This was revealed on Monday by Co-founder and Chief Executive Femi Aluko, who described the company’s rise as a clear sign that the on-demand model can succeed at scale in Africa. 

In a LinkedIn post, he said: “Chowdeck just hit 2 million users!” He recalled the company’s early days, noting: “It feels like just yesterday that we started with three riders and two restaurant partners. We now have more than 20k riders across 14 cities in Nigeria and Ghana.”

Chowdeck’s recent drive shows how quickly it has moved from a small experiment to a major logistics company. Founded in 2021, the company has expanded into urban markets including Lagos, Abuja, Accra, and Kumasi.

Its network of over 20,000 riders now supports a growing mix of restaurant deliveries, groceries, and everyday essentials.

The latest achievement comes months after Chowdeck secured $9 million in Series A funding, an investment led by Novastar Ventures with participation from Y Combinator, AAIC Investment, Rebel Fund, GFR Fund, Kaleo, HoaQ, and a series of angel investors, including Paystack founders Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi. 

The company said the capital would support its expansion plans in both Nigeria and Ghana and speed up its move into quick commerce.

That strategy, built around dark stores and hyperlocal fulfilment hubs, is designed to cut delivery times. Chowdeck sees it as the backbone of a bigger vision to build what Aluko has previously described as “Africa’s number one super app.”

Africa’s food-delivery sector is expanding at double-digit rates each year, driven by smartphone growth, denser cities, and high demand for convenience. 

While larger global companies such as Jumia Food have struggled to maintain profit, Chowdeck’s locally tuned approach has helped it sidestep many of those challenges.

Aluko, in his message, credited users and partners for the company’s rise. “We are incredibly proud of the technology we’ve built and the logistics network we have established. But most importantly, we are proud of our ecosystem: our customers, our riders, and our vendor partners.” 

He added: “I am really grateful to our team, customers, riders and partners for coming on this journey with us. Thank you so much for coming on this journey with us. It’s still Day 1!”

Competition in Africa’s delivery market is far from settled, but Chowdeck is highly focused on enlarging its lead and testing how far its model can stretch across the continent.

The raise, led by Andreessen Horowitz with backing from Activant Capital, Khosla Ventures and several others, brings new board members on deck as the company prepares for a wider commercial sprint.

The funding gives Stuut room to enhance six core functions it already targets, including collections, payments, cash application, deductions, credits and disputes. These are the areas where companies with heavy transaction volumes often struggle the most.

Many still depend on staff who spend long days chasing customer payments, combing through portals and matching records by hand. For some firms, that drag can wipe out up to 5% of EBITDA.

Rather than treating accounts receivable as a set of tools that still rely on humans, Stuut built its platform as a worker that completes each step itself. It reads customer patterns, manages outreach, resolves disputes and pulls information from different systems without waiting for someone to guide it. 

Many firms have promised speed, but Stuut’s assertion is different. The company says it removes manual steps entirely.

Tarek Alaruri, co-founder and chief executive said the underlying technology only recently became possible. “The technology to actually automate this work didn’t exist 18 months ago when we started Stuut,” he said. “We can now handle exceptions and complexity, learn from each interaction, work across disconnected systems, and execute tasks end-to-end. Previous solutions help humans click buttons faster. We eliminate the clicking entirely and are helping brands collect millions more in previously lost revenue.”

The company says implementation takes days rather than the six-month to 18-month rollouts common with older software. Early adopters such as ZoomInfo, Bishop Lifting, Honeywell and PerkinElmer are already using the system, with reported reductions of 40% in overdue balances and cuts of up to 70% in manual workload.

Honeywell’s Head of Quote to Cash, Razvan Bratu, said the impact is immediate. “Stuut is transforming our accounts receivable operations on a daily basis. We’re collecting faster from the in-scope customers, our cash flow is improving, and our team has more time to focus on white gloves service for top customers,” he noted. “The platform handles the routine work so our people drive increased real business value.”

Venture supporters say Stuut Technologies is moving the industry towards fully autonomous financial operations. “Accounts receivable is one of the finance functions still dominated by manual work. Stuut changes that by replacing repetitive AR tasks with software that actually does the work–and does it better,” said Seema Amble of Andreessen Horowitz. She added that the company’s early results show clear returns for clients.

