Disrupt 2022’s climate tech and health tech sessions

Between the climate crisis and global pandemics, we’re living in remarkably fraught times. Undaunted by the magnitude of the challenges, Silicon Valley has been hard at work seeking to mitigate the threats, extend help to the overlooked, and prepare for a new kind of future. Some of the most promising and cutting-edge advancements in climate tech and health tech will be on display at Disrupt 2022, set for October 18–20 in San Francisco. 

For founders, engineers, VCs and leaders working to save the world, Disrupt 2022 will be a three-day festival of hope. There are tracks for both climate tech and health tech, with presentations, roundtables, startup exhibitions and networking opportunities in each part of the convention. Disrupt 2022 will have a huge list of distinguished speakers and sessions — check them out here:

  • Making Care Actually Work
    With Toyin Ajayi — co-founder and CEO, Cityblock Health
  • Extreme Tech Challenge Highlights
    Sponsored by Extreme Tech Challenge
  • From Point A to Point Unbelievable: How Buoy Health Scaled from Idea to Unbelievable AI Success Story
    Sponsored by Connection
  • How to Disrupt Any Industry with Longevity Science: No PhD Required
    With Erin Sharoni — chief product officer, Foxo Technologies
  • Tech-Driven Biology and Chemistry: Solving Science’s Hardest Problems at Scale
    With Jacob Berlin — chief executive officer, Terray; Peyton Greenside — CSO and co-founder, BigHat; Eric Zimmerman — Principal Healthcare & Life Sciences, Amazon Web Services
  • My Daughter the Cyborg
    with Jeremiah Robison — founder and CEO, Cionic
  • Breaking into the Healthcare Monolith: Strategies for Working with Payers and Providers
    Sponsored by InterSystems
    with Neal Moawed — Global Head of Industry Research, InterSystems
  • Saving the World: The Playbook for Building Planetary Health Unicorns
    with Arvind Gupta — partner, Mayfield Fund

TechCrunch Disrupt takes place in San Francisco on October 18–20 with an online day on October 21. Buy your pass now, and you’ll save up to $700 over full-price admission before prices go up October 15.

Disrupt 2022’s climate tech and health tech sessions by Lauren Simonds originally published on TechCrunch

Moderna sues Pfizer, BioNTech over alleged mRNA patent infringement

Moderna filed a lawsuit against Pfizer and BioNTech claiming the biopharmaceutical companies infringed on Moderna’s patents related to mRNA technology in develop of their COVID-19 vaccine.

The lawsuit, to be filed in the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts and Regional Court of Düsseldorf in Germany, alleges Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine Comirnaty infringes on Moderna’s patent filed between 2010 and 2016.

“We believe that Pfizer and BioNTech unlawfully copied Moderna’s inventions, and they have continued to use them without permission,” said Moderna chief legal officer Shannon Thyme Klinger in the company’s press release.

A Pfizer spokesperson told TechCrunch they are stunned by the allegations because “the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine was based on BioNTech’s proprietary mRNA technology and developed by both BioNTech and Pfizer.”

BioNTech in their statement said they plan on “vigorously [defending] against all allegations of patent infringement.

“BioNTech also values and respects valid and enforceable intellectual property rights of others and remains confident in its intellectual property,” read the company’s statement. “It is an unfortunate but rather regular occurrence that other companies make allegations that a successful product potentially infringes their intellectual property rights, even more so here after witnessing the historic accomplishments of a vaccine like COMIRNATY®.”

Moderna is accusing the companies of copying two features they claim are “critical to the success of the mRNA vaccines.” One of the features includes a chemical modification to help avoid undesirable immune responses to mRNA, and the other is related to the encoding of the spike protein in a lipid molecule.

The company is currently seeking monetary damages, but isn’t looking for an injunction to force Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine off the market.

“This foundational platform, which we began building in 2010, along with our patented work on coronaviruses in 2015 and 2016, enabled us to produce a safe and highly effective COVID-19 vaccine in record time after the pandemic struck,” said Moderna Chief Executive Officer Stéphane Bancel in the release. “As we work to combat health challenges moving forward, Moderna is using our mRNA technology platform to develop medicines that could treat and prevent infectious diseases like influenza and HIV, as well as autoimmune and cardiovascular diseases and rare forms of cancer.”

Moderna announced they began development on mRNA vaccines targeting the seasonal flu HIV and Nipah virus back in 2021.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 360 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine have been administered in the country. Moderna has had close to 230 million doses administered.

Bitmain co-founder welcomes crypto regulation to restore market confidence

The collapse of Three Arrow Capital and the counterparties wrapped in the crypto hedge fund’s troubles have drawn questions about the soundness of the heady digital asset investment space. For the industry’s survivors, watching their rivals fall to pieces overnight has been an alarming experience.

