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How African startups raised investments in 2020

TechCrunch

But with the pandemic bringing in utter confusion and panic, companies downsized as investors re-strategized, and due diligence slowed during the first few months of the year. This can be attributed to an increase in seed rounds (up 88% from 2019) and bridge rounds due to shortage of cash amidst a pandemic-induced lockdown.

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TechCrunch+ roundup: eVTOL takes off, pivoting with agility, when to hire a lawyer

TechCrunch

“I’ve been working in the aircraft development space for decades, but 2021 was different,” Tigner writes. In reality, changing course is usually the smartest bet, because it allows founding teams to leverage new technology and adapt to changing market conditions. Mainstream attention is increasing.

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How to pitch me: 5 investors discuss what they’re looking for in April 2023

TechCrunch

But dealmaking is idiosyncratic: a few investors might be content to make a deal over coffee, but early-stage teams still need a sturdy pitch deck or memo they can leave behind. And if you’ve added “AI” to your pitch deck only to make it more appealing, here’s some more bad news: FOMO is passé, and due diligence is the new black.

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Productfy raises $16M to build the ‘Shopify of embedded finance’

TechCrunch

The company claims that with its platform, developers can “configure in hours, integrate in days, and go from idea to full stack deployment in as little as three weeks.” . But Productfy, unlike many other BaaS companies, is not just focused on developers. Today, they still have to have an engineering team to do that.

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Why Tomago Aluminium reversed course on its cloud journey

CIO

We put dollars in and got services out, but couldn’t say to the board, with confidence, that we were really in control of things like compliance, security, and due diligence.” With the cloud, if we wanted to do additional work or give development teams a sandpit to play in, we had to pay for the additional load.

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How Antler East Africa is building early-stage startups with experienced professionals

TechCrunch

” It helps founders build complementary co-founding teams, provides support with deep business model validation and a global platform for scaling their businesses. After six months of incubation, the firm invests in the teams they can help further. To date, Antler has invested in and helped build over 250 companies.

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LinkSquares benefits from the legal tech boom with a fresh $100M

TechCrunch

Demonstrating that there’s a robust market for contract management solutions, LinkSquares , a company developing intelligent software that helps brands maintain and ink new contracts, today announced that it raised $100 million in Series C financing led by G Squared. Modern legal teams need to cement their seat at the executive-level.