Activant Capital’s Steve Sarracino said this is a good difference in how businesses will run their finance stack. “We backed Stuut because they’re redefining AR as an autonomous system of intelligence that learns, executes, and compounds value over time. This is an exciting move from tool-centric software to results-centric operations.”

With new capital and pressure on companies to speed up cash recovery, Stuut is changing the slow processes and ageing tools in the sector.

The funding brings fresh support to a company trying to solve the problems of vast submission volumes, limited talent, and tools that haven’t kept pace with the insurance industry’s demands. 

The round was led by Stellaris Venture Partners, with backing from Y Combinator and Arali Ventures.

Pibit.AI’s founder Akash Agarwal watched the slow, paperwork-heavy world his father worked in and later saw tech-driven industries move faster while underwriting barely changed. That contrast eventually impacted the central idea behind the business.

At the centre of the company’s features is CURE, a consolidated environment that takes an application from raw submission to risk-rated output. It brings together document intelligence, triage tools, research layers, risk modelling and workflow management in one system, rather than leaving underwriters to jump between fragmented tools. 

The platform includes ClearCURE, DocumentCURE, ResearchCURE, RiskCURE and WorkflowCURE, each responsible for a step that used to rely heavily on manual effort.

Agarwal says the aim isn’t to remove the underwriter but to give them a system that can be trusted. “Pibit.AI was built around one idea: that AI should empower underwriters, not replace them,” he said.

“Too many systems prioritise speed over trust. We’re building something that’s transparent, explainable, and decision-ready – a system that gives underwriters confidence in every output while helping them move faster than ever before.”

Companies using the platform are already reporting a change in how much work their teams can handle. Several clients, including HDVI, Shepherd Insurance, RMS Insurance Brokerage, Kinetic and Method Insurance Company, have seen underwriting cycles cut by as much as 85%, alongside increases in premium per underwriter and improvements in loss ratios. 

For businesses dealing with high submissions, these margins can determine whether growth is sustainable.

Operational leaders inside these firms say the benefits are not theoretical. Michaela Morrison, COO of Method Insurance Services, explained the impact clearly: “As a fast-moving company scaling our operations nationally, Pibit.AI played a key role in ensuring we achieved that growth without losing control.” She added, “Our outcomes aren’t magic; they are the direct product of thoughtful engineering and a team that genuinely listens.”

Kinetic’s CEO, Adam Price, also pointed to the expansion the system made possible. “Pibit.AI helps us to handle more than a billion dollars in submissions on an annual basis without scaling our overhead costs, and grow our business by close to 100% in premium because we’re able to get those looks and quotes up and running.”

For investors, underwriting is too important to remain slow or inconsistent. Stellaris Venture Partners’ Alok Goyal said the platform addresses that directly. “Underwriting has long been constrained by manual reviews, inconsistent data and tools that haven’t kept pace with rising submission volumes,” he said. 

“With CURE, Pibit.AI automates and unifies these workflows, improving accuracy, reducing costs and accelerating quote generation to drive higher revenue. We’re excited to partner with Akash and lead Pibit.AI’s Series A round as it scales.”

Pibit.AI now employs more than 125 people and plans to deepen its infrastructure, expand integrations and build more advanced risk models.

The company also intends to broaden its API capabilities and secure additional data partnerships, making the platform adaptable to new lines of insurance and emerging risk categories.

The funding also saw backing from Y Combinator, Afore Capital, and COTU Ventures, alongside several high-profile angel investors.

Founded by Akeed Azmi and David Reche, both former Careem operators, Cercli was built to solve a long-standing problem in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, fragmented HR systems and outdated compliance processes that fail to connect HR, payroll, and finance. 

The company’s new AI-native architecture aims to unify these operations under one intelligent platform.

In just a year, Cercli has recorded 10x revenue growth, processed over $100 million in payroll across 50 countries, and expanded its customer base to include both startups and large corporations such as Vision Bank, Backlite Media, Global Climate Finance Centre, Huspy, Lean Technologies, and Ziina.

With the new capital, Cercli plans to expand its global footprint, strengthen its engineering team, and roll out new AI-native products designed to automate and simplify HR operations for businesses of all sizes. 

The company is currently hiring top talent from global tech giants such as Google, Meta, and Rippling to ensure its platform remains fast, secure, and reliable.

