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Swoop, an Eswatini food delivery startup, has raised $7.3 million in seed funding to support its expansion into Nigeria as it pursues its super-app model outside its home country for the first time. The round, backed by Silicon Valley investors including Long Journey, Variant, Version One, Dune Ventures, Soma Capital, and Zero Knowledge Ventures, will fund the buildout of a consumer platform starting with food delivery. Walter Kortschak and Base Capital also participated. Swoop’s seed raise is one of the largest seed rounds disclosed by an African consumer startup, and nearly as large as the $9 million Series A that Chowdeck closed in August 2025 after four years of operations and expansion into 11 cities. “It’s super hard to build a super app, and our investors recognise that. They recognise that you need a bit of runway and foundation to be able to do the things that you need to do operationally,” said Demola Adesina, Swoop’s Nigerian country manager. Swoop believes Nigeria’s food delivery market—valued at $1.1 billion in 2025—has more room to grow than its competitors suggest. According to Nigerian payments processor Paystack, which processes payments for Swoop and all the major food delivery companies in Nigeria, the sector grew by 187% between 2021 and 2024. Nigeria’s ratio of food ordered for delivery to food consumed outside the home is far lower in the country than in peer markets in Africa or Southeast Asia, and the real opportunity lies in converting non-consumers rather than poaching existing users, Adesina said. “We think that the food delivery space in Nigeria is still significantly under-penetrated. Our target is not existing consumption but the users that are not consuming,” he said. “We are not getting into a war with other platforms. We are trying to grow the pie.” Swoop, formerly known as Thumo, launched in Eswatini in August 2025 and acquired 6,000 users in its first month, according to co-founder Aubrey Niederhoffer. Edwin Ruiz, another co-founder, told local press in Eswatini that the goal was to build a pan-African super app combining food, groceries, and rides. The startup is starting with food delivery in Yaba, a neighbourhood in Lagos Mainland, already served by Chowdeck, Glovo, and FoodCourt, its competitors in Nigeria’s growing food delivery sector. “There is more confidence regarding regulatory risk, and international investors committing capital to us proves that,” Adesina said. “Beyond that, I am passionate about Nigerians. There is better market education and more interest in positively changing consumer habits. We think this is the perfect time to build on that.” Swoop says it uses a network of independent riders rather than an employed fleet, generating revenue through commissions on restaurant sales and customer handling fees. While riders retain 100% of delivery fees, the startup applies a 7% service charge to fund operations. Adesina declined to disclose the startup’s fee structure or unit economics, saying current fees are low because the priority is user acquisition. He added that the company is not interested in a price war. “Our approach is to find the reason why some people are not consuming [through food delivery] and to make them consumers. We are not just slashing prices and getting into a price war,” he said. Picking food delivery as the first vertical in a multi-product approach allows Swoop to acquire daily customers that create a habit with the app, a proven but costly growth engine for its super-app ambitions. OPay, one of Nigeria’s largest fintechs, initially bundled food delivery and ride-hailing with its payments wallet to drive daily usage for its wallet before shutting down the non-fintech products. “Food delivery is a metric for how developed the ecosystem is. If you get food delivery right, you can essentially be the node of the ecosystem,” Adesina said. “We believe that if we have a group of customers around that node, we are able to translate that into other areas and verticals,” he shared, adding that Swoop will let its users determine the next vertical to launch. Nigeria’s ‘difficult’ food delivery market Food delivery in Nigeria is a tightly contested sector that has claimed many startups and local divisions of well-funded international companies like HelloFood, Jumia Food, Bolt Food, and OFood, as the unit economics rarely work at scale. According to Jumia’s 2022 financial report, its food delivery arm lost $1.80 for every $10 it made. The logistics and marketing costs exceeded the revenue made from the order, which meant Jumia was essentially paying customers and restaurants to use the service. These unit economics are a primary reason why Jumia eventually shuttered its food delivery business in late 2023. Despite Jumia Food’s shutdown, Chowdeck, the largest food delivery platform in Nigeria, serves two million registered users with over 20,000 riders operating across 14 cities in Nigeria and Ghana while maintaining profitability, a rare feat for young food delivery startups. Swoop’s strategy will require acquiring high-volume, lower-income customers on the outskirts of Lagos and in smaller cities, where local restaurants and quick-service outlets dominate, if it is to create a new set of food delivery consumers. Whether Swoop becomes a success depends on three things: what it builds after food delivery and in what order, a monetisation strategy that ensures it is profitable, and whether it can scale beyond Yaba and Lagos before it runs out of cash.