To understand where the industry might be going after the market turmoil, we spoke with John Ge, chief executive officer at Matrixport, a Singapore-based digital asset manager with over $10 billion in assets under management and custody.

Ge was formerly the head of investment and financing as well as a founding partner at Bitmain, the world’s biggest maker of Bitcoin mining machines. Together with Bitmain’s co-founder and former CEO Jihan Wu, Ge co-founded Matrixport in 2018.

Three Arrow Capital, known as 3AC in the crypto community, was one of the world’s largest crypto hedge funds before its fall from grace. Its success was predicated on a risky strategy: it borrowed aggressively from crypto lenders and in turn invested that money in other crypto projects.

When cryptocurrency prices began to plummet earlier this year, the firm, as well as other similar outfits that bet on rising crypto prices, failed to repay their creditors and plunged into liquidation. The crypto market is down by $1.8 trillion since its peak in November, led by the slide in Bitcoin and Ethereum prices.

The recent market crash is “inevitable”, Ge says in an interview with TechCrunch. “The core issue is that we saw players whose business model is like a black box. They borrow money from investors without giving transparency over how the money will be used.”

The other problem is that these crypto managers are acting both as the player and referee, Ge contends. “Many of them are providing both asset management and proprietary trading. An asset manager should not be doing proprietary trading, and if it does, it needs to follow stringent leverage requirements.”

“Even the most conservative investment strategy has risks and may result in losses, but the principle is to be transparent with your customers, not fraudulent, deceptive, or misleading,” the founder says.

Matrixport, which serves individuals as well as over 500 institutions across Asia, Europe, and North America, was exposed to 3AC and has lodged a claim alongside other creditors. But Ge assures that the firm’s exposure is “relatively small” when compared to the exposure other industry players faced and is considered “minor” when compared relative to Matrixport’s equity.

As to how to restore investor confidence in the crypto sphere, Ge believes regulators are on the right track to bring more oversight over consumer-facing crypto products and protection for retail investors, as is the case in Singapore.

But it’s “unrealistic” to have regulators design risk control models for institution-focused asset managers. “The pace of regulations tends to fall behind that of industry development.”

Ge thinks investors have “lost a certain level of confidence” in the crypto market and the industry will take time to recover. On the other hand, he thinks competition has waned for survivors like Matrixport because “many of the other players are gone.”

Matrixport told Bloomberg last year that it planned to go public in three to five years and Ge said that plan “hasn’t changed.” It’s too early to say which market the company is floating its shares but the U.S is a “likely” option given investors there are more “welcoming of crypto innovation.”

Beacon Power Services raises $2.7M to improve electricity access for sub-Saharan African cities

Sub-Saharan Africa’s share of the global population without access to electricity stood at 77% in 2020, according to reports. Also, the average daily electricity supply in some of Africa’s largest cities is less than 12 hours. As a result, individuals and businesses find other options and substitutes, such as generators, to deal with their power issues; however, these solutions can either be costly to use or affect the climate.

While solar grids and panels are another viable option and have compelling use cases for end consumers, there’s still an opportunity to launch products targeted at power distribution companies, and that’s where Beacon Power Services (BPS) plays. The energy tech company, which provides data and grid management solutions to help Africa’s power sector distribute electricity more efficiently, is announcing today that it has closed a seed round of $2.7 million.

Founder and chief executive officer Bimbola Adisa, an aerospace engineer, started the company in 2014 after working several years for a power turbine manufacturer and as an investment banker covering the power sector in the U.S. For the latter, most of his clients included electric utilities, service providers and manufacturers. In an interview with TechCrunch, he said these experiences gave him exposure to the application of technology in the power sector, and he saw an opportunity to apply that in Nigeria and across Africa.

Adisa launched BPS in 2014 to address the inadequate electricity supply from power distribution companies. The U.S.- and Nigeria-based utility company provides energy management software and analytics for utilities. Its AI-enabled grid management platform, Adora, solves one of two fundamental problems power distribution companies face in Africa.

The software offers real-time visibility on network performance for electric utilities and connects to every utility asset and customer node on the grid, allowing energy providers to preempt outages and identify network losses, respond to them quickly and distribute electricity more efficiently. “The result is that utilities can operate more efficiently, recover more revenue, and by reducing outages, customers get increased supply of electricity (more hours supplied daily), so everyone wins,” said BFS in an emailed response to TechCrunch on how Adora works.

