Happy pre-TGIF.

Somewhere in Beijing, China, this week, a humanoid robot attempted a spinning kick, fell flat on its face, and watched its opponent celebrate with what looked suspiciously like a victory dance. The robots are competing at the World Humanoid Robot Games, which is apparently a real event and not the plot of a Pixar film we all missed.

It suspiciously looks like somebody is making a case for robots to compete in the Olympics soon. Or, at the very least, get their own event. 

Anyway, if the robots take over, at least they’ll be entertaining about it.

Let’s get into today’s newsletter.

Ventures Platform (VP), the Nigerian venture capital firm, has closed its second fund at $84 million, almost twice the $46 million it raised for its first fund in 2022. This time, the firm is looking to write bigger cheques to own more equity in African startups it backs—up to 12%.

What happened? The VP Pan-African Fund II has brought in four new investors, including the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD); Norfund, Norway’s development finance institution (DFI); the Dutch family office Alphatron; and the Ashesi University Foundation, to add to the $64 million first close of the fund in November 2025.

Explain like I’m new here: Ventures Platform works like a startup shopper. It raises money from investors, pools it into a fund, then uses that money to buy stakes in young companies it believes can become much bigger. 

Some of the companies it has invested in include Paystack, PiggyVest, Moove, Mono, Remedial Health, and Raenest. The venture capital firm invests in these companies at their pre-seed, seed, or pre-Series A stage, and makes more money if those companies become more valuable. Fund II will follow the same playbook, but with bigger cheques.

Playing into the funding pattern: Ventures Platform plans to invest up to $3 million initially, with an average cheque of about $1.5 million, while targeting 10%–12% ownership in the startups it backs. 

While the company has not disclosed the number of startups benefiting from this fund, the strategy fits the shift in African venture capital, where investors are putting more money into fewer companies. 

In H1 2026, African startups raised $1.44 billion, 1.4% more than the same period in 2025, while the number of deals dropped from 252 to 174.

Yet, Ventures Platform coming to the table with bigger cheques gives African founders another sizable pool of capital at a time when fundraising has become more selective.

Pick n Pay, the South African retailer, is bringing the scroll-and-shop habit to the supermarket. Its Pick n Pay asap! delivery app has launched Pick n Pay Inspire, a shoppable video feed that lets customers add products to their basket without leaving the video.

What happened? A shopper watching a recipe can tap the ingredients on screen, add them to a basket, and have the groceries delivered within an hour. The feed will also include entertainment, product demonstrations, and Pick n Pay Clothing content; clothing orders take three to five business days. Pick n Pay says Inspire is the first feature of its kind from a South African grocery retailer.

Explain like I’m new here: The idea is familiar to anyone who has seen a recipe on Instagram, taken a screenshot, opened a shopping app, and then tried to remember all the ingredients. Pick n Pay has been testing this behaviour since 2024 through Unreal Deals, a live-shopping show on its website and social platforms. Inspire brings that experiment into the app, where the video, basket, payment, and delivery happen in one place. The company’s asap! service already delivers groceries to customers’ doors, so the new feature is adding a content layer to an existing online shopping and fulfillment system.

Between the lines: Pick n Pay is trying to make grocery discovery feel less like a chore and more like the way many people already find things online: through videos, creators, and recommendations. In July, it launched Penny, an AI shopping companion, giving customers another route into the same basket. Penny helps someone say or show what they want; Inspire helps them tap what they see. For a retailer competing beyond South Africa’s traditional supermarket aisle, the bigger bet is that the app can become a place where people discover dinner, not just pay for it.

Zoom out: Grocery delivery is becoming a fight over more than speed. Retailers also want to control the moment when a customer decides what to buy. Pick n Pay is betting that the best grocery app may not feel like a catalogue at all; it may feel more like a feed that happens to end with a basket.

Kenya is preparing to join 76 countries in a treaty created to make it easier for investigators to chase cybercriminals across borders.