Read MoreNigeria’s telecom subscribers will receive airtime refunds as compensation for poor service experienced between November 2025 and January 2026. The refunds will begin on Friday, April 24, according to the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC). The NCC said operators failed to meet required performance benchmarks in several parts of the country following a March 29, 2026, directive. While this is not the first time the regulator has ordered compensation for service failures—MTN and Celtel (now Airtel) were fined in 2008—the latest directive signals a more assertive approach to holding telecom operators accountable. The NCC said it has also directed tower companies responsible for many of the outages to channel their compensation obligations into upgrading tower infrastructure. These investments, separate from their annual capital plans, will be monitored by independent auditors to ensure compliance. “It’s actually compensation for the quality of service experience you may have had,” NCC’s Executive Vice Chairman and chief executive officer, Aminu Maida, said at a press briefing on Thursday in Lagos, adding that subscribers will begin receiving alerts via SMS detailing the credits applied to their lines. Unlike previous enforcement approaches, which assessed service quality at the state level, the NCC said it has shifted to a more granular system. Performance is now measured at the local government level, allowing the regulator to better capture variations in network experience across the country. “What we have now adopted is to carry out the assessment at local government levels,” Maida said. “This ensures that whatever we measure is as close as possible to what subscribers actually experience.” Under this framework, operators are evaluated across multiple network layers—2G, 3G, and 4G—against key performance indicators set out in the commission’s quality of service regulations. Where operators fall short, penalties are imposed, part of which is now being redirected as compensation to affected users. Maida acknowledged the gap between demand and current network capacity but pointed to ongoing investments by operators as a sign of progress. In 2025, the industry invested over $1 billion upgrading networks, importing equipment, and building new towers. According to Maida, one operator has already invested $1 billion in infrastructure this year. “Things actually improve, but we need to be patient,” he said, noting that infrastructure expansion remains the primary driver of better service quality. According to him, operators deployed just under 300 new sites last year. In contrast, they have committed to rolling out about 12,000 sites in 2026. So far, around 2,800 have been completed, including new builds, spectrum additions, and upgrades such as converting 3G sites to 4G and deploying 5G in select locations. “You can see we’re already moving way ahead of what we did last year,” he said. Operators say they are complying with the directive while continuing to invest in network improvements. MTN Nigeria said in a statement on Thursday that all affected customers will receive airtime compensation in line with the NCC framework, describing the directive as one that “places customers at the centre of regulatory decision-making.”