The other problem is data-focused, tackled by the company’s proprietary platform called Customer and Asset Information Management system (CAIMs). Utilities in Africa struggle to maintain an accurate database of their customers, assets and grid topology (the relationship between assets and customers). The CAIMs solves this by factoring in the unique conditions within which Africa’s utilities operate, for example, poor address systems, and helps them digitize their data, which serves as a foundation for network improvements.

“Africa is home to the fastest growing cities in the world, but when most people think of energy access in Africa, they think of the rural areas with little or no access to electricity at all. However, it is impossible for Africa to develop without significantly improving electricity access and reliability across its major cities,” said CEO Adisa in a statement. “When we realized that solutions designed for mature markets fail to address the unique infrastructure challenges Africa faces, we developed a tailored solution for power companies on the continent to improve daily grid supply of electricity.”

Bim Adisa (CEO)

Adisa told TechCrunch that BPS has grown from a single utility in Nigeria to four utilities in two countries, including Ghana, covering more than 8 million customers (residential and businesses). BPS’ business model entails working with its clients as partners over the long term, and not just to sell products, said Adisa. As such, the company can defer most of the upfront cost of deploying its technology in exchange for service-based payments commensurate with the value it creates.

The eight-year-old energy utility company says it differs from other platforms because it provides “local solutions that factor in the local operating environment in Africa.” For instance, most off-the-shelf solutions created for mature markets do not factor in the frequency of outages encountered in Africa or the network communications issues experienced, but BPS claims its solutions have solved that.

The company’s seed round was led by Seedstars Africa Ventures with participation from Persistent Energy, Kepple Africa Ventures, Factor[e] and Oridun Capital Management. Speaking on the investment, Maxime Bouan, managing partner at Seedstars Africa Ventures, said, “As a society, we have recognized climate change as one of the biggest threats to our generation, and it is critical we use smart capital to support entrepreneurs across Africa who are creating innovative and localized solutions to tackle this challenge.”

The new funding would enable BPS to improve its current products (product upgrades to add new features and incorporate automation) and expand into new markets beyond Nigeria and Ghana, where it currently operates.

Key European tech founders and investors launch OneUkraine charity to assist Ukraine

A host of major European tech founders and investors are today backing the launch of OneUkraine, a new charity providing sustainable humanitarian relief for the Ukrainian people.

OneUkraine will be supporting Ukrainians at home and abroad, delivering humanitarian aid, and aiming to rebuild the tech and broader infrastructure of Ukraine by SMEs and startups on the ground. With many of the organization’s founding members being from Ukraine or with family ties to the country, the organisation hopes to leverage direct access to local networks and real-world data about the country’s needs.

The organisation says it has now evacuated more than 5,500 people, mostly women and children, and already delivered aid worth more than EUR 4 million. It’s also built a Ukrainian school in Lithuania to provide education for refugees.

In a statement Martin Reiter, CEO and co-founder of OneUkraine: “With many of our founders born and raised in Ukraine, we felt compelled to help our friends, family, and colleagues. All of our founders have proven track records leading or founding tech unicorns, and we are now doing collectively what we do best: working quickly and efficiently at scale, providing instant and much needed humanitarian relief for the people of Ukraine. We believe that we can help best by bringing an entrepreneurial, data-driven and sustainable approach to the world of humanitarian aid, complementing other major relief efforts.”

OneUkraine’s founding team:

•   Martin Reiter: Martin ran Groupon Ukraine back in 2011 and still has many friends in Ukraine. 
Martin previously held leading positions at Airbnb and Wayfair Europe and co-founded 
mademoisellemartina.org to help evacuate Ukrainian women and children. 


•   Martina Kojic: Martina grew up in post-war Croatia, with the impact and trauma of the post- war situation shaping much of her childhood. Martina co-founded mademoisellemartina.org to 
help evacuate Ukrainian women and children. 


•   Markus Fuhrmann: Markus, whose wife and her family are from Mariupol, Ukraine, is CEO 
and co-founder at GROPYUS, and previously co-founder of Lieferheld.de and Delivery Hero. 


•   Wolfgang Heigl: Wolfgang, who lives in Lithuania, is the founder of NFQ and HomeToGo. 


•   Viktoriya Tigipko: Viktoriya, born and raised in Kyiv, Ukraine, is the founding partner of TA 
Ventures and founder of ICLUB Global, the network angel investors. She is the founder of WTECH, a 5k+ network of women in tech business, chairman of the Board of Ukrainian Startup Fund and founder and president of Odesa International Film Festival. 


•   Johannes Reck: Johannes, whose grandfather grew up in a small village which today is part of western Ukraine, is the co-founder and CEO of GetYourGuide. 