What happened? In February 2026, Kenya’s Cabinet approved the country’s accession to the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime; Kenya’s Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi is now asking Parliament to endorse the move. 

If approved, Kenya will become the convention’s newest member and join countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, and Australia among its 76 parties.

Explain like I’m new here: The Budapest Convention, in force since 2004, provides a common legal framework for countries to investigate computer- and cyber-related crime. 

Imagine a cybercriminal in Kenya hacking someone in Germany. The suspect’s laptop may be in Nairobi, but the emails, server records, or other digital evidence investigators need could be stored by a company in Germany, the US, or another country. Kenyan investigators cannot simply demand that a foreign company hand over that information. They need a legal route for requesting evidence from another jurisdiction, and different countries can have different procedures. That is where the Budapest Convention comes in. In essence, the treaty is seeking to create a cross-border cyber-police.

Yet, Kenya has a reason to worry: According to the US INTERPOL, an estimated $3.8 million was siphoned from Kenyan mobile money wallets in 2025 as SIM swap fraud surged 327%. According to the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK), Kenyans have lost KES 810.7 million ($6.3 million) to mobile banking fraud in 2024, up from KES 182.4 million ($1.4 million) the previous year. As these crimes grow, so does the need for Kenya to work with other countries when an investigation crosses borders. 

There’s a catch: The treaty comes with obligations around privacy and fair-trial rights, so Kenya plans to reserve its position on provisions that could extend its jurisdiction beyond its borders while seeking safeguards for citizens’ privacy and national interests, and, if Parliament approves the accession, will need to establish mechanisms for rapid international cooperation, including a 24/7 point of contact for urgent requests. 

Cameroon is about to switch off untaxed phones

Starting September 1, any phone that entered Cameroon without clearing customs could lose access to every mobile network in the country. The government is moving from warning owners about undeclared devices to blocking them.

What happened? Louis Paul Motaze, the country’s finance minister, announced that Cameroon will restrict the use of phones that have not been declared and taxed. The rule covers devices connecting to a Cameroonian network for the first time, as well as phones first connected after April 1, 2026, whose owners received warnings but did not regularise them. It applies across mobile networks Camtel, MTN Cameroon, and Orange Cameroon.

Between the lines: The scale of the problem became clearer in April 2026, when the government said its system had identified nearly 700,000 new phones connected to local networks without prior customs clearance within a month. To be on the safe side, mobile phone users in Cameroon can check and confirm their status by dialling *#06#. 

Explain like I’m new here: Cameroon introduced the customs monitoring system in 2023 to identify phones entering its networks through informal channels. Since then, the authorities have used network connections to flag devices, sending warnings to owners, and giving them a chance to pay what is owed. The September 1 deadline is the next step: phones that remain undeclared after the warnings will be denied network access.

State of play: Authorities identified nearly 700,000 undeclared phones in less than a month. That sounds enormous, but it is important not to mistake phones for people: Cameroon had 29 million mobile connections in late 2025, equivalent to 96.4% of its population, and one person can have more than one connection. The 700,000 devices represent roughly 2.4% of the country’s connections—not 700,000 unique customers. 

Still, blocking that many devices could remove a meaningful amount of network traffic and handset-related business from operators, at least until owners regularise their phones. The policy may also help formal importers compete with sellers who avoid duties, but the cost will land first on buyers who may not have known their phones were improperly imported.

Zoom out: Cameroon is trying to close a tax leak by making the phone itself the enforcement tool. The market is large enough for the policy to matter—Orange overtook MTN in subscriber numbers in 2024—but the number of devices at risk is not the same as the number of customers operators will permanently lose. The real test is whether buyers can check a device before paying, and whether the government can regularise legitimate phones without mistakenly cutting people off.

Written by: Yemi Kareem, Emmanuel Nwosu, and Zia Yusuf

Edited by: Emmanuel Nwosu & Ganiu Oloruntade