Technology
Jumia plans to raise over $100 million in secondary shares to boost stalled user growth

African e-commerce company Jumia is selling 20 million American depositary shares in the subsequent few weeks, TechCrunch has learned. The at-the-market deal goals to profit from strong results despite a volatile market.
Given Jumia’s share price of around $5.70 when the stock market opened Tuesday, the e-commerce company could potentially raise around $100 million through a brand new share offering. However, the ultimate amount will rely on the share price, which has since fallen to $4.90. The drop, from around $11 on Monday after a 200% gain in the past three months, may very well be attributed to shareholders reacting negatively to news of dilution, the impact of world carry trades, or each.
This isn’t the primary time Jumia has taken this approach. The e-tailer raised almost $600 million from secondary share sales between 2020 and 2021.
CEO Francis Dufay, who’s making a secondary share sale for the primary time, told TechCrunch that Jumia is raising money this time to speed up its business, having made significant progress in cost management and efficiency.
“The new funding will be used to expand our supply chain network, specifically by improving logistics to reach smaller cities and expanding our overall network,” Dufay noted. “We also plan to invest in technology, with a focus on marketing and supplier technology, which we believe will significantly drive growth. In short, after some deep, fundamental, hard work on cost and efficiency, we believe it’s time to shift the focus toward growth and invest additional money so we can scale the company faster and achieve even more success.”
Crossing the two million mark
Specifically, these measures will improve Jumia’s money position, which currently stands at $92.8 million (including $45.1 million in money and money equivalents and $47.7 million in term deposits and other financial assets) compared to Q2 2024. latest financial reportFor comparison, the platform’s liquidity in the fourth quarter of 2023 amounted to $120.6 million, and in the primary quarter of 2024 – $101.5 million.
The funds raised can even be used for other purposes including customer acquisition, product assortment, maintaining supplies and adding more suppliers to the market offering.
Jumia’s lively customer base has hovered around two million for several quarters. The number represents a 6.0% quarter-on-quarter increase compared to Q1 2024 and flat year-on-year growth between Q2 2023 and Q2 2024. “Our customer base is still relatively small, around two million active consumers per quarter, while we operate in markets with over 600 million people. So we can do a lot more in the customer base,” Dufay said.
Orders then rose 7% year-on-year to 4.8 million. Jumia attributes the growth to product diversification, one other area it plans to double down on with the capital raised.
However, despite the rise in orders, Jumia’s GMV and revenue fell 5% and 17% year-over-year to $170.1 million and $36.5 million, respectively. As with most of Jumia’s financial reports since recent management took over in Q4 2022, a recurring theme has been that the numbers typically highlight year-over-year improvement in constant currency, but fluctuate in dollar terms due to devaluation. For example, Jumia’s GMV in constant currency increased 35.0% year-over-year, while revenue increased 15%.
“The devaluation that occurred in our two largest potential markets, Egypt and Nigeria, at the end of the first quarter had a significant impact on our revenue quarter over quarter,” Dufay said. “However, we saw some signs of stabilization and a sharp narrowing of the spread between official and parallel market rates. More importantly, our ability to drive GMV growth in constant currency shows that our value proposition is working.”
Turning to profitability, Jumia’s adjusted EBITDA loss, which excludes finance charges, narrowed 10% to $16.3 million — in line with an 8% year-on-year decline in its operating loss to $20.2 million — primarily driven by cost-cutting initiatives.
While Jumia has used each adjusted EBITDA and operating loss to measure losses and the trail to profitability for years, Dufay insisted on the decision that the 12-year-old e-commerce platform is more likely to report a loss before income tax from continuing operations, which incorporates financial costs corresponding to the impact of FX and the associated fee of repatriating money. The loss before income tax from continuing operations was $22.5 million, down 27% yr over yr.