•   Dmitry Gorilovskiy: Dmitry, whose mother is from Rovno, Ukraine, has been organising adoptions of Russian orphans with disabilities since 2014, when the Russian government prohibited adoption by foreigners. He is a serial founder of product design, IoT and machine learning businesses such as Woodenshark and Moeco. 


•   Klaus Hommels: Klaus is the founder and chairman of Lakestar and one of Europe’s leading venture capitalists. 

•   Jens Hilgers: Jens, whose wife is Ukrainian, is a serial entrepreneur and has built and managed international games and tech companies in Central and Eastern Europe as well as in Asia. Among others, Jens is founding GP at BITKRAFT Ventures and is co-founder and chairman at G2 Esports. 


•   Alexa Sinyachova - Chief Executive Officer - Moeco. Alexa is Ukrainian. She is the Co-Founder & CEO at Moeco and WTech Berlin curator.

Bitcoin’s bid to become the “one chain to rule them all”

The Bitcoin 2022 conference brought over 25,000 attendees to Miami last month to discuss the future of the world’s largest cryptocurrency. The event, which attendees have described as “extravagant” and compared to a bacchanal, featured a now-notorious keynote speech by Peter Thiel in which the venture capitalist rallied Bitcoin supporters against a list of people whom he described as Bitcoin’s enemies, including Warren Buffet and Jamie Dimon.

While Thiel’s speech grabbed a lion’s share of the attention surrounding the conference, many investors, developers, and founders in the Bitcoin community convened at the same event to discuss a threat that could prove far more pressing than the aforementioned personae non gratae – competition.

Even as the overall crypto market has plunged this week, Bitcoin remains the most valuable crypto asset in the world with a market capitalization of around $589 billion as of May 9. Its status stems, in part, from the advantage of having been the first cryptocurrency token on a public blockchain. 

But as new blockchains continue to spring up, and after last year’s “DeFi” summer that brought new traction to Ethereum, Bitcoin investors have had to start watching their backs. Now, the blockchain’s backers are pouring capital into efforts to ensure it can maintain its dominance as a form of money and expand into other use cases through decentralized apps (dapps) to keep up with competitors like Ethereum and Solana.

Bitcoin’s payments edge

Bitcoin’s edge has typically been described as its value as an asset to hedge against inflation, much like gold, because of its fixed supply. Bitcoin supporters, including Thiel, ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood, and MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor, all spoke at Bitcoin 2022 about its ability to act as a store of value when central banks relax their policies and let inflation run hot, as has been the case in the United States throughout the majority of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The reality has not been so simple, as Bitcoin has oftentimes traded down amid periods of rising inflation in the U.S. But Bitcoiners argue that its value is more clearly visible in developing nations, especially those experiencing hyperinflation or with sizable proportions of underbanked individuals. They view it as a relatively safe asset that can enable faster, more efficient payments both within and across borders.

The Bitcoin network itself only supports about five transactions per second, according to crypto exchange Binance. Bitcoin has integrated with a layer-two protocol called the Lightning Network to increase its speed and efficiency while lowering transaction costs, a piece of infrastructure used by the nation of El Salvador and major crypto exchanges such as Kraken.

Startup Lightning Labs, which raised a $70 million Series B round last month, is at the forefront of developing Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. It is building infrastructure for the Bitcoin Lightning Network akin to Visa’s payments network, Lightning Labs CEO and co-founder Elizabeth Stark told TechCrunch. 

Elizabeth Stark, chief executive officer of Lightning Labs Image Credits: Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The Lightning Network can execute hundreds of thousands of transactions per second by settling transactions off-chain in a separate ledger, thus freeing up space on the layer one Bitcoin blockchain while still adhering to its underlying protocol, Stark explained.

“People want access to Bitcoin, the asset … When you’re looking at stability, security and the global payments use case, and the global transaction aspects, that’s where Bitcoin and the Lightning Network will shine,” Stark said.

Lighting Labs recently announced a proposal to build Taro, a protocol that would allow individuals without bank accounts to send and receive money in the form of stablecoins that represent their domestic fiat currency through mobile applications. 

“If I were Visa, I’d be scared, because there are a lot of people out there that have mobile phones, but now don’t need to tap into the traditional system, and then the merchants don’t need to pay the 3% fee plus 30 cents [for a transaction]. You can have fees that are dramatically lower than the legacy system,” Stark told TechCrunch.

Startup Moon, in fact, partners with Visa to enable users to buy goods and services with Bitcoin through the Lightning Network at any U.S.-based e-commerce site using Visa’s rails. 

While Lightning Labs is focused on optimizing global payments through the Lighting Network, trading platform Robinhood has found the network useful in keeping network fees low on its new crypto offering, which it rolled out to users last month, Robinhood’s crypto CTO, Johan Kerbrat, told TechCrunch.

