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CrowdForce raises $3.6M to increase access to cash for underserved communities in Nigeria

TechCrunch

The company was launched in 2015 by Oluwatomi Ayorinde and Damilola Ayorinde as MobileForms, a data collection agent network. In 2018, the company got its first big break while working on TraderMoni, a small loan scheme for micro traders pioneered by the Nigerian government.

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Packworks makes operations easier for sari-sari stores in the Philippines

TechCrunch

It was founded in 2018, with an initial client base of five sari-sari store partners. The Pack SuperStore app enables sari-sari owners to process their business’ inventory, bookkeeping and data collection. Packworks started after founders Hubert Yap, Bing Tan and Ibba Bernando took a motorcycle journey to rural communities.

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Latent AI, which says it can compress common AI models by 10x, lands some key backing

TechCrunch

Of course, given that the world is now rife with data-collecting-devices and that there’s an enormous interest in making that data actionable without having to send it back and forth to a distant cloud, there are many other companies and projects with the same objective as Latent AI. And what of those rivals?

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InstaDeep’s acquisition is a classic case of an African startup gone global 

TechCrunch

The bootstrapped company — which didn’t receive outside capital until 2018 — depended on original AI research that Beguir published , which led to the startup being discovered by specialized clients who later became partners and investors, such as DeepMind, Google and its future acquirer BioNTech. That was crazy.

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Is ocean conservation the next climate tech? 7 investors explain why they’re all in

TechCrunch

We have to think beyond community beach cleanups — there are actually extremely investable approaches to solving the plastic problem.” Seafood traceability solutions; ropeless traps; microalgae and seaweed are a hugely untapped resource with multiple market opportunities; ocean and weather data collection and analysis.

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Astronomer ready for its next mission after Datakin acquisition, $213M Series C

TechCrunch

The company began developing its modern data orchestration tools, powered by Apache Airflow, an open source platform for data engineering pipelines, that enables users to build, run and observe pipelines-as-code, and started driving that project in 2018. to make data analytics more accessible. Image Credits: Astonomer.

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Twitter’s API access changes are chasing away third-party developers

TechCrunch

On August 12, Twitter launched a complete rebuild of its 2012 API, with new endpoints for data collection, new access levels and a new developer portal. Notably, the version 2 API was presented as a step in mending the notoriously fractious relationship between Twitter and its third-party developer community.