Azmi explained that Cercli’s focus has always been on rebuilding HR infrastructure from the ground up, not just layering AI onto existing systems. “The legacy systems of the last 20 years, your SAPs, Oracles, Workdays, they were built for on-prem and the cloud. Now we’re entering an AI-native world,” he said. 

“We didn’t want to just integrate AI; we wanted to rethink the whole stack for how people and agents work together.”

That rethink is already boosting Cercli’s services. Its new AI-driven recruitment assistant, Cera, now allows companies to manage hiring from application to onboarding, all within the same system. 

Cercli’s internal operations also rely on AI, with treasury and reconciliation agents managing its finances as the company maintains an average 21% month-on-month revenue growth.

According to Robin Godenrath, founding partner at Picus Capital, Cercli’s integrated approach to workforce management and its early traction made the investment a natural choice. “We’ve seen this business model succeed globally within our portfolio, and we are excited to back Cercli as they continue to grow market share through new customers and product launches,” he said.

Cercli’s Series A round also represents Picus Capital’s first investment in the MENA region, highlighting growing investor trust in the region’s HR-tech potential, an industry projected to exceed $5.8 billion in value.

Cercli is scaling further, and its founders believe that being AI-native gives them a distinct advantage. “Customers are asking for everything in one place, and being AI-native allows us to build that unified experience far more quickly,” Azmi noted.

The startup wants to deliver a single, intelligent platform that manages people, data, and processes seamlessly across borders, and to do so faster than any legacy company ever could.

The funding comes only six months after its $5 million seed round, pushing its total capital raised to $30 million.

At the heart of FurtherAI’s mission is a goal to put an end to the inefficiencies that have long burdened insurance professionals. For decades, underwriters, brokers, and claims handlers have relied on outdated systems and manual processes, spending hours sifting through spreadsheets, PDFs, and disconnected databases. 

FurtherAI wants to change that by automating workflows across underwriting, claims, and compliance, giving insurers the freedom to focus on risk management and client service rather than administrative tasks.

“Insurance is the backbone of the economy, but the people running it have been stuck with outdated tools,” said Aman Gour, co-founder and CEO of FurtherAI. “With this funding, we’re doubling down on building AI workflows that give underwriters, brokers, and claims teams superpowers — freeing them to focus on the work that truly matters.”

The Series A round, which also saw participation from Nexus Venture Partners and Y Combinator, reiterates the current interest in specialised technology in the insurance space. The company plans to use the new funds to expand its catalogue of insurance-specific workflows, strengthen integrations with major carriers and brokers, and scale its go-to-market efforts amid accelerating demand.

The insurance industry, estimated at $7 trillion globally, faces a convergence of challenges, from climate risk to regulatory pressures and a shortage of skilled professionals. Many insurers have attempted to deploy generic automation tools, only to find them inadequate for the industry’s complex documentation and compliance needs. 

FurtherAI provides what it calls an insurance-native workspace, designed to integrate seamlessly with existing systems while delivering precision and scalability.

Sashank Gondala, co-founder and CTO of FurtherAI, explained the company’s hands-on model: “We’re excited to partner with the insurance industry to unlock real value with AI — automating the busy work and opening new avenues of growth. With our forward-deployed engineering model, insurance teams work side-by-side with an AI engineer to ensure impact at scale.”

Already, the firm’s technology processes billions in premiums annually, powering submissions, policy comparisons, and compliance checks for major industry players such as Accelerant, MSI, and Leavitt Group. Early adopters report measurable improvements, including a 15% boost in submission-to-quote ratios, over 95% accuracy in policy comparisons, and up to tenfold faster proposal generation.

“The FurtherAI team has been a fantastic partner in rapidly standing up complex enterprise workflows,” said Venkat Raman, chief bizOps officer at Accelerant. Similarly, Laurie Flanagan of Leavitt Group noted, “Implementing FurtherAI has been game-changing — faster turnarounds, higher accuracy, and a platform we can keep expanding.”

For Andreessen Horowitz, the investment shows FurtherAI’s potential to boost the sector. “FurtherAI is redefining how insurance gets done,” said Joe Schmidt, Partner at a16z. “Aman and Sashank are technical founders whose customers see them as true AI partners, not just AI tools. Their early traction signals a generational opportunity to transform insurance.”