“We will support Lightning on the [Robinhood] app, so you will be able to connect it to pay merchants directly with the Lightning Network,” Kerbrat said. “It also means that you will be able to kind of create a channel between people using Robinhood outside of Robinhood and be able to exchange Bitcoin for almost zero fees.”

More than just an asset

Bitcoin’s low fees, enabled primarily by the Lightning Network, and early widespread adoption mean the blockchain has become synonymous with payments. Its closest competitor by value, Ethereum, is notorious for high network fees and is still worth less than half as much as Bitcoin by market cap. Newer challengers such as Solana offer lower transaction fees but are considered to be less secure. 

But despite Bitcoin’s dominance in the payments realm, other blockchains are developing capabilities far beyond simple monetary transfers. As an open-source blockchain, Ethereum lets developers easily build decentralized applications, or “dapps” on top of it, enabling use cases such as minting NFTs and offering DeFi lending products through which investors can earn interest. 

As a result, Ethereum has been able to amass the largest ecosystem of tools, apps, and protocols in the crypto world, and even competitors such as Polkdadot, Cosmos, and Solana have more developers working on their blockchains than Bitcoin does, according to venture firm Electric Capital’s 2021 Developer Report.

Bitcoin, meanwhile, ranks just fifth by number of developers, below Cosmos and Solana. Its backers are trying to give Bitcoin a boost and attract developers to work on new projects in the ecosystem.

“A lot of [discourse] has been just about Bitcoin as an asset, and not necessarily Bitcoin as the network. And now I think we’re starting to see that paradigm shift, where people are looking at it more as an infrastructure,” Alex Chizhik, head of listings at crypto exchange Okcoin told TechCrunch.

Chizhik co-chairs Bitcoin Odyssey, an initiative launched in March by Okcoin in conjunction with venture firms including Digital Currency Group, GSR, and White Star Capital, to deploy $165 million into projects that will “supercharge Bitcoin adoption,” according to the group

$165 million is a lot of money but seems like a drop in the bucket for the world’s biggest blockchain. Venture capitalists deployed over $30 billion into web3 last year, much of which flowed to projects on chains that innately enable smart contracts, unlike Bitcoin.

Stacks, formerly known as BlockStack, plays a crucial role in expanding use cases for Bitcoin. Its open-source network allows custom smart contracts to be built on Bitcoin, enabling developers to use the Bitcoin blockchain to create dapps. Dapps built on the Bitcoin network with Stacks include CityCoins, a token protocol through which local governments can raise money from investors, and NFT exchanges such as Hey Layer and STX NFT.

“Ethereum definitely is leading the way in what can be done with things like DeFi and asset ownership, like NFTs, but that’s largely probably in the past three years. I think Bitcoin now has this opportunity to kind of catch up, take some of the best lessons learned, and really unlock the value and the base layer chain,” Brittany Laughlin, executive director of the Stacks Foundation, told TechCrunch. 

Muneeb Ali, co-founder of Stacks Image Credits: Alex Flynn/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The Stacks Foundation is a nonprofit arm within Stacks that supports governance, education, and grantmaking to improve infrastructure within the Bitcoin network. 

“Our role is really how to support growth of the network and make sure that we can fulfill our promise, which is a user-owned internet powered by Bitcoin,” Laughlin said.

Laughlin explained that without the Taproot upgrade implemented on the Bitcoin network late last year, which makes it easier and faster to verify transactions, the growth of Bitcoin as an ecosystem would have been much more limited. She noted that the Bitcoin community is generally hesitant to change anything about the protocol, and that even the Taproot upgrade was met with some internal resistance and conflict before it was finally implemented three years after it was first proposed. Still, she said, Taproot doesn’t solve all of the challenges Bitcoin faces, and further changes may be needed to continue building out the network.

Ultimately, though, Laughlin believes that Bitcoin will prevail in the long-run against other layer-one blockchains because of its first-mover advantage. 

“Anyone who’s holding $100 of Bitcoin, from El Salvador to New York City, if they want to take a loan against that [$100], or if they want to secure an asset with it, they could do that [with dapps on Bitcoin],” Laughlin said.

Laughlin compared Bitcoin’s race against other blockchains to Apple’s competition with Android, wherein Apple often launches products significantly later than Android does, but has a greater focus on the user experience. 

“Bitcoin is going to be like Apple, and secure the brand recognition, compatibility, and ease of use – all of that comes to mind when I think of Bitcoin.”

