Jumia eyes new markets

Happy mid-week. ☀️

Yesterday, Microsoft and NVIDIA said they plan to invest $15 billion in Anthropic, the AI startup that owns Claude. Now, don't get me wrong; this is exciting news for the bookies and the AI nerds who have been secretly wishing for a super-marriage between all the heavy-hitters in AI. 

But the cynical side of me is this close 🤏 to calling it all some complex engineering (not the cute, nerdy finance type from my POV). Everybody is just exchanging a few billion dollars at this point, sorry.

Add the Microsoft + NVIDIA + Anthropic and the Cohere deals, and you're officially confused.

Anyway, let's get into today's business.

Jumia, the African e-commerce giant, is preparing for a new phase of expansion. Only a year after exiting South Africa and Tunisia to cut losses, the company is now eyeing Tanzania and Angola as possible comeback markets. It’s a surprisingly quick pivot for a startup that spent the year consolidating operations, cutting costs, and tightening its logistics engine in pursuit of profitability by 2027. The company exited Tanzania in 2019 as part of ongoing portfolio optimisation efforts.

Why the change of heart? In 2025, Jumia survived a turbulent period that saw its largest institutional investor, Baillie Gifford, divest its stake and exit. However, Axian Telecom, a telecommunications company, was not too far behind, acquiring nearly 10% of the e-commerce company’s stock to become its largest shareholder. This vote of confidence may be giving Jumia the latitude to enter new markets like Tanzania and Angola, even though it had previously exited one of those markets.

Why Tanzania and Angola? Tanzania's e-commerce market revenue is projected to hit $1.69 billion by 2030, while that of Angola is expected to pass $710 million by the same year. Both markets give Jumia scale, but only if FX, seller pipelines, and sufficient capital hit internal thresholds.

Meanwhile in Kenya: The startup has repositioned its operations toward rural buyers, who now drive the majority of its volume. The model relies on a national web of small business owners managing more than 80% of its pick-up stations. It cuts capital costs, speeds delivery in remote towns, and leans heavily on community-based logistics, allowing Jumia to expand reach without heavy capital spending.

Lesaka Technologies, a financial service company, has received South Africa's Competition Commission approval to acquire digital bank Bank Zero, the zero-fee digital bank, for about $64 million, clearing a major regulatory hurdle. The deal was first announced in June 2025. Once the deal is complete, Bank Zero shareholders will own roughly 12% of Lesaka’s fully diluted shares and up to $5 million in cash. 

What does this mean? The acquisition gives Lesaka access to Bank Zero’s banking licence, modern digital infrastructure, and an opportunity to tap into new revenue streams. Lesaka moves from being just a fintech to a fully integrated financial services group. With Bank Zero’s digital infrastructure plus Lesaka’s merchant and consumer reach, the combined business entity could scale more efficiently.

The competition shake-up: Now that Lesaka has a fully licenced bank under its wing, other digital challengers, including TymeBank and Happy Pay, as well as regional entrants looking to scale, may have to rethink their pricing, features, and customer experience to stay relevant or risk losing ground to the duo soon-to-be merged entity.

When the year finally ends, I think we should gather African tech companies in a room and ask how many of them survived without suffering a single cybersecurity attack.

It's becoming that bad. But before you pull a strand out of your hair, please relax; no one got attacked this time. Yet, South Africa’s Information Regulator said there were 2,374 security breaches in the 2024/25 financial year; that’s about 198 breach notifications popping up in situation rooms every month.

And somehow, it got even worse this year. About 1,947 of those breaches happened from April 2025 to date. It’s like more talented attackers have been inspired to put on a V for Vendetta mask and become self-described “hacktivists.” That, or these people are just angry.

Across Africa, several companies have suffered direct and third-party breaches this year, including Kenya’s M-Tiba, which was hit recently, and others like Safaricom, Eskom, and various government agencies across the continent.

In South Africa, telecom companies Cell C and MTN suffered ransomware and data breach attacks. Another report said the country’s State Security Agency (SSA), its intelligence service (don’t laugh), was possibly attacked by RedNovember, an alleged Chinese state-sponsored group, in September.

The trend is increasingly worrisome, and company executives across industries have been calling for stronger security measures. Yet in an erratic market like Africa, where other concerns such as compliance, product, and marketing often dominate budgets, should tech companies really be paying significantly more for security than for everything else?

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Generative AI is cool, but it mostly speaks English and works best for the well-connected West. It’s the AI divide in action: the technology expected to reshape the global economy is advancing while overlooking most of the world, including the 2,000+ languages spoken in Africa.

This is where Microsoft’s Project Gecko, led out of Microsoft Research Africa in Nairobi, comes in. 

Announced on Tuesday, the goal of the project is to build an AI from the ground up that is local, low-cost, and culturally aware. Its first big win was the MMCTAgent, a multimodal AI that's already helping smallholder farmers in Kenya and India get hyper-local agricultural advice in their native languages, including Kikuyu, Swahili, and Kalenjin—through speech, text, and community-generated videos. 

Why this matters: For years, Africa has pushed for localisation and contextualisation in technology. Now it is finally happening with institutional support.

The significance is two-fold. First, it addresses a core issue for African fintechs and digital services: to scale, you need to speak the language of the masses, literally. Second, with agriculture as the starting point, the framework for Project Gecko is designed to be scaled into critical sectors like healthcare and education. This creates a foundation for inclusive AI that is built for Africans, a right step in building relevant technology.

Project Gecko suggests that the next generation of AI might actually be built for Africa. And that changes everything.

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The World Wide Web3

Source:

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* Data as of 06.45 AM WAT, November 19, 2025.

Written by: Opeyemi Kareem, Emmanuel Nwosu, and Fancy Goodman

Edited by: Emmanuel Nwosu & Ganiu Oloruntade