With this latest funding round, FurtherAI appears well-positioned to boost digital transformation in insurance, as efficiency and expertise finally go hand in hand.

The round was led by Blume Ventures, with support from Schema Ventures, Vicus Ventures, Together Fund, DeVC, Medmountain Ventures, and strategic investors including Innovaccer, Memora Health, and existing customers.

The company is tackling one of healthcare’s biggest pain points which is patient phone calls. Despite digital options, 81% of patients in 2025 still use the phone to contact doctors, often facing long waits, confusing menus, or delayed responses. On the other side, understaffed front desks struggle to manage the volume, leading to frustration and burnout.

Confido’s platform removes the traditional phone tree. Its voice agents answer calls immediately, verify the caller, check insurance eligibility, and handle tasks such as referrals, refills, payments, updates, or appointment bookings. More complex issues are transferred to staff, with all interactions recorded directly into electronic health record (EHR) or practice management systems (PMS).

The need for such automation is increasing. The American Hospital Association has warned that hospitals are under severe financial strain while demand for round-the-clock access keeps growing. Many startups have entered this space in 2025, but Confido differentiates itself by offering a broader range of workflows beyond scheduling, giving providers higher efficiency and return on investment.

In less than a year, the company has scaled rapidly, serving more than one million patients today compared to just 150,000 in December 2024. Automation rates exceed 80%, with clients reporting reduced wait times, faster resolutions, and significant time savings for staff.

At Dallas Renal Group, results were immediate as 66% of patients confirmed appointments instantly on outbound calls, fewer than 6% required staff involvement, and inbound call wait times dropped to 15 seconds, saving nearly 50 staff hours in a single week. “Confido has helped make access faster, smoother, and far less stressful for everyone,” said Srinivas Danda, COO of Dallas Renal Group.

Confido’s Co-founder and CEO, Chetan Reddy, stressed the urgency of the moment. “Healthcare is at an inflection point. Labour shortages and rising patient demand mean practices can’t keep scaling front desks the way they used to. At the same time, building AI for healthcare isn’t like other industries – it requires deep empathy for both staff and patients. Our agents are designed to support people, not replace them, so patients get faster access and workers feel less stressed. That combination is what makes this moment so powerful.”

The company already operates across multiple specialities, including paediatrics, orthopaedics, nephrology, dermatology, gastroenterology, and pain medicine. Its roadmap goes beyond scheduling to include recalls, reactivation, payments, and care coordination, with speciality playbooks, audit trails, analytics, and first-call resolution metrics.

Investors are confident in Confido’s position. Sanjay Nath, partner at Blume Ventures, said: “Chetan, Vichar and the Confido team have gone incredibly deep into the trenches of the healthcare industry, having faced the pains of poor patient experience themselves – and have emerged with an offering that is transforming the way patient communication with providers is run. 

“It is clear to us that healthcare especially in the US is ripe for AI-led transformation, given the widespread administrative staff shortages, and Confido Health is well positioned to 10X the patient experience. We are very excited to lead this investment round and see a clear path to Confido becoming the market leader in this space, driven by a patient-first product ethos and close partnership with the provider ecosystem.”

Shubham Gupta, founding general partner at Together Fund, added: “Chetan, Vichar, and the Confido team have gone deeper than anyone we’ve seen in tackling the patient access problem. Their fully generative, multi-agent platform is not just a tech innovation — it’s already proving its impact in real-world provider settings by handling the communication bottlenecks that EHRs and legacy vendors have consistently failed at. 

“They are also building the most differentiated tech in this space focused on data & integrations not just voice. We’re excited to partner with them in building the market leader in AI-powered patient engagement.”

Confido Health believes that phones will remain healthcare’s most common entry point. In turning calls into efficient, human-like conversations, the company aims to become the standard infrastructure for patient communication across clinics and health systems of every size.

The acquisition follows Landbase’s $30 million Series A funding and is another step in its bid to dominate the go-to-market (GTM) technology space. 

Adauris is known for building intent signal systems that help B2B companies identify and convert high-intent leads through distributed content. Its tools have reached over 10 million impressions monthly and identified more than 45,000 potential prospects daily.