Flutterwave responds as CEO is put on the spot for alleged bullying by ex-employee

On Monday, Clara Wanjiku Odero, a former employee of African payments giant and unicorn Flutterwave, accused the company’s chief executive officer Olugbenga ‘GB’ Agboola of bullying and harassing her for years. She made the allegations in a Medium post and series of tweets that came after.

In the blog post, Odero recounted how a series of undescribed events led her to quit her job as Head of Implementation (Rest of Africa) in 2018 and when the time came for her to be settled, she claimed the company refused to do so.

However, upon her threats to sue the company, which she claimed led to various employees from the company “asking to talk and resolve this amicably,” Flutterwave finally paid her dues, she said in the post.

According to Odero, what followed was an accusation made by the company of her involvement with a Twitter account that called out male members of Flutterwave’s management for sexual harassment.

“I asked for my dues multiple times, [I] got no response, in fact [I] was threatened and I responded accordingly,” said Odero, who is now CEO of Credrails, an open finance platform backed by SoftBank.

“Flutterwave paid me my money after having multiple people call me to call off my lawyers; lawyers I had to call because they refused to pay me simply because they thought I would do nothing [a.k.a] bully me. Without any proof, they accused me of being behind an account calling out the male members of management for sexual harassment.”

Odero’s post also revealed how she got “introduced to a bank in Nigeria for a role which GB then sabotaged by saying I was a bad worker, a crime in California.” But what broke the camel’s back for her was when Flutterwave, “in an attempt to keep doing business in Kenya with M-Pesa, had kept my number as the contact person on the Mpesa pay bill.”

In this local piece published two years ago, Wanjiku claimed her number was used as the contact person in a fraud that involved Flutterwave allegedly setting up non-existent sex parties in Thika, Kenya and extorting Kenyans up to Sh1,500. 

Wanjiku sued Flutterwave for damages and won a settlement, according to her blog. However, she appealed the case after deeming the payment inadequate to compensate for all the troubles caused. This was corroborated in a recent interview granted by Agboola and several important members of Flutterwave and released hours before Wanjiku published her Medium post.

“An ex-employee who led one of our country expansions sued us for negligence and emotional trauma for not removing their name as the contact person in the country. So anytime there was a merchant enquiry, they were called. They said this was emotional harassment,” Flutterwave’s CEO revealed.

“We tried to resolve this amicably, but it was impossible. They asked for $900,000 to quash the lawsuit. We refused because we didn’t believe $900,000 in damages represented the cost of the alleged negligence. They proceeded with the lawsuit, and the judge awarded them an equivalent of $2,500 for damages. When it was time to cut the check, they declined it and said they’d appeal.”

The interview, which might have prompted Wanjiku to tell her side of the story, mainly highlighted Flutterwave’s rise to becoming Africa’s most valued company after completing a $250 million Series D round at a $3 billion valuation in February. It also noted that Flutterwave dealt with a sexual harassment case where it “discovered an employee had been inappropriate towards his team members.” which led to immediate dismissal, the company claimed.

TechCrunch reached out to Flutterwave for comments, asking specific questions about Wanjiku’s bullying claims by the company and its CEO. The fintech company declined to address each of our questions and instead sent this response:

As an organization that continuously strives to create an environment where employees feel secure and safe, we take the recent allegations of bullying from a former employee very seriously.

We categorically state that there is no place for bullying or harassment of any kind in our workplace. We have a zero-tolerance stance on bullying and a robust independent disciplinary committee and processes in place to stamp out abuse of any kind.

Flutterwave has grown significantly in personnel, over the last 3 years. We experienced most of that growth during lockdown — it was very important for us to bring the entire company together to meet each other in one location, (for the first time in many cases), share out story, challenges and build camaraderie. Sharing some of our challenges as a company, understandably caused a reaction from a former employee.

We confirm that at the point of resignation, all monies due to our former employee at the time were promptly disbursed and we have records to confirm this. We however sincerely regret the circumstances that led to the dispute and wish it had been addressed in a more timely manner.

In no way did we take this lightly. We want the ecosystem to have a health and productive work culture and we are committed to doing our part.

In an interesting turn of events, Wanjiku told TechCrunch, “I am no longer allowed to speak on this for ‘the ecosystem’” when we reached out to her to share more parts of her story.

This news comes two weeks after Lagos-based tech publication TechCabal published a report on the toxic and unhealthy workplace culture created in Bento, an HR platform by its CEO Ebun Okubanjo. The report has sparked a conversation leading other employees across tech and different sectors in Nigeria and Africa to share similar workplace experiences in the past few weeks.

This is a developing story…

Ghanaian fintech Dash raises $32.8M seed to build connected wallets for Africans

Global financial transactions are facilitated mainly by payment processors such as Visa or Mastercard. They are responsible for communication between banks and fintechs to settle transactions for consumers and businesses swiftly.