“We have been emphasizing this KPI more in recent quarters due to currency volatility and related costs. Reporting the full picture is essential for companies exposed to such volatility. For example, Mercado Libre in Latin America also prefers to look at pre-tax loss rather than EBITDA,” the CEO said. “During their recent earnings call, they highlighted how currency volatility in Argentina affects financial costs. Therefore, focusing on pre-tax loss provides a more comprehensive picture when operating in multiple markets with currency fluctuations.”
Technology
The planned Openai data center in Abu Dhabi would be greater than Monaco

Opeli is able to help in developing a surprising campus of the 5-gigawatt data center in Abu Dhabi, positioning the corporate because the fundamental tenant of anchor in what can grow to be considered one of the biggest AI infrastructure projects in the world, in accordance with the brand new Bloomberg report.
Apparently, the thing would include a tremendous 10 square miles and consumed power balancing five nuclear reactors, overshadowing the prevailing AI infrastructure announced by OpenAI or its competitors. (Opeli has not yet asked TechCrunch’s request for comment, but in order to be larger than Monaco in retrospect.)
The ZAA project, developed in cooperation with the G42-Konglomerate with headquarters in Abu Zabi- is an element of the ambitious Stargate OpenAI project, Joint Venture announced in January, where in January could see mass data centers around the globe supplied with the event of AI.
While the primary Stargate campus in the United States – already in Abilene in Texas – is to realize 1.2 gigawatts, this counterpart from the Middle East will be more than 4 times.
The project appears among the many wider AI between the USA and Zea, which were a few years old, and annoyed some legislators.
OpenAI reports from ZAA come from 2023 Partnership With G42, the pursuit of AI adoption in the Middle East. During the conversation earlier in Abu Dhabi, the final director of Opeli, Altman himself, praised Zea, saying: “He spoke about artificial intelligence Because it was cool before. “
As in the case of a big a part of the AI world, these relationships are … complicated. Established in 2018, G42 is chaired by Szejk Tahnoon Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the national security advisor of ZAA and the younger brother of this country. His embrace by OpenAI raised concerns at the top of 2023 amongst American officials who were afraid that G42 could enable the Chinese government access advanced American technology.
These fears focused on “G42”Active relationships“With Blalisted entities, including Huawei and Beijing Genomics Institute, in addition to those related to people related to Chinese intelligence efforts.
After pressure from American legislators, CEO G42 told Bloomberg At the start of 2024, the corporate modified its strategy, saying: “All our Chinese investments that were previously collected. For this reason, of course, we no longer need any physical presence in China.”
Shortly afterwards, Microsoft – the fundamental shareholder of Opeli together with his own wider interests in the region – announced an investment of $ 1.5 billion in G42, and its president Brad Smith joined the board of G42.
(Tagstransate) Abu dhabi
Technology
Redpoint collects USD 650 million 3 years after the last large fund at an early stage

Redpoint Ventures, an organization based in San Francisco, which is a few quarter of a century, collected $ 650 million at an early stage, in keeping with A regulatory notification.
The latest RedPoint fund corresponds to the size of its previous fund, which was collected barely lower than three years ago. On the market where many enterprises reduce their capital allegations, this cohesion may indicate that limited partners are relatively satisfied with its results.
The company’s early stage strategy is managed by 4 managing partners: Alex Bard (pictured above), Satish Dharmraraj, Annie Kadavy and Eric Brescia, who joined the company in 2021 after he served as the operational director of Githuba for nearly three years.
The last outstanding investments of the RedPoint team at an early stage include AI Coding Pool Pool, which was founded by the former partner Redpoint and CTO GitHub Jason Warner, distributed laboratories of SQL database programmers and Platform Management Platform Platform Levelpath.
A multi -stage company also conducts a development strategy led by Logan Barlett, Jacob Effron, Elliot Geidt and Scott Raney partners. Last 12 months, Redpoint raised its fifth growth fund at USD 740 million, which is a small increase in the USD 725 million fund closed three years earlier.
