Technology
Ventures Platform Advocates Increased Funding for Africa Amid Global Slump
By Adedapo Adesanya
Ventures Platform, an early-stage venture capital fund investing in innovative startups across Africa, has called for increased investment in Africa amidst global economic shifts.
This was the crux of the second edition of its Africa Prosperity Summit held on Friday, November 15 2024, in Lagos, Nigeria.
The invitation-only event themed Funding the Next Billion: Africa’s VC Investment Landscape in a Post-ZIRP Era brought together over 150 Pan-African and global investors, venture fund managers, family offices, development finance institutions (DFIs), fund of funds, Limited Partners and key ecosystem players actively investing in Africa.
The event served as a call to action for global and local investors, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and thought leaders to reassess opportunities in emerging markets amidst rising global interest rates and economic shifts. Africa, with its dynamic entrepreneurial spirit and growing youth demographic, presents significant investment potential.
However, realising this potential requires a deep understanding of local contexts and a commitment to fund innovations, which the 2024 Africa Prosperity Summit sought to address.
Speaking at the summit, Mr Kola Aina, Founding Partner, Ventures Platform emphasized that Africa’s massive population boom is happening at the same time global venture capital is on a decline.
He references that since the post-COVID peak of venture capital investments in 2021 -influenced by the Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) era – global venture capital flows have declined by 70 per cent.
“The situation in Africa is no better – Africa has experienced a 67 per cent decline in venture capital funding, despite its requirement of 10x more capital to address infrastructure gaps and non-consumption and be at par with Asia in terms of VC investments.
“Africans are simply unable to consume the goods and services that they need, talk less of want. If we do nothing about this today, by 2050, the 1 billion Africans that will be born – will end up being chronic non-consumers,” he argued.
“At Ventures Platform, we believe that by investing in the right kinds of entrepreneurship and innovation, we can produce two powerful outcomes – high-quality jobs that will drive up incomes across Africa, and scaling up affordability and accessibility to products/services for millions of people across Africa. The combination of these two powerful forces is an effective way of driving up consumption across Africa.”
Also speaking at the event, Mr Efosa Ojomo, the Director of Global Prosperity at the Clayton Christensen Institute highlighted Africa’s potential as the modern investment frontier, drawing parallels to historical transformations in global economies.
He emphasised how venture capital can accelerate market creation on the continent, stating, “Venture capital is designed to de-risk an economy – or at least, a sector. Unlike other financial vehicles like private equity or bonds, VC takes on the highest risk.
“In Africa, where raising funds for critical infrastructure is particularly challenging, venture capital must go beyond funding to actively build entrepreneurial ecosystems in the early stages.”
In the second keynote by Mr Charlie Robertson, Head of Macro-strategy at FIM Partners, provided a comprehensive analysis of global macroeconomics and its impact on investment and industrialization.
Engaging investors, fund of funds, startup founders, and policymakers, he explored the risks, challenges, and opportunities Africa faces in comparison to other regions.
“As Africa charts its path to prosperity, the critical levers of education, electricity, and fertility rates will define its economic trajectory. Countries like Egypt, Ethiopia, and Nigeria are already making strides with central bank policies that have corrected currency misalignments, paving the way for current account improvements and reduced investment costs.
“With fertility rates beginning to decline and the potential for service-led growth through affordable solar power and advanced connectivity, Africa is poised to leapfrog traditional industrialization barriers. This is a pivotal moment for investors to recognize the continent’s unique opportunities and actively shape its future prosperity.”
This year’s edition also witnessed Ventures Platform launching its inaugural ClimateTech White Paper titled “Innovating for a Sustainable Future: Harnessing Venture Capital and Startup Entrepreneurship to Combat Climate Change in Africa”.
The landmark paper which was launched by three key drivers – Urgency, Climate disparity, and Opportunities for VCs and Startups, examines the roles of venture capitalists and startups in climate change mitigation and adaptation. It also provides a comprehensive guide for non-climate VCs and entrepreneurs, including the development of a proprietary framework for a coordinated climate response in the African tech sector.
Technology
Capillary Technologies Acquires SessionM from Mastercard
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.
Technology
Emergent Ventures, Others Invest $2.2m in Potpie
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.”
Technology
Expert Reveals Top Cyber Threats Organisations Will Encounter in 2026
By Adedapo Adesanya
Organisations in 2026 face a cybersecurity landscape markedly different from previous years, driven by rapid artificial intelligence adoption, entrenched remote work models, and increasingly interconnected digital systems, with experts warning that these shifts have expanded attack surfaces faster than many security teams can effectively monitor.
According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026, AI-related vulnerabilities now rank among the most urgent concerns, with 87 per cent of cybersecurity professionals worldwide highlighting them as a top risk.
In a note shared with Business Post, Mr Danny Mitchell, Cybersecurity Writer at Heimdal, said artificial intelligence presents a “category shift” in cyber risk.
“Attackers are manipulating the logic systems that increasingly run critical business processes,” he explained, noting that AI models controlling loan decisions or infrastructure have become high-value targets. Machine learning systems can be poisoned with corrupted training data or manipulated through adversarial inputs, often without immediate detection.
Mr Mitchell also warned that AI-powered phishing and fraud are growing more sophisticated. Deepfake technology and advanced language models now produce convincing emails, voice calls and videos that evade traditional detection.
“The sophistication of modern phishing means organisations can no longer rely solely on employee awareness training,” he said, urging multi-channel verification for sensitive transactions.
Supply chain vulnerabilities remain another major threat. Modern software ecosystems rely on numerous vendors and open-source components, each representing a potential entry point.
“Most organisations lack complete visibility into their software supply chain,” Mr Mitchell said, adding that attackers frequently exploit trusted vendors or update mechanisms to bypass perimeter defences.
Meanwhile, unpatched software vulnerabilities continue to expose organisations to risk, as attackers use automated tools to scan for weaknesses within hours of public disclosure. Legacy systems and critical infrastructure are especially difficult to secure.
Ransomware operations have also evolved, with criminals spending weeks inside networks before launching attacks.
“Modern ransomware operations function like businesses,” Mitchell observed, employing double extortion tactics to maximise pressure on victims.
Mr Mitchell concluded that the common thread across 2026 threats is complexity, noting that organisations need to abandon the idea that they can defend against everything equally, as this approach spreads resources too thin and leaves critical assets exposed.
“You cannot protect what you don’t know exists,” he said, urging organisations to prioritise visibility, map dependencies, and focus resources on the most critical assets.
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