Africa has it different. It’s not a predominantly card continent. Telecoms and banks lead the majority of online financial transactions carried out in the region via mobile money wallets and bank accounts. But here’s the challenge: While both systems tend to work well when users make transactions within their unique environment, there’s no interoperability for transactions between them.

An alternative payment network with connected wallets allowing a mobile money user to transact with a bank account would fix this problem, and that’s the premise of Ghana-based fintech Dash. Today, the unified payments app is announcing that it has raised $32.8 million in an oversubscribed seed round.

Founder and CEO Prince Boakye Boampong started the company in 2019. Before Dash, Boampong was the co-founder of OMG Digital, a YC-backed Ghanaian media startup he started alongside Jesse Ghansah — the current CEO of Float— in 2016. 

Two years before that, Boampong traveled to Kenya and was fascinated by how unbanked Kenyans sent and received money while paying bills with mobile money, a system of payments pioneered by Safaricom’s M-Pesa, which has close to 30 million customers. But having come from a mobile money background himself, being Ghanaian, Boampong experienced how interoperability posed a challenge within and outside mobile money systems.

“I was blown away by the ubiquity and convenience of mobile money in 2014 when I visited Kenya for the first time. However, there are over 200 mobile money wallets and 100 banks across the continent that [do] not work with each other,” the chief executive officer told TechCrunch.

Here’s what that means: A Kenyan who uses M-Pesa and travels to Ghana finds it difficult to send money to a Ghanaian who uses MTN Ghana because both mobile money operators don’t permit transactions between each other.

Similarly, a Nigerian or South African with a bank account cannot make transactions with an M-Pesa mobile money account or an MTN Ghana account due to the difference in payment ecosystems. Thus, when they travel, they’d need to swap currencies or get necessary bank or mobile money accounts that work outside their home countries.

Dash’s alternative payment network brings together this mobile money and traditional banks and facilitates transactions for consumers and businesses. It doesn’t aim to replace mobile money or banks. Instead, its wallet allows users to access a plethora of services they can’t find on their traditional provider.

“We’re building this interoperability so a Kenyan traveling to Ghana or Ghanaian travelling to Kenya would be able to pay for stuff without having to change currencies or setting up accounts when they touch ground,” Boampong said. “We’re taking a page from AliPay and PayTm by building features that will make the lives of our users easier without having to switch from different providers.”

Dash’s playbook is similar to Visa or Mastercard, routing payments through banks and telcos regardless of who issued it. So, users from different countries — Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya, for now — can connect their bank or mobile money accounts to Dash, pay bills, and send and receive money to other users while the platform handles currency conversions.

Dash

The Dash team

The company makes revenue from processing fees, savings (interest earned when users save), FX fees when Dash is used cross-border, bill payments (commission earned when users pay bills on Dash) and subscription (for Dash+, its premium service).

Dash claimed to process over $300 million in TPV in January, up 300% monthly from Q4 2021. In total, it has processed over $1 billion since its launch in 2020 from 1 million customers the company has acquired from Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria, Boampong said.

These numbers indicate the tremendous growth from last October, when Dash first closed its seed round before re-opening after rising investor interest. At the time, the Ghanaian fintech was raising $8 million–a large seed in its own right–and had acquired just a little over 200,000 users with transactions reaching $250 million.

The pace at which Dash managed to quadruple the size of its initial investment in the space of five months is intriguing. That said, for some investors and onlookers, $32 million is an incredibly large seed that could cause more harm than good for a three-year-old company. But Boampong disagrees.

“For most products, it’s either you are figuring stuff out, or you figured it out. We were kind of caught off guard with the crazy growth in a very weird way. We didn’t prepare for the growth, so when it happened, we raised more money to meet that demand and we believe it can only get better,” he said, attributing the company’s mammoth seed raise to a 5x boost in customer base and transaction volume.

Dash’s seed round, led by New York-based Insight Venture Partners, is one of the largest of its kind in Africa; only PalmPay’s $40 million tops it at the moment. The round, which comes after a $500,000 pre-seed, continues a list of fintech deals amid a wave of innovation rippling through the sector, which accounted for up to 60% of Africa’s total VC funding last year.

This deal is also noteworthy because it takes attention from Nigeria, Africa’s hottest fintech ecosystem, to neighboring Ghana, where venture capital raised by its startups reached a meager $167 million last year.

Other investors in the round include Global Founders Capital and 4DX Ventures. They participated alongside ASK Capital, Techstars, Guillaume Pousaz’s Zinal Growth Partners, Jitendra Gupta of Jupiter Money, Amrish Rau of Pine Labs, the founders of Moss, executives from ProcessOut and the founders of PennyLane. 

