Grace Ashiru

GoLemon, the Lagos grocery delivery startup founded by former Paystack staff, has stopped taking new orders and will fully shut its customer support channels on August 2, after it couldn't raise the funding needed to keep going.

Rentoza has filed for voluntary business rescue, unable to raise fresh capital, settle its debts, or complete two years of overdue financial audits. The company confirmed the move on 1 July 2026, publishing supporting documents on its website.

Nigerian financial-services company Zedcrest Group has completed its acquisition of Leatherback, a UK-founded financial-technology business specialising in international payments. The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Coursera has announced a $100 million strategic equity investment in LearnVector, a newly launched AI-native learning company founded and led by Andrew Ng, the AI researcher and educator who co-founded Coursera itself. The deal gives Coursera roughly a one-third ownership stake in LearnVector on a fully diluted basis, and it marks one of the clearest signals yet that major education platforms see AI as a growth engine for the learning market rather than a disruptive threat to it.

For years, when people talked about stablecoins, they were really talking about crypto markets. Regulators in Washington debated whether dollar-backed tokens threatened monetary sovereignty, and traders used them mainly as a safe harbor to sit in between volatile crypto trades. Thousands of miles away, a very different story has been building, and increasingly, Africa rather than the US or Europe is where that story is playing out.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, working with the Smart Africa Secretariat, has opened the third edition of the Innovate Africa Challenge, a continent-wide push to get artificial intelligence solutions for climate-smart agriculture out of the lab and into farmers' hands. This year's theme, “From Ideation to Deployment,” signals a deliberate change in emphasis from previous rounds: rather than rewarding clever concepts, the challenge is built around identifying one proven AI-driven solution and actually deploying it within a Smart Africa member state, in partnership with national governments, FAO country offices, and agricultural stakeholders on the ground.

Mubadala Investment Company led the round, with Woven Capital (Toyota's growth fund) and Ion Pacific co-leading.

Yellow Card, the Africa-born stablecoin infrastructure provider, has raised $40 million in strategic equity funding to expand its push into bank-grade stablecoin payments. The round brings its total equity funding above $120 million, at a valuation reportedly well above the $200 million it carried in 2022, though still short of $1 billion, according to a person familiar with the deal cited by CoinDesk. Neither CEO Chris Maurice nor the company confirmed the figure.

African startups closed 44 disclosed rounds worth $100,000 or more in July 2026, raising a combined $102 million. While the number of funded companies stayed near the 12-month average, the total raised came in 60% below the monthly average of $258 million, making it the weakest month since March 2025.

Moment, a payments infrastructure company serving enterprise merchants across Africa, has closed a $22 million Series A round to scale its collections and billing platform. AlphaCode Venture Partners led the round, joined by returning backers General Catalyst and MultiChoice, plus a first-time check from French media group Canal+.