👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – Brass gets Stacked

Good morning.

Nigeria’s healthtech sector has mobilised $271 million across 128 active startups, yet structural friction, including low electronic medical records (EMR) adoption and funding volatility, limits its durable impact. This report maps the required strategic actions for sustainable scale, going beyond deficits to offer a full roadmap for progress. 

Read TechCabal Insights’ new State of Healthtech in Nigeria (2026).

Download the report.

You know that viral meme of a man trying—and failing—to carry more cash than he can physically hold? Spiro might relate. The Nairobi-based electric mobility (e-mobility) startup is becoming the literal embodiment of that meme—except, in its case, it seems comfortable handling all that haul.

On Monday, the company raised $215 million in equity funding, with backing from Equitane, the investment firm founded by Indian entrepreneur and Spiro founder Gagan Gupta, and Impact Fund Denmark.

If nobody was keeping count, we were; Spiro has now raised $365 million in total debt and equity funding in the last nine months alone, a massive overhaul that now puts the e-bike manufacturer at a near-$1 billion valuation, Gupta told Bloomberg. 

Why is the company raising so much money? Spiro is no longer just selling e-bikes; it already controls half of that market in Kenya. It wants to embed itself deeply in the manufacturing process. 

Historically, the e-mobility startup has imported partially assembled vehicle frames and components from partners like Horwin and assembled them into motorcycles tailored for African roads. But its acquisition of UK-based Coexlion in May suggests a bigger ambition: moving into ground-up manufacturing, where it can control everything from vehicle design to key components. 

That shift would give Spiro more than production capacity. It would create a stronger moat built on proprietary technology, lower manufacturing costs, and tighter control of its supply chain. Combined with its growing battery-swapping network across seven markets, that strategy could make Spiro harder for rivals to replicate and help explain why investors continue to back the company with ever-larger cheques.

With that new ambition, Spiro needs a lot more money than it has probably ever raised. Equitane’s participation also suggests that one of Spiro’s closest insiders believes the company is ready for its next phase of growth. The investment firm is deploying fresh capital to support Spiro’s manufacturing ambitions in Africa. 

Zoom out: In January, Equitane backed MAX, a Nigerian e-mobility startup, in a $24 million funding round, showing that the Gupta-founded asset manager is casting a wider net across Africa’s electric mobility sector.

Brass, the Nigerian business banking fintech that was acquired by a Paystack-led consortium in 2024, has finally been folded into Paystack’s microfinance banking operations.

The company that once pitched itself as a modern banking layer for African businesses will no longer exist as a standalone company, and its customers will be migrated to Paystack Microfinance Bank (Paystack MFB) by July 31.

What was Brass trying to build? Before things went sideways in 2023, Brass tried to be the operating system for SMEs’ money. It offered current accounts, corporate cards, payroll, expense controls, and cash flow analytics, all wrapped in software. That dream collided with reality when withdrawal delays in 2023 exposed how fragile a deposit‑taking fintech can be without its own regulatory cushion.

The Paystack‑led rescue in 2024 bought it time. A transition to “Brass 2.0” had been planned for 2025 after several members of its former technical team were laid off following the departure of the company’s founding executives.

However, the endgame appears to have changed. Rather than rebuilding Brass as an independent company, Paystack preserved customer trust and continuity before moving to integrate the startup’s technology, customers, and know-how into its own microfinance banking operations.

Why does Paystack want Brass in its MFB operations? Folding Brass into its infrastructure gives Paystack a business banking suite for its customers. With Brass in view, the fintech turned microfinance bank could then control the rails for how money comes in (payments), how it sits (deposits), and how it goes out (payroll, vendor payments, credit). 

While Brass did not survive the transition, its original thesis—that African businesses want a single, software‑driven command centre for their finances—will live on with Paystack’s logo on the login screen.

Pick n Pay, one of South Africa’s biggest retailers, has just learned an awkward lesson about how the Internet’s memory works: old apps never really die if you keep their data plugged in.

The company has disclosed that a cyberattack exposed customer data linked to an older version of its on-demand delivery service, first launched as “Bottles” and later rebranded as Asap!. The platform had long since been replaced, but the customer records apparently never got the memo.

What did hackers access? The compromised data includes names, contact details, delivery addresses, and limited payment card information belonging to customers who signed up on or before 2022. Pick n Pay says full card numbers and card verification value (CVV) codes were not stored on the affected system, reducing the risk of direct card fraud.

Yet, the most interesting detail is not what was stolen. It is where it was sitting.

The breach did not originate from Pick n Pay’s current digital infrastructure. Instead, it came from a retired platform that continued holding customer information years after it disappeared from public view. It points to a problem that extends far beyond one retailer: companies are getting better at launching digital products than shutting them down.

Every new app creates a database. Every database creates risk. And when old systems linger online, they can become soft targets for attackers long after the business has moved on.

Zoom out: South Africa’s tech sector has recently become a target for hackers. Following the high-profile March breach at Standard Bank, the country’s largest bank, which exposed customer names and card details—specifically card numbers and expiry dates—as of the bank’s last update on April 14. Cyber attackers also claimed to have targeted government agencies, including the South African Revenue Service (SARS), the country’s taxman. The agency denied those claims.

While in Pick n Pay’s case, the breach may have exposed data tied to a platform retired years ago, there is no telling how valuable it can become in the hands of data tracers and brokers who’d buy those IDs from them.

GETESA, Equatorial Guinea’s state-owned telecom operator, appears to have looked at its network and decided it was time for a factory reset.

The telco has unveiled a 12-month modernisation plan that includes 5G, expanded fibre infrastructure, public Wi-Fi, eSIM technology, and a new mobile money platform called Getesa Money. It also wants to revive a national fibre-optic network that has largely been reserved for the country’s electricity utility.

The ambition is understandable. After the telecom firm conducted an audit, it found ageing equipment, slow Internet speeds, network congestion, and weak technical planning were crippling its service quality to customers. More customers complained, and GETESA seems to be actively heeding their call. 

For a country where 60.4% of the population is already online, the upgrade is less about getting people connected and more about improving what happens after they connect. Faster networks could support everything from streaming and cloud services to digital payments and online businesses.

The most interesting addition may be mobile money. GETESA’s mobile money plan is also notable because in Africa, telco-backed operators—spanning players like Orange Money, VodaPay, and Telkom Pay—are becoming a dime a dozen. 

Across Africa, telecom operators have discovered that connectivity is only half the business. The other half is moving money. If GETESA can pair better coverage with financial services, it could become more than a telco. It could become a bigger part of how Equatorial Guineans communicate, transact, and access digital services.

The challenge, as always, is execution. Announcing 5G is easy. Building the infrastructure to make it useful is the hard part.