The funding will help the Techstars-backed company expand to new markets such as Tanzania and South Africa, get the licenses needed to operate there, build out its team, invest in technology and launch new features.

Sage acquires remaining stake in retail management platform Brightpearl for $340M

Enterprise software giant Sage has acquired the remaining stake in Brightpearl, originally a UK-based startup in cloud retail management, for $340m. Brightpearl provides a SaaS-based retail operating system, enabling real-time business insights.

Sage previously owned 17% of the Bristol, UK-based startup, which MMC Ventures, a UK Series A investor, backed in 2014. The startup had previously raised $15m in 2018 and $11m in 2016.

The consideration for the 83% of Brightpearl that Sage does not already own is $299m (£226m), which will be funded from Sage’s existing cash and available liquidity.

Brightpearl CEO Derek O’Carroll said: “Bringing our two teams together will help combine the retail strength of Brightpearl and the scale, brand and financial expertise of Sage.”

In a statement, the Sage said that for the year ending December 2021, Brightpearl is expected to generate revenues of $27m (£20m), representing growth of around 50% compared to the prior year, and to achieve operating profit around the breakeven level.

The transaction is subject to regulatory clearance under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act in the US, and is expected to close in January 2022.

Steve Hare, Chief Executive Officer of Sage, commented: “Sage’s purpose is to knock down barriers so everyone can thrive. Together, Sage and Brightpearl will remove the barriers that hold back retailers and wholesalers, streamlining their systems and enabling them to focus on growth. I’m delighted to welcome Brightpearl, its management team and colleagues to Sage, and look forward to executing on our strategic priorities together and delivering accelerated growth.”

Writing on linkedIn, former Co-founder Andrew Mulvenna said: “This is a fantastic end to a chapter started 14 years ago when Chris Tanner and I started the business with the vision to help every small retailer digitise their data and workflows and embrace omni-channel retail and become one of the success stories of tomorrow…Our CEO Derek O’Carroll and team have been exceptional, and there are too many others to mention. Their fingerprints are also all over the success enjoyed today.”

Alibaba undergoes major management reshuffle

Alibaba is reassigning roles to four of its executives in one of the biggest reshuffles in its recent history, the company announced on Monday morning.

Maggie Wu, the e-commerce titan’s former chief financial officer, will step down next April and be replaced by Toby Xu, current deputy CFO. Wu will continue to be a partner in Alibaba Partnership, an exclusive group of personnel with major influence on the company’s directions, and will remain as an executive director on the Alibaba board.

Wu was instrumental in Alibaba’s three public listings since she joined about 15 years ago: Alibaba.com (the firm’s B2B marketplace) on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2007, Alibaba Group Holding on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014 and on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2019. Alibaba is one of the U.S.-listed Chinese firms that have pursued secondary listings in Hong Kong amid rising U.S.-China tensions.

Founded in 1999, Alibaba already went through a major reshuffle when Jack Ma passed the torch as CEO to Daniel Zhang in 2015 and further appointed him as chairman in 2019.

“The announcement of Alibaba’s CFO transition today is the culmination of extensive preparation over many years and a part of Alibaba’s leadership succession planning,” said Wu in a statement.

“The markets will always have ups and downs, but Alibaba has ambitious long-term goals. We are in a relay race and we must have new generations of talent to take the company forward. I trust Toby even more than I trusted myself when I first took up the CFO position years ago,” she added.

Xu joined Alibaba from PwC three years ago and first appeared as deputy CFO at the firm’s investor day last year. He has overseen several major deals at Alibaba, including the e-commerce titan’s partnership with Starbucks in China.

Alongside the CFO succession, Alibaba also unveiled major reorganization to buttress its two-pronged strategy of domestic and international e-commerce, Daniel Zhang said in an internal letter.

Jiang Fan, who steered the firm’s core revenue drivers, its consumer-facing marketplaces in China, for years, will lead the newly-formed International Digital Commerce. The international unit includes Southeast Asia-focused Lazada, in which Alibaba acquired control in 2016.

“We will continue to focus on becoming a truly globalized company, and we believe that overseas markets present many exciting potential and opportunities for us to capture,” wrote Zhang in his letter.

Meanwhile, the firm’s domestic consumer-oriented and wholesale marketplaces will be merged to form the new China Digital Commerce unit and come under the stewardship of Trudy Dai. Dai has been spearheading two of Alibaba’s new growth drivers, Taobao Deals, its bazaar targeting lower-income demographics in China, and Taocaicai, its neighborhood grocery service.