Kenn Abuya

Cloud9, a Kenyan startup that offers digital banking services for businesses, has acquired social commerce platform Chpter in an all-stock deal, marking its second acquisition in three months after

Rwanda, with about 13 million people, hosts more than four times as many Spiro motorcycles as Nigeria, whose population exceeds 200 million.

Ultimately, the phenomenon of a founder acquiring their own prior startup is neither a scam nor a stroke of pure genius but a mechanical feature of modern corporate finance. When a market demands consolidation, and venture capitalists demand an eventual path to liquidity, overlapping cap tables and recycled founding teams become the path of least resistance. It requires careful legal structuring and board-level approvals to ensure fairness, but if the resulting entity solves distribution problems and scales faster, the market tends to forgive the tangled corporate history.

Kenya's Capital Markets Authority (CMA) has approved a new investment fund from Wall Street Africa (WSA), a Nairobi-based financial media and fintech startup, that will allow investors to buy into a group of listed banks in a single investment.

This sounds like a disaster for media, and in part it is. But there is another way to look at it. The Internet may finally be forcing publishers to answer a question they have been able to avoid for years: what, exactly, are people paying you for? This question gets more interesting when you look at what some media companies are doing about it.

Africa is building regional payment systems that could make cross-border money transfers faster and cheaper, but its fragmented currencies remain a problem that payment rails alone cannot solve.

Until the broader ecosystem returns to a baseline of financial discipline, where the fear of missing payroll outweighs the desire to optimise the next funding round, the missing angst will keep manifesting exactly as it has in the growing, highly capitalised obituaries of Kenyan startups. The hunger is not entirely gone from Kenya, but it will only return when the market stops paying founders to ignore it.

Kenya's telecom operators will have to change how they deactivate and recycle inactive phone numbers from September 19, when new rules from the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) take effect.

, Sun King, the off-grid solar startup, is now making smartphones in Kenya as it expands its PayGo model into Kenya's growing financed-device market.

Ride-hailing giant Uber has restored Visa card payments for riders in Kenya, eight months after removing the option over rising payment costs.