The recent RedPoint outputs include the next insurance, which was sold for $ 2.6 billion in March, Tastemada Startup Media Travel -utar -Media was enriched by Wonder for $ 90 million, and the takeover of Hashicorp $ 6.4 billion by IBM.
Redpoint didn’t answer the request for comment.
(Tagstranslate) Early Stage Venture Capital (T) Basenside (T) Redpoint Venture Partners
Technology
Tensor9 helps suppliers implement software in any environment using digital twins
Enterprises must access latest software and artificial intelligence tools, but they’ll not risk sending their sensitive data to external software suppliers as a service (SAAS). Tensor9 He tries to help software firms to get more corporate customers, helping them implement the software directly in the client’s technological stack.
TENSOR9 transforms the software supplier code into the format needed to implement their client in the technological environment. Tensor9 then creates a digital twin of implemented software or a miniaturized infrastructure model of implemented software, so TENSOR9 customers can monitor how the software works in their customer environment. TENSOR9 will help firms to be placed in any premise, from the cloud to a bare server.
Michael Ten-POW, co-founder and general director of TENSOR9, told Techcrunch that the pliability to tendsor9 to send software to any assumption and using digital double technology in order to help in distant monitoring, helps to face out from other firms, comparable to Octopus implementation or non, which also help firms implement software in the client’s environment.
“You can’t just throw the wall software, or it is very difficult to throw the wall software and know what is happening, be able to find problems, debrieve them, fix them,” said Ten-POW (in the photo above, on the left). “They see how it works, they can debate it, can log in and understand what problems are and fix them.”
He said that time is suitable for Tensor9 technology on account of the wind from the creation of AI. Companies and financial institutions wish to simply accept AI technology, but they’ll not risk sending their data to third parties.
“Enterprise search seller can succeed, say, JP Morgan and say:” Hey, I’d love access to your entire six data parabetts to construct an intelligent search layer in order that your internal employees can confer with the company’s given company, “it is not possible to work,” said this-POW.
Ten-Pow, a former engineer in AWS, said he had a “long, quite winding path” to run the tensor9. He came up with the company’s idea, working on one other potential concept that failed. He spent some time, wondering if he would discover an answer to make it easier for software suppliers to accumulate a SOC 2 certificate, a frame compliance frame to help them unlock customers who required their suppliers.
Although it failed, he discovered from clients’ connections that what firms really wanted was software to act in their very own technological environment. But many programming firms, especially startups, shouldn’t have any resources to provide a specially to order for each company customer.
This sentiment became the premise of Tensor9, which Ten-POW began in 2024. Later this 12 months he brought two of his former colleagues, Matthew Michie and Matthew Shanker, as co-founders.
The company found early grip with AI. Since then, they began to expand to work in other industries, including: attempting to get your hands on enterprises, corporate databases and data management. The company currently cooperates with AI, including: 11x, REELL AI and DYNA AI.
TENSOR9 BootstrePPRE for the first 12 months, and recently raised a round of $ 4 million, led by Wing VC with the participation of UP Ventures levels, Devang Sachdev with the Ventures model, Nvangels, Angelic group of former employees of NVIDIA and other Investors of Angels. This POW said that the involvement of investors with this idea was not too difficult, for the rationale that VC they talked to see how their portfolio firms struggle with this exact problem. Tensor9 simply needed to steer investors that they were an appropriate team for work.
“We have a simple model, but there are many complexities under the covers, which makes it happen, difficult technical challenges that we solved to make it happen,” said Ten-Pow. “I think it was one of the things that helped us convince investors to invest in us.”
The company plans to utilize funds for employment and construct one other generation of its technology in order that it could cooperate with clients in larger vertical number.
“There was evolution from (on the premise) to the cloud and we think that this idea of the software lives where it must and works where it must, is the next step, which is a kind of synthesis of previous local and cloud ideas,” Ten-POW said.
(Tagstranslate) artificial intelligence
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