out two full-service telecommunications licenses in a bid to bring in more foreign investment but some companies withdrew their bids, as the licenses do not allow access to Ethiopia’s mobile-based financial services market.

Ethiopia, Africa’s most populated nation after Nigeria, is poised to expand 8.7 per cent next year, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), making it the fastest-growing economy on the continent and is set to become a hotspot for investments.

Speaking on this, Mr Shameel Joosub, CEO of Vodacom Group, said: “We are submitting a strong tender as the Global Partnership for Ethiopia consortium led by Safaricom. It is never an easy job to open up a country’s telecom market, yet the Ethiopian government has managed to move forward with a large number of the regulations required for the benefit of 110 million Ethiopians.

“The country’s authorities have also repeatedly committed to create and maintain a level playing field for all, giving us confidence that the next round of regulations will be tackled as soon as possible.

“Our Global Partnership for Ethiopia has a unique mix of experience and know-how to help transform Ethiopia into a modern digital economy and to positively impact the lives of Ethiopians.”

On its part, MTN confirmed “that it is participating with equity partners in a bid for a telecoms licence in Ethiopia, Africa’s second-most-populous country which represents the last and largest telco liberalisation opportunity in the world.”

The group added: “Our participation is aligned with our strategy, Ambition 2025, focusing on capturing growth from digital acceleration across the continent. It has been made in partnership with Silk Road Fund from China. Other partners will be disclosed on a successful bid outcome.”

Mr Ralph Mupita, president and CEO of MTN Group, said: “Ethiopia provides the largest telecommunication and digital services growth opportunity in Africa over the medium term and fits into our pan-Africa focus and platform strategy. We are being guided by our capital allocation framework in our assessment of this opportunity.”

Earlier this month, Business Post had reported that MTN announced plans to value its mobile money service at $5 billion.

Adedapo Adesanya is a journalist, polymath, and connoisseur of everything art. When he is not writing, he has his nose buried in one of the many books or articles he has bookmarked or simply listening to good music with a bottle of beer or wine. He supports the greatest club in the world, Manchester United F.C.

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Truecaller, AnyMind Group to Expand Direct Sales Footprint

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New Truecaller Logo

By Modupe Gbadeyanka

The leading global communications platform, Truecaller, now has a strategic direct sales reseller partnership with AnyMind Group, a Business-Process-as-a-Service company for marketing, e-commerce and digital transformation.

Under this partnership, AnyMind Group will serve as the exclusive intermediary for Truecaller’s advertising inventory across Egypt, UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Ghana, Nigeria, Morocco, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam.

The scope of the partnership is focused specifically on enabling brands and agencies to leverage Truecaller’s premium ad formats to reach highly engaged, high-intent users through relevant, data-driven advertising solutions.

Through this collaboration, Truecaller will accelerate its direct advertising business across the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) and Southeast Asia (SEA) regions.

With a strong on-ground presence and established relationships with leading advertisers and agencies across MENA and SEA markets, AnyMind Group brings deep regional expertise that will support the scaling of Truecaller’s advertising footprint locally.

The partnership is designed to empower brands with impactful placements on Truecaller’s trusted communications platform, helping drive meaningful engagement with users in these fast-growing digital economies.

“As Truecaller continues to expand its global advertising business, partnerships with strong regional players like AnyMind Group are critical to delivering localised expertise and measurable outcomes for advertisers.

“MENA and Southeast Asia represent high-growth markets with evolving digital maturity, and through this collaboration, we aim to bring brands closer to consumers via trusted and contextual communication experiences on our platform,” the Vice President and Global Head for Truecaller Ads Business, Hemant Arora, said.

Also, the Managing Director for Growth Markets at AnyMind Group, Aditya Aima, said, “We are excited to partner with Truecaller to open its inventory to brands across MENA and Southeast Asia. With Truecaller’s scale and trusted user ecosystem, combined with our market depth and networks, we see strong potential to drive more relevant, high-impact advertising outcomes for advertisers looking to deepen engagement in these dynamic markets.”

