Zindi is convening Africa’s data scientists to create AI solutions for complex problems.

Founded in 2018, the Cape Town-based startup allows companies, NGOs or government institutions to host online competitions around data-oriented challenges.

Zindi’s platform also coordinates a group of more than 4,000 data scientists based in Africa who can enroll to join a competition, submit their solution sets, move up a leader board and win the challenge — for a cash prize payout.

The highest purse so far has been $12,000, split across the top three data scientists in a competition, according to Zindi co-founder Celina Lee.

Competition hosts receive the results, which they can use to create new products or integrate into their existing systems and platforms.

Digital infrastructure company Liquid Telecom has hosted competitions.

Glow is a new startup that says it wants to help podcasters build media business.

That’s something co-founder and CEO Amira Valliani said she tried to do herself.

After a career that included working in the Obama White House and getting an MBA from Wharton, she launched a podcast covering local elections in Cambridge, Mass., and she said that after the initial six episodes, she struggled to find a sustainable business model.

Valliani (pictured above with her co-founder and chief product officer Brian Elieson) recalled thinking, “Well, I got this one grant and I’d love to do more, but I need to figure out a way to pay for it.” She realized that advertising didn’t make sense, but when a listener expressed interest in paying her directly, none of the existing platforms made it easy.

“I just couldn’t figure it out,” she said.

“I felt an acute need, and I thought, ‘Are there other people out there there who haven’t been able to figure out how to do it, because the lift is just too high?

Five years ago, Frank Meehan, my SparkLabs Global Ventures co-founder, described the goal of our seed-stage fund as follows:

During the first three years of our fund, we would look at startups — especially in the Internet-of-Things space — that would collect millions of data points, but most companies weren’t willing to pay for such data.

Industrial manufacturing, search and social media data and a handful of other verticals are long-established gold mines for data information and analytics.

What we’re seeing now is that across our portfolio of more than 250 startups, data and analytics is finally being valued and becoming mission critical: It is no longer “just another tool” to have in the toolbox, but is key to a company’s success.

I define “cultivated data” as existing data (i.e.

One of our first SparkLabs Global Ventures investments in this space was 42 Technologies.

Juniper Research pegs the number of digital records that will be stolen in 2023 at 33 billion, compared with the 12 billion stolen in 2018.

The costly threat of compromise has given rise to a market that’s projected to be worth $300 billion by 2024.

It today emerged from stealth with $31 million in funding contributed mostly by Mayfield and its managing director Navin Chaddha, with participation from General Catalyst and its managing director Steve Herrod.

“[There are] a dozen state-level privacy regulations in the works, and we look forward to scaling our team and expanding our product capabilities to ensure businesses stay prepared as new regulations go into effect,” said president and CEO Rehan Jalil, who founded Securiti.ai in 2018 with a team hailing from Symantec, Blue Coat, Elastica, and Cisco.

Jalil previously headed Symantec’s cloud security division after his company Blue Coat was acquired for $4.7 billion following a merger with his previous startup, Elastica.

During his tenure, it became Symantec’s fastest-growing team, with triple-digit growth over seven quarters.

Indonesian unicorn Gojek is currently in talks to acquire local mobile point-of-sale startup Moka, an anonymous source close to Moka told Tech in Asia.

The deal is also expected to be worth over US$100 million, according to the source.

Moka, however, has already insisted that the development is only a rumor.

“It is a rumor and we do not comment on market speculation,” the company told DealStreetAsia.

Moka added that it is partnering with GoPay to “complete our payment ecosystem and provide more cashless payment options to our merchants.”

Gojek told KrAsia that it does not “comment on rumors and speculation.”

AllSome Fulfillment, a startup providing virtual warehouses and ecommerce fulfillment services in Southeast Asia, has raised US$1.94 million in a seed round led by East Ventures.

AllSome’s service seeks to remove the painful steps sellers face from sourcing international suppliers, offshore quality assurance, secured storage, pick and pack, door-to-door delivery, and parcel tracking.

It also allows consumers to tie various shipments to their phone number so they won’t have to visit multiple websites to track deliveries.

AllSome CEO Liu Yi Shu and chief technology officer Ng Yi Ying, both former online sellers, established AllSome in Malaysia in 2018 to reduce cross-border fulfillment and logistics cost by at least 40%.

With the investment, the startup, which also operates in China, plans to expand its network in Southeast Asia, with Indonesia as its top priority.

AllSome said it picked Indonesia because of its population and stable economy.

Instagram has kicked a marketing startup off its platform after determining it improperly collected user data.

The Facebook-owned social network sent Hyp3r took the action after finding the startup scraped public data such as users' physical locations, profile information and photos to serve better targeted ads.

Instagram sent a cease-and-desist letter to the San Francisco-based company on Wednesday after learning of the activity from Business Insider, which reported on the data collection earlier.

Information collected by Hyp3r included data stored in Instagram Stories, content designed to disappear after 24 hours and not available through the company's API.

"Hyp3r's actions were not sanctioned and violate our policies," an Instagram spokesperson said.

We've also made a product change that should help prevent other companies from scraping public location pages in this way."