Comment on Buffett Salary: Still $100,000

Catalyst Fund, a global accelerator managed by BFA Global, announced the 8th cohort for its Inclusive Fintech Program today. The accelerator runs the flagship program annually and with a focus on Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Mexico and India, selected startups receive £80,000 (~$100,000) in grant capital, six months of support and connections with follow-on investors. In 2020, all five countries had representatives in the accelerator.

Tokopedia, Lazada, Shopee, and other firms created an e-commerce market in Indonesia in the past decade, making it possible for consumers to shop online in the island nation. But as is true in other Asian markets, most small retailers and mom-and-pop stores in the Southeast Asian country still face a myriad of challenges in sourcing inventory and working capital, and continue to rely on an age-old supply chain network. Nipun Mehra, a former executive of Flipkart in India, and Derry Sakti, who oversaw consumer goods giant P&G’s operations in Indonesia, began to explore opportunities to address this in 2019. “Much like India, much of the Indonesian retail market is unorganized.

The media licensing business is a massive market, but much of the work involved is still handled manually through emails and spreadsheets. A startup called Flowhaven is working to change that. The company, which has now closed on $16 million in Series A funding, helps brands to manage their licensing partnerships, including the account management aspects, the individual product information, the financial information, and more. The new round was led by Sapphire Sport, the part of Sapphire Ventures that specializes in sports, media and lifestyle brands.

Cowrywise, a Nigerian fintech startup that offers digital wealth management and financial planning solutions, has raised $3 million in pre-Series A funding. Quona Capital led the round as Tsadik Foundation, Gumroad CEO Sahil Lavingia, and a syndicate of Nigerian angel investors locally and in the diaspora participated. The company previously raised more than $500,000 through a combination of equity financing and grants. The idea for Cowrywise came when CEO Razaq Ahmed was an investment analyst with Meristem covering equities and making recommendations to retail and wealth management clients.

WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned popular messaging app with more than 2 billion users, has been getting a lot of heat and losing users in recent weeks after announcing (and then delaying) changes to how it uses your data. It’s not done with how it’s tweaking privacy and security. Now, it’s adding a new biometric feature to the service to bring in a new authentication layer for those using its web and desktop versions. The company said that from today, it will let people add in a fingerprint, face, or iris scan to use WhatsApp on desktop or web by linking it to your mobile app, to be used alongside the existing QR code authentication. The feature is coming on the heels of what WhatsApp is describing as a “visual refresh” of the WhatsApp web page on the Android and iOS apps for linking and managing devices connected to your account.

Levity, which has been operating in stealth (until now), is the latest no-code company to throw its wares into the ring, having picked up $1.7M in pre-seed funding led by Gil Dibner’s Angular Ventures. The Berlin-based startup wants to bring AI-powered workflow automation to anyone, letting knowldge workers automate tedious, repetitive and manual parts of their job without the need to learn how to code. Suitable for customer service, marketing, operations, HR, and more, Levity has elected to be a horizontal offering from the get-go.