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Cameroon’s Waspito closes $2.7m seed funding round. 2 other things and a trivia

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This line-up of stories will help you discover the latest happenings around the tech world, today.

1. Cameroon’s Waspito closes $2.7m seed funding round

Waspito, a Cameroonian e-health startup, has announced closing a US$2.7m seed funding round.

The round, according to the startup, will help it grow its user base in its home market and expand to Ivory Coast.

Waspito was founded by Jean Lobe Lobe in 2020, with a mission to connect users with medical doctors via instant video consultations from their smartphones.

Offering home service, the startup provides mobile laboratory services, with a lab technician collecting samples from a user’s home and results received digitally.

On user base, Waspito has served over 15,000 patients with plans to expand to 10 countries in the next four years.

Described as an oversubscribed round, the US$2.7 million seed round was secured from Launch Africa Ventures, Newtown Partners via the Imperial Venture Fund, BLOC Smart Africa managed by Bamboo Capital Partners, Orange Ventures, Saviu Ventures, Plug and Play, and BringCom.


Tech Trivia:

Unwanted email is also known as what?

A Pork
B Bacon
C Ham
D Spam
Answer: See end of post


2. UN innovation challenge opens call for applications for female-led startup

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), in collaboration with World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has opened call for applications for the Empower Women and Girls Challenge.

The initiative is expected to help scale innovative solutions that can help disrupt inequalities and advance the empowerment of women and girls.

Read also: TechNigeria: A weekly digest of what went down in Nigeria’s tech space

The initiative is the first ever Joint Innovation Challenge organised by the UNFPA.

According to the team, the mission is looking for innovative ideas that support female empowerment, maternal health, gender equality, and reproductive rights.

In addition, the challenge will support women-centered innovations, including those that provide affordable and sustainable access to essential reproductive health commodities, services, and information.

3. London’s Weaver closes $4M seed round to enhance service

London-based marketplace and SaaS contract negotiation platform, Weaver, has closed a $4 million seed round to expand nationally.

Led by European VC btov Partners, the round saw the participation of FJ Labs, Enterprise Fund (a syndicate of former Atlassian & Docker executives) and Dr. Stefan Heitmann (founder & CEO of MoneyPark and PriceHubble) among others.

The 5 year old startup matches homeowners/architects planning major home renovation projects with vetted contractors.

The new raiser brings the startup’s total raiser to date to $5.5M after a previous $1.5M in pre-seed financing from a number of angels.

Speaking on startup’s progress and milestone, co-founder and CEO, Greg Keane, explained how the startup is solving one of the biggest frustration in the industry.

He said: “We started off as two industry founders looking for product/market fit with no-code SaaS, bootstrapping whilst minimising investment. We then invited two tech founders to join us in 2020, and it took around one and a half years to reach product/market fit on a proprietary platform.”

“We are on our way to becoming the leaders in renovation pricing in our market, which we are confident will establish us as the go-to solution for renovation price indexing. We have plans to utilise this data to build a machine learning algorithm that will accurately budget and price home renovations, thereby solving one of the industry’s biggest frustrations today.”


Trivia Answer: Spam

Originating from the name of Hormel’s canned meat, “spam” now also refers to junk e-mail or irrelevant postings to a newsgroup or bulletin board. The unsolicited e-mail messages you receive about refinancing your home, reversing aging, and losing those extra pounds are all considered to be spam.

Spamming other people is definitely not cool and is one of the most notorious violations of Internet etiquette (or “netiquette”). So if you ever get the urge to let thousands of people know about that hot new guaranteed way to make money on the Internet, please reconsider.

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