INVESTMENT

African startup funding platform Investable.Africa has launched in open beta, giving founders access to a database of more than 4,000 investing firms and investors free access to deal flow from all 54 African countries.

Madica, a structured pre-seed investment programme for African startups, has secured US$6 million in additional capital from Flourish Ventures to extend its investment pilot by three years.

The Dallas-based investment firm Disruptive, whose past bets include Palantir, Airbnb, and Spotify, announced a $10 billion fund to back at least 10 late-stage companies, with checks of up to $1 billion, it said Tuesday.

Tanzanian e-health startup Medikea has raised US$1.2 million in pre-seed funding as it opens two new clinics and targets a network of 10 facilities by the end of next year.

Customer-first travel platform Onto has launched its services and raised $1 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Stargazer Fund, with participation from Singapore-based White Venture Capital.

Vectorial, an AI startup building human behaviour simulation tools for product development, has raised $3 million in a funding round led by SenseAI Ventures. Other participants include Smilegate, Berkeley SkyDeck, Berkeley AI Research Lab, Dent Capital, Motus Ventures, SUM Ventures and angel investors

Karta AI, a voice AI platform for inbound customer operations across banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), has raised $3 million in a seed funding round led by PeerCapital and Cedar Hill Capital. Wyser VC, CDM Capital and Seedstars also participated in the round.

NewView Capital recently partnered with Carta. The collaboration combines NewView’s secondary deal-structuring experience with Carta’s equity platform. Ravi Viswanathan, founder and managing partner of NewView, pitches this as a way to help startups launch and manage liquidity programs more seamlessly.

Egyptian prop-tech startup Aqar Exit has secured an investment of EGP10 million ($183,000) from businessman Ayman Mamdouh Abbas, executive chairman of Intro Holding Group, in return for a 10 per cent stake in the company.

OpenAI is reportedly close to securing another mega round of private funding, rather than plowing ahead with an IPO. The AI lab is working on raising up to $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion pre-money valuation

Legal AI startup Legora announced Wednesday that it raised a $550 million Series E round, valuing it at $8.8 billion. The company helps automate and assist with workflow tasks for legal professionals, as the industry moves beyond AI assistants to AI services that help them get work done.

Ten African startups have been named semifinalists for the Milken-Motsepe Prize in Circular Economy, and will share US$500,000 in unrestricted funding as they compete for the US$1 million grand prize.