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Capillary Technologies Acquires SessionM from Mastercard

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Capillary Technologies SessionM

By Modupe Gbadeyanka

A software product company established in 2012, Capillary Technologies India Limited, has acquired the customer engagement and loyalty company, SessionM, from Mastercard.

This followed a definitive agreement signed by the global leader in AI-powered customer loyalty and engagement solutions with the renowned digital payments firm.

The acquisition of SessionM is the latest in a series of strategic moves by Capillary, following its successful listing on the Indian Stock Exchange in November 2025.

With SessionM in its portfolio, Capillary reinforces its position as a global leader in enterprise loyalty, offering a leading platform to the world’s most sophisticated enterprise brands.

Mastercard has identified Capillary Technologies—consistently recognised as a Leader in The Forrester Wave as the ideal partner to lead SessionM into its next era of growth.

As part of the agreement, a specialised team within SessionM will transition to Capillary, ensuring that the platform’s deep technical expertise is preserved.

SessionM’s esteemed global customer base—which includes Fortune 500 retailers, airlines, and CPG brands—will continue to receive the same high-calibre support and service they experienced before the acquisition.

“M&A has been a key growth strategy for Capillary over the years, and as a public company, we are delivering on that promise to our shareholders and the market.

“By bringing SessionM into our portfolio, we are not just expanding our footprint across the globe; we are further strengthening our loyalty capabilities to deliver one of the industry’s most comprehensive offerings.

“Our mission remains to provide enterprises across industries with specialised, AI-native loyalty technology solutions,” the chief executive of Capillary Technologies, Aneesh Reddy, commented.

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Emergent Ventures, Others Invest $2.2m in Potpie

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potpie engineering software $2.2m capital

By Dipo Olowookere

About $2.2 million pre-seed round to help engineering teams unify context across their entire stack and make AI agents genuinely useful in complex software environments has been announced by Potpie.

Potpie was established by Aditi Kothari and Dhiren Mathur, who were determined to unify context across the entire engineering stack and enabling spec driven development.

As generative AI adoption accelerates, most tools focus on surface-level code generation while ignoring the deeper problem of context.

Large language models are powerful, but without access to system-level understanding, tooling history, and architectural intent, they struggle in real production environments.

Traditional approaches rely on senior engineers to manually hold this context together, a model that breaks down at scale and fails when AI agents are introduced.

The platform enables teams to automate high-impact and non-trivial use cases across the software development lifecycle, like debugging cross-service failures, maintaining and writing end-to-end tests, blast radius detection and system design.

It is designed for enterprise companies with large and complex codebases, starting at around one million lines of code and scaling to hundreds of millions.

Rather than acting as another coding assistant, Potpie builds a graphical representation of software systems, infers behaviour and patterns across modules, and creates structured artefacts that allow agents to operate consistently and safely.

A statement made available to Business Post on Monday revealed that the funding support came from Emergent Ventures, All In Capital, DeVC and Point One Capital.

The capital will be used to support early enterprise deployments, expand the engineering team, and continue building Potpie’s core context and agent infrastructure, it was disclosed.

“As AI makes code generation easier, the real challenge shifts to reasoning across massive, interconnected systems. Potpie is our answer to that shift, an ontology-first layer that helps enterprises truly understand and manage their software,” Kothari was quoted as saying in the disclosure.

A Managing Partner at Emergent Ventures, Anupam Rastogi, said, “In large enterprises, the real challenge is not generating code, it is understanding the system deeply enough to change it safely.

“Potpie’s ontology-first architecture, combined with rigorous context curation and spec-driven development, creates a structured model of the entire engineering ecosystem. This allows AI agents to reason across services, dependencies, tickets, and production signals with the clarity of a senior engineer. That is what makes Potpie uniquely capable of solving complex RCA, impact analysis, and high-risk feature work even in codebases exceeding 50 million lines.”

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