Finance, VC & PE

Venture capital investments exceeded R16 billion over the last decade, with AI emerging as the next major growth driver for South African start-ups.

Wema Bank is the first commercial bank to distribute Duplo's software. The move reflects an emerging pattern across Africa's financial services industry in the past three years: banks and payment networks partnering with fintech startups to offer their business customers software they want, without building it themselves.

MetaX, a Chinese maker of graphics processing units (GPUs), has confidentially filed for a listing in Hong Kong, according to people familiar with the matter. The Shanghai-based company was targeting an initial public offering (IPO) by the end of this year, according to the sources, who asked not to be identified because the information was confidential. MetaX was working with Huatai International Financial Holdings on the potential share sale, the people said. The company did not immediately...

Today's links AI solipsists and AI cynics: You don't have to believe that AI "works" to believe that it's a good investment. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Malware v stolen computer; Industrial material made from old coffee and melted cups; Austro-Germany's weird tunnels; Health data v Silicon Valley; Amusement parks v load-balancing. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: Y

A host of U.S. hotel operators ​and online travel platforms are set to release second-quarter earnings starting next week, and investors ‌will weigh optimism from a FIFA World Cup boost against ...

The mayors of Charleston, South Carolina, and Boise, Idaho, make the case for investing in the improvement and innovation of local government.

The Vaal University of Technology modernises specialist teaching laboratories and a postgraduate space at its Vanderbijlpark campus.

ED Scraps Tool to Investigate Discrimination Sara Weissman Fri, 07/24/2026 - 03:00 AM For decades, the Office for Civil Rights investigated whether educational institutions’ policies disparately impacted minority groups in discriminatory ways. Not anymore. Byline(s) Sara Weissman

Every WhatsApp conversation, location ping, cloud backup and piece of metadata can help investigators reconstruct relationships that might once have remained hidden.

AI methods promise to support autism spectrum condition (ASC) diagnostics in adults, a complex and time-consuming process, that is characterized by a shortage of specialized clinicians. To date, clinicians' needs and their interaction with such AI-based support remain underexplored. Our work aims to develop and evaluate an AI-based clinical decision support system (CDSS) for ASC assessment, and to investigate how it impacts clinicians' decision-making. By interviewing clinicians of varying exper

I asked an early-stage investor a simple question: Tell me about a startup that discovered, too late, that it wasn’t allowed to operate the way it had built itself to operate. He gave me three companies. For each one, his answer was some version of the same thing: They haven’t gotten far enough yet for that to be an issue. Still testing. Hasn’t hit the government hurdles. Hasn’t reached the point where it would matter. That wasn’t a bad answer. It was an honest one, from someone whose returns re

This paper investigates the adversarial manipulation of the ranked recommendations produced by web-augmented large language models (LLMs). When an LLM answers a recommendation query by retrieving and reading live webpages, it acts as a recommender, and each retrieved page becomes a potential attack surface. Prior work has examined fabricated products, retrieval poisoning, and rank promotion. However, these studies do not compare how different edits to an already retrieved page change the model's

Simon Johnson is a professor of entrepreneurship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), he won a joint Nobel Prize for economics in 2024 for his research into how institutions shape national prosperity. On June 8, the British government announced Johnson as chair of its new AI Economics Institute. In this interview, conducted on the sidelines of the UBS Asian Investment Conference in Hong Kong, Johnson discussed the.

The EU will face a flat 10% tariff from Friday following the outcome of a US investigation into trade in products made with forced labour, a European Commission spokesperson said. Washington announced ...

Companies make biggest US investment push in years to build up tech capabilities and avoid Donald Trump’s tariffs

Euronext NV is considering creating a market for private securities, potentially ramping up competition with the London Stock Exchange Group Plc as bourses seek to offer investors access to ...

CXMT is stoking fears that its blockbuster stock market debut could pull cash from China's equities.

China’s A-share market has seen another high-profile divorce case result in a massive asset split, involving the transfer of 6 billion yuan (US$886 million) – the highest this year – and raising concerns over corporate governance stability and share price fluctuations. Although the scope of the divorce settlement is not at all comparable to that of Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates, it has made tens of thousands of retail investors worry about their portfolio holdings and paper wealth. Maxone...

