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**Good morning. **

It’s raining money in African tech this week. Paymob has raised $35 million. Spiro also secured more debt funding, and e-finance gets shareholder approval for its Tamweely deal in Egypt.

Speaking of money, Kenyan TikTok creators may soon see less of it in their payouts. TikTok is asking creators for their tax and residency details as it prepares to comply with Kenya’s digital content tax rules. Kenya has applied withholding tax to digital content monetisation since 2023, with the country’s taxman listing rates of 5% for residents and 20% for non-residents. TikTok hasn’t said when it will start deducting the tax or which payouts will be affected.

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• e-finance gets shareholder approval for Tamweely deal
• Spiro secures debt for expansion
• Paymob raises $35 million
• StanChart chases Nakumatt debt
• World Wide Web 3
• Opportunities

M&A

e-finance shareholders have approved the fintech’s Tamweely deal

Image Source: Tenor

e-finance, the publicly listed Egyptian fintech group, has secured shareholder approval to acquire 99.32% of micro-lender Tamweely in a cash-and-share deal that values the lender at EGP6.4 billion ($122 million). The deal, first announced in August, gives e-finance another piece of Egypt’s consumer and small-business financial services market.

Explain like I’m new here: e-finance is best known for the digital infrastructure behind Egypt’s government payments. Tamweely adds something different: credit. The acquisition gives e-finance exposure to microfinance customers who need working capital, not just the payment rails moving money around.

The transaction has two parts. e-finance will pay EGP956 million ($18 million) in cash upfront, with another payment tied to Tamweely’s future financial performance due in 2028. It will also issue 146.1 million new shares to Turin Egypt, Tamweely’s major shareholder, giving Turin a 4.04% stake in e-finance.

Between the lines: e-finance is becoming less of a payments infrastructure company and more of a financial services platform. Crucially, e-finance’s recent moves are starting to connect. In August, it also bought an 8% stake in Wilzy, a digital wealth management platform, for EGP100 million ($2 million).

Put the pieces together, and the strategy gets clearer: e-finance wants to be deeply embedded in users’ financial journey: payments, lending, and investing. It can potentially cross-sell across those businesses and capture more value from customers it already touches.

Zoom out: e-finance is assembling a financial ecosystem under one roof. The question now is whether those pieces can work together well enough to become more valuable as a group than they are separately.

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E-mobility

Spiro doubles green debt facility to $36 million

Image Source: Spiro

Spiro, a pan-African electric mobility startup, has secured an additional $18 million from the Africa Go Green Fund. The new capital doubles the climate fund’s debt commitment to $36 million in under ten months, backing the expansion of Spiro’s electric motorcycle and battery swapping footprint across Uganda and Rwanda.

**Explain like I’m new here: **Commercial motorcycle taxis form the backbone of African urban transit, but volatilepetrol prices routinely swallow driver income. Spiro overcomes this by separating the vehicle from its power source. Drivers buy the motorcycle, but subscribe to the battery, swapping depleted units for charged ones at street hubs in seconds. Having secured $270 million in equity in June to push total funding past $550 million, Spiro is now leveraging fresh debt to rapidly scale its charging grid.

**Between the lines: **Lenders doubling their exposure in under a year signals that Spiro is transitioning from a tech venture into a bankable energy utility. Motorcycle sales serve merely as the entry point to onboard riders. The true long-term economic engine is the recurring, high-margin revenue from battery swaps once fleet density takes hold.

While regional rivals operate on leaner capital structures, Spiro is deploying its capital advantage to eliminate rider range anxiety through dense mega swap stations. Institutional debt funds are backing this aggressive expansion because Spiro’s mature markets are already cash positive, showing that high network utilisation yields reliable returns.

**What’s next? **Keep an eye on Spiro’s ambitions beyond transport. After acquiring UK-based engineering firm Coexlion with plans to open its battery infrastructure to third parties, the company is preparing to monetise its network as distributed energy storage for regional power grids.

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Fintech

Egypt’s Paymob raises $35 million in pre-Series C funding round

Image Source: Tenor

For years, African fintech was mostly about getting people onto digital payments. Paymob, the Egyptian fintech, is now playing a slightly different game: making it easier for businesses to accept whatever payment customers happen to prefer.

It is a boring problem until you realise how much money and hassle it is. A merchant expanding across the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) can end up dealing with multiple payment methods, separate integrations, and settlement processes. Paymob wants to put all of that behind one door.

