From $250M to $366M, Brazil’s Facily secures multimillion investment. 2 other things and a trivia

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

1. From $250M to $366M, Brazil’s Facily secures multimillion dollar investment

São Paulo-based social commerce marketplace, Facily, has announced securing over $366 million in funding across four different rounds over the last year.

The Brazilian startup, which was founded less than a year, is valued at $850M.

In a series D, Facily closed a $250 million Series D led by DX Ventures and Berlin-based Delivery Hero, where Citius featured as a co-anchor investor.

The series C, which was consolidated earlier, was a $63 million fund led by Glade Brook with participation from Tiger Global Management and Hill House.

Speaking on the company’s growth, the startup noted that its sales volumes grew 43x from January to September.

Delivering more than 7 million items in October alone, the startup blitz expansion into new markets.

Facily is raising even more money that would push its valuation to north of $1 billion.

Tech Trivia: Which of the following is an emoticon?

A (heart)
B n00b
C ^_^
D 1337
Answer: See end of post

2. Tunisia’s iCompass adapts AI to help companies speak their customer’s language

Tunisia-based startup, iCompass, has adapted artificial intelligence technology to help companies across Africa and the Middle East communicate with their customers in their own languages.

READ ALSO: Nigerian agri-tech startup Zowasel secures $100k. 2 other things and a trivia

The tech startup was founded in 2019 by Ahmed Nouisser and Hatem Haddad, specialising in natural language processing (NLP) products.

iCompass uses the latest deep learning and reinforcement learning technologies to develop speech transcription services, automatic voice generation, and chatbot and voicebot products.

Speaking on the development, chief communications officer, Suzy Mahjoub stated that the startup was on a mission to provide a deeper machine understanding of standard languages and underrepresented dialects in Africa and the Middle East.

He said: “The market we looked at is the Middle East and Africa where we realised that companies communicate with their clients in standard languages such as Modern Standard Arabic, French, or English but not in their native languages or dialects; which creates a gap in their customer experience, the quality of services rendered, and access to relevant and accurate information.

“In an audience centric world, where the heart is the compass, this linguistic gap translates into a customer experience where brands may not meet their audiences where they are. iCompass identified an opportunity to help companies speak to people’s hearts in their native languages, since it is easier to teach a machine to speak many languages than to teach all people to speak one language.”

3. Egyptian ed-tech startup, Educatly, closes $1m pre-seed round

Educatly, an Egyptian ed-tech platform, has closed a US$1 million pre-seed funding round.

The new raiser is expected to help it build on strong early growth by further developing its product and scaling up marketing efforts.

Educatly was founded by Mohamed ElSonbaty, Abdelrahman Ayman and Joan Manuel in 2020 to democratise access to higher education opportunities by allowing students to search, compare and apply to over 120,000 live and up-to-date higher education opportunities globally.

Today, according to local sources, the startup has already had over 100,000 users from 190 countries worldwide.

With contributions from Enterprise Ireland, Falak Startups and other angel investors, the funding will be utilised for product development, expanding the team, and ramping up sales and marketing efforts.

Ayman, the startup’s chief operating officer (COO), while speaking on the progress recorded since the launch of the startup said that the platform provides users the opportunity to browse through the largest up-to-date database globally.

Ayman said: “Students want to have transparent access to all relevant opportunities out there while getting as personalised support as possible to reach the best possible decision.

“At Educatly, users can browse through the largest up-to-date database globally with more than 120,000 higher education opportunities worldwide and filter according to their profile and preferences to find the programs most relevant for them.

“We leverage the latest technologies to narrow down the most relevant programs to support the decision-making process for them and offer personalised support through our network of consultants and ambassadors.”

Trivia Answer: C

The term emoticon comes from “emotion and icon” and refers to facial expressions represented by keyboard characters. For example, the emoticon 🙂 represents a happy face and 🙁 represents a sad face. By inserting an emoticon into a message, you can help the recipient better understand the feeling you want to get across.

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