This study investigates how writers of high-velocity Chinese digital romance fiction negotiate the arrival of generative AI at the desk. Drawing on a 4-year multi-sited digital ethnography (2021–2025) and interviews with 34 writers on Jinjiang Literature City alongside sustained forum observation and platform-discourse analysis, this article tracks how authors of serial romance work under the time discipline of the daily-update treadmill in the presence of large language models (LLMs). I argue t

The first known runaway AI agent - or a very bad marketing stunt? Martin Alderson's commentary on the OpenAI accidental cyberattack against Hugging Face includes a couple of details I hadn't considered. First, Hugging Face offers a truly rich target if you're trying to find potential vulnerabilities that require executing arbitrary code: Hugging Face has an enormous attack surface. They have more interfaces than I can count which run untrusted models and code. While they definitely have invested

MEMORANDUM FOR THE UNITED STATES TRADE REPRESENTATIVE Subject: Actions by the United States in the Investigations under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 of the Acts, Policies, and Practices of 60 Economies Related to the Failure of Each Economy to Impose and Effectively Enforce a Prohibition on the Importation of Goods Produced with […] The post Actions by the United States in the Investigations under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 of the Acts, Policies, and Practices of 60 Economies R

We investigate the effectiveness of interventions that reduce the visibility of offensive content on the local social platform Nextdoor. Content filtering -- hiding or downranking offensive content that brushes against a platform's rules without clearly breaking them -- is deployed across virtually every major platform, yet almost no field evidence exists on whether it changes user behavior. We report two large-scale randomized controlled trials, each involving 100,000 users. Study 1 (2022) test

IBM's CEO highlighted growing mainframe hardware capacity, and said software should "catch back up" within a year.

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters. It’s not quite the “Mississippi Miracle,” but California’s reading scores have been inching upwards since the state poured billions into changing the way students learn to read. A shortage of literacy coaches, however, may be preventing students from improving even more. In 2013, before California overhauled its […]

An investigation by Science and Retraction Watch has uncovered details about a clinical trial that resulted in the death of its sole patient: a 6-year-old girl with a rare genetic mutation affecting her cognitive development. Her death has never been reported publicly, even though the medical team published its preclinical work in Nature earlier this … Continue reading Exclusive: A couple paid more than $800,000 for a gene-editing therapy for their daughter. She died, and it wasn’t made public

Airtel Africa has released its Q1 results for the quarter ended June 30th, 2026. The telecoms company has also confirmed London as listing venue for Airtel Money in 2026.

Wall Street is banking heavily on exchange-traded funds that give investors artificial intelligence exposure, according to JPMorgan Asset Management.

Le projet d’acquisition d’Electronic Arts par un consortium emmené par le PIF, le Fonds public d’investissement d’Arabie saoudite, est en bonne voie. Du moins du côté de l’Union européenne, qui a donné son feu vert à l’opération maousse costaud de 55 milliards de dollars. La Commission européenne a approuvé le projet d’acquisition du géant du […]

Generative models can support decision-making under uncertainty by producing ensembles of plausible future system trajectories, but statistical plausibility does not ensure structural feasibility. This study investigates whether post-sampling symbolic constraints can improve the reliability of generative trajectory modeling in dynamic graph-structured systems. A conditional diffusion model generates future graph-state trajectories from partial observations, while an external symbolic layer appli

The report comes at a critical time for optimistic investors like us at the Club.

WayaWaya joins a growing list of African fintechs recruiting experienced banking executives as they scale into regulated financial services.

Etched, founded by three Harvard dropouts, has created new chips and memory components that speed up inference on any AI model -- no GPUs required, it says.

Expedia Group has introduced STAR, an internal AI-assisted observability platform that helps engineers investigate production incidents using service telemetry and LLMs. Built with FastAPI, Datadog, Celery, Redis, and Langfuse, STAR follows structured workflows to analyze telemetry, generate root cause assessments, and support incident response while keeping engineers in the loop. By Leela Kumili

The 5th edition of Nigeria Fintech Forum holds on Thursday, July 30th, 2026, at Civic Centre, Victoria Island, Lagos.

Humanoid, a UK-based AI and robotics company building industrial humanoid robots, announced a $152 million Series A financing at a $1.35 billion post-money valuation.

Here are five key things investors need to know to start the trading day.

Designing and developing a new medicine is an expensive, failure-prone scientific challenge. A new drug can take many years to develop, at the cost of a significant investment. And even then, most possible candidates never reach the patient. For biologic medicines, therapies made from engineered proteins rather than synthetic chemistry (which are often used to…

What GAO Found The Economic Growth and Regulatory Paperwork Reduction Act of 1996 (EGRPRA) requires the federal banking agencies to solicit and review public comments on their regulations to identify and eliminate outdated, unnecessary, or unduly burdensome regulations on insured depository institutions, as appropriate. How Federal Banking Agencies Conduct Decennial EGRPRA Reviews Outcomes from the EGRPRA reviews are often difficult to identify, and their connection to subsequent regulatory acti

Numerous studies have analyzed the use of hybrid quantum-classical convolutional neural networks as a promising alternative to classical deep learning. However, network components on quantum hardware impose fundamental limitations, while the scalability of quantum circuits leads to trainability issues. In this work, we investigate whether small, classically-emulated quantum circuit components can play a meaningful role within complex models, offering an alternative to purely classical convolutio