**What’s new? **On Monday, the fintech announced a $35 million pre-Series C round, co-led by Mubadala, the sovereign investor of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). Paymob said its revenue tripled in 18 months, while revenue from the Gulf has grown sevenfold and now makes up almost half of its business. It has also added about 20,000 merchants across three Gulf markets since getting its UAE payments licence in January 2025.

What to watch: Paymob raised $50 million in its 2022 Series B and an additional $22 million Series B extension in 2024, taking that round to $72 million. The new $35 million round takes its disclosed funding, including Series A rounds, to $125.5 million; the fintech is now shifting from proving that it can build a payments business in Egypt to proving that it can operate as a regional financial infrastructure company.

Third, watch Mubadala’s portfolio: The sovereign investor is not approaching fintech as a single bet on consumer apps. Its recent UAE activity points towards infrastructure: helping SMEs obtain capital, digitising financial access, building payment rails and supporting tech platforms that can scale from the UAE into the wider Gulf region. CredibleX, a fintech that raised $15 million Series A led by Mubadala in May, and Paymob are particularly interesting when viewed together because they touch two sides of the same SME economy: getting paid and getting financed.

**There is another useful piece of context here: **Mubadala already has exposure to some of the region’s major fintech stories. Reuters reported on September 14 that it was among the previous investors in Tabby, a Gulf-focused fintech, which has since reached a $6.5 billion valuation. Tabby is much more consumer finance-oriented than Paymob, but together they illustrate the breadth of the Gulf’s fintech opportunity: payments infrastructure, consumer finance, merchant finance, and financial services are converging. And Mubadala, beyond the fact that a government-run facility is actively investing, seems to be backing the strongest bets.

What to watch next: Following the raise, Paymob has said it is planning a wider Gulf expansion and pushing into agentic commerce.

Banking

StanChart moves to auction land over Nakumatt debt

Image Source: Tenor

Standard Chartered Bank Kenya, a tier-1 lender, is moving to seize rental income and sell five prime properties to recover more than KES 1.9 billion ($14.7 million) in defaulted loans advanced to the collapsed retailer Nakumatt Holdings.

**Explain like I’m new here: **Nakumatt was once East Africa’s dominant retail chain, operating over 60 stores before succumbing to a severe cash flow crisis and an estimated KES 30 billion ($232 million) debt burden in 2017. Years before its downfall, affiliated entities Creative Enterprises and Nakumatt Investments charged real estate in Nairobi, Mombasa, and Nakuru to back the retailer’s aggressive expansion.

Standard Chartered faced years of legal gridlock while attempting to serve statutory recovery notices on corporate directors. After winning a High Court ruling in 2025 that permitted public notices, statutory grace periods expired without payment, clearing the legal path for the lender to liquidate the assets.

**Between the lines: **This statutory enforcement highlights a tough decade-long fallout from major corporate insolvencies and the crippling cost of legal delays in African banking.

When the land was originally pledged between 2011 and 2012, the principal sum secured was only KES 119 million ($922,000), comprising KES 26.5 million ($205,000) from Creative Enterprises and KES 92.55 million ($717,000) from Nakumatt Investments.

Over fifteen years, unfulfilled overdrafts and unpaid import invoice financing of KES 967 million ($7.5 million), along with $7.33 million in foreign currency facilities, inflated the total balance to KES 1.9 billion ($14.7 million). Appointing receivers over rental streams while enforcing forced sales allows the bank to mitigate ongoing balance sheet erosion and bypass further debtor stalling.

**What’s next? **Standard Chartered will commence public auctions once the statutory 40-day notice period concludes. The upcoming sales will show whether buyers are still willing to purchase commercial properties in Kenya’s major cities and at what prices.

CRYPTO TRACKER

The World Wide Web3

Source:

Coin Name

Current Value

Day

Month

Bitcoin $85,180

+ 4.42%

+ 11.82%

Ether $2,720

+ 1.79%

+ 14.19%

Sui $0.03193

+ 12.37%

+ 285.66%

Solana $116

+ 3.47%

+ 24.41%

* Data as of 06.30 AM WAT, September 22, 2026.

Opportunities

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Written by: Emmanuel Nwosu and Kenn Abuya

Edited by: Emmanuel Nwosu & Ganiu Oloruntade

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