According to Landbase Chief Executive Daniel Saks, “We’re building the future of GTM: intelligent, connected, and deeply multimodal.” 

He described the integration as a key driver for the company’s “Vibe AI” vision, a software approach that allows users to express marketing goals in plain language, leaving execution to intelligent systems without the need for complex interfaces or manual processes.

With this deal, Landbase gains an experienced founding team:

• Logan Underwood, former Adauris CEO, will lead partnerships and oversee collaborations with agencies.
• Tina Haertel, former COO, will direct inbound marketing product development.
• Griffin Cook, former CTO, will head engineering for the inbound product line.

Former Adauris CEO, Underwood said, “We joined Landbase because it’s solving a critical market pain point: providing a unified approach to GTM, and combining inbound and outbound into single omni-channel campaigns. We saw the power of Landbase as a customer and a partner, and the impact is undeniable.”

The Adauris team has already contributed to Landbase’s first inbound-focused feature, a LinkedIn thought leadership posting tool. It allows GTM teams to publish signal-based content, track real-time buyer engagement, and strengthen market presence directly from the platform.

Haertel noted, “Everyone wants more visibility, but most teams don’t know what to say or who’s listening. This feature makes it easy to publish with purpose and connect content to demand, and it’s just the beginning of Landbase’s inbound roadmap.”

Landbase plans to expand its inbound offering with more publishing channels, deeper engagement analytics, and automated signal-based content creation, positioning itself as a central operating system for GTM.

The company also launched North 2.0, a suite of new products merging FinOps, GreenOps, and AI to tackle the cost and complexity of multi-cloud infrastructure.

“This funding allows North.Cloud to deepen its commitment to solving the most pressing challenges in cloud cost management,” said Matt Biringer, co-founder and CEO. 

“We’re grateful to our investors for recognising the immense opportunity to accelerate savings, tackle complexity, and deliver sustainability-focused solutions tailored to our customers’ needs.”

Over the past year, North.Cloud has collaborated with the world’s preeminent engineering teams to monitor AWS and GCP bills, usage spikes, and commitments across fragmented dashboards. 

The newly released platform offers industry-first tools, including AI-powered recommendations, real-time fleet intelligence, and a sleek, user-first design, to deliver unprecedented clarity and actionability in cloud management. 

“We’ve been blown away by the speed and efficiency of the North team. Their unique approach consistently delivers significant savings over traditional cloud cost and visibility tools,” said Andrew Berg of Companyon Ventures. 

“With AI adoption accelerating, companies are seeing a surge in cloud usage and infrastructure complexity. North is perfectly positioned to meet this moment, helping teams stay agile and cost-efficient through automation that scales with demand.”

New Platform Highlights Include: 

• Arctic – Real-Time Commitment Automation: Arctic dynamically reallocates AWS and GCP commitments based on real usage, cutting compute costs by up to 55%—no forecasts or lock-ins needed.
• Coststreams – Cost Allocation Without Tags: Coststreams offers real-time cloud spend visibility by team or environment, without relying on inconsistent tags. Budgets are built-in and actionable.
• Agent North – AI-Powered FinOps Copilot: Ask plain-language questions in Slack or the app to analyse spend, flag anomalies, and generate instant FinOps insights, with no analyst required.
• GreenOps Impact Visualisations: Track carbon, energy, and water usage alongside cost metrics to align spend with environmental impact.
• Expanded Support for GCP: North now supports AWS and GCP optimisation in a unified workflow, bringing automation, savings, and visibility across multi-cloud environments.

Since its launch in late 2023, the platform has delivered extraordinary outcomes, including:

• Generating $0 to $6M in ARR in just 14 months.
• Achieving up to 50% savings on AWS compute spend.
• Onboarding customers in under 5 minutes, with first savings surfaced within 30 minutes.
• Ranking in the top 1% of AWS savers globally.

Already supporting verticals like content platforms, healthcare, fintech, and e-commerce, North.Cloud supports innovators like Brave and Stayntouch, helping organisations modernise infrastructure and simplify financial operations.

The public cloud today handles $200 billion in annual technology spend. Despite being one of the most complex licensing ecosystems ever made, over 95% of this spending is still managed with a credit card and a spreadsheet. 

With the AI boom poised to supercharge this category to over $1 trillion by 2030, the need for better tools has never been greater.