Startup funding, launches, and venture capital activity
STACX is a brand deal pipeline manager, payment tracker, rate calculator, and invoice generator built by a Ghanaian tech content creator with 500,000+ followers across platforms. It launched in April 2026. It is iOS-only in an Android-dominant market.
The Norwegian-Chinese parent values its 9.5 percent stake at $294.6 million, implying a total OPay valuation of $3.1 billion — up from $2 billion at its 2021 SoftBank round. The company processes $12 billion in monthly transactions across 50 million Nigerian users.
The seed round was led by VoLo Earth Ventures. Refiant's compression technology shrinks a 120-billion-parameter model to run on 12GB of RAM, using 80 percent less energy. The implications for African deployment are obvious.
CEO Wale Tinubu told Reuters the drilling campaign targets assets acquired from ConocoPhillips and Eni. Current production is 32,000 barrels a day across infrastructure built for 483,000. The Gulf crisis is the funding catalyst. Ghana and Ivory Coast are on the expansion list.
The 18-month pilot used POS transaction data as the credit proxy. Average loan size is 1 percent of annual revenue. The digitised collateral framework ties repayment to platform access. Now they want to scale to N500 billion.
The ten-year national spectrum management framework will govern how frequencies are priced, allocated, and shared as 5G licensing begins.
MTN Ghana CEO Stephen Blewett disclosed that 157 sites are currently degraded from fibre damage. The industry recorded 10,233 cable cuts between January and November 2025 at a repair cost of $17.4 million. Road construction causes 20.7 percent. Theft and vandalism cause 14 percent.
Gold Fields handed over the 30-year concession on 18 April. Ibrahim Mahama's company scored 93.15 percent in a four-bidder tender. A $205 million syndicated loan from Stanbic, Standard Bank, Ecobank, and Absa backs the acquisition. The mine has 3.55 million ounces remaining.
Less than 5 percent of intra-African trade is credit-insured. 95 percent of Ghanaian businesses cannot secure loans because they lack physical collateral. The Accra forum brought Coface's risk intelligence, Societe Generale's lending perspective, and FEDCO's exporter experience to the same table.
Shaibu Haruna says the separation from MTN Ghana allows MMFL to act as a fintech directly rather than a fintech-enabler inside a telco.
Kumasi-based Sesi Technologies joins nine other African startups in this year's Qualcomm mentorship. Its Qualcomm project is an AI field device for early cocoa quality assessment — the kind of tool COCOBOD has been trying to deploy at scale for a decade.