Read MoreWhile many African countries race to deploy artificial intelligence, Mauritius has made governance and ethics the starting point of its AI strategy, rather than a problem to solve after the technology is in use. Central to the strategy is the FAIR framework, a set of guidelines that governs how AI systems are designed, deployed, and managed. It sets clear expectations across sectors and applies to the entire AI lifecycle, from design and development to deployment, monitoring, and eventual decommissioning. Mauritius’s approach reflects a broader shift in how African countries may position themselves in the AI landscape. While larger markets such as Nigeria and Kenya emphasise scale and ecosystem growth, and South Africa focuses on institutional regulation, Mauritius is advancing a governance-led model centred on enforceable standards. The Mauritius National AI Strategy 2025–2029, alongside the FAIR Guidelines introduced in April 2026, is designed to be vendor-neutral and border-agnostic. Any AI system operating within the country, regardless of origin, must comply with a unified set of ethical and operational standards. Imported AI tools are subject to the same level of scrutiny as domestic systems. The framework requires compliance with principles of fairness, accountability, inclusiveness, integrity, and responsibility. In high-risk sectors such as fintech and gaming, systems must undergo bias audits to mitigate discriminatory outcomes. Accountability provisions also require foreign providers to designate locally based representatives who can be held responsible for system outcomes. Any AI system that affects individuals, organisations, or public interests in Mauritius falls within the framework’s scope, reflecting a recognition that AI risks are not bound by geography and that governance should be determined by impact rather than origin. Although the FAIR Guidelines are currently non-binding, there are no immediate legal penalties or fines for non-compliance—at least not yet; they are designed with a clear legal and policy trajectory. They are expected to shape government policy, inform sector-specific regulations, influence procurement standards, and eventually underpin future legislation. In effect, Mauritius is building a regulatory framework that can evolve alongside the technology, rather than locking in rigid rules too early. This contrasts with approaches like South Africa’s Draft National AI Policy, which proposes steep penalties—including fines of about $530,000 or up to 10 years in prison—for serious ethical breaches. The Mauritius approach allows the country to remain flexible while still establishing a stable reference point for accountability. Policymakers, regulators, businesses, and even courts can rely on these principles as AI adoption expands. The framework has four pillars: fairness, accountability, inclusiveness, and integrity. Each addresses a specific risk that has emerged in global AI deployment and is tied to concrete expectations. Fairness focuses on preventing bias. AI systems must not discriminate based on income, gender, ethnicity, or geography, the policy stated. This is particularly important in a small and diverse society, where flawed systems could quickly exclude entire groups from access to services or opportunities. To address this, the guidelines emphasise the use of representative local datasets and require bias testing, especially in high-impact sectors such as finance and public services. Accountability tackles one of AI’s most persistent challenges: the “black box” problem. Under the FAIR framework, there must always be a clearly identifiable party responsible for an AI system’s decisions. This includes defining liability, maintaining audit trails, and establishing mechanisms for redress when harm occurs. AI decisions are not meant to be opaque or unchallengeable. Inclusiveness ensures that the benefits of AI are widely distributed. Rather than concentrating advantages among large firms or urban populations, the strategy promotes AI literacy through initiatives like “AI for All,” supports small and medium-sized enterprises, and expands access to digital infrastructure. The goal is to prevent a new form of inequality—what the policy’s authors describe as a potential “digital divide 2.0.” The final pillar, integrity and responsibility, addresses the technical and ethical robustness of AI systems. It covers data governance, privacy, cybersecurity, and safeguards against misuse, including fraud and manipulation. For a government that plans to integrate AI into public service delivery, trust in system reliability is essential. What sets Mauritius apart is not just the inclusion of these principles, but how they are embedded into the broader economic strategy. The FAIR framework is tied directly to procurement decisions, system design, and policy development. It is positioned as a baseline requirement, not optional guidance. This reflects a broader strategic choice: as a small, open economy of just 1.26 million people and a roughly $15 billion GDP, Mauritius cannot compete on scale with larger economies like South Africa, with an over $400 billion GDP. It is not that South Africa and Nigeria are ignoring trust. The difference lies in priorities and timing. Mauritius is using its smaller size to position itself as a focused, “boutique” AI regulator, while South Africa and Nigeria must balance building trust with driving the scale of growth their larger economies demand. In doing so, it hopes to attract investment, build partnerships, and integrate into global AI value chains. The country’s economic ambitions reinforce this direction. AI is seen as a new growth pillar, alongside traditional sectors like manufacturing, whose contribution to GDP has steadily declined—from over 20% in the late 1990s to about 10.7% in 2020, and only a modest recovery to roughly 12.8% in 2024. According to the policy, the country now sees AI as a way to revitalise these sectors, improve efficiency, and create new opportunities in areas such as fintech, logistics, and the ocean economy. To drive this transformation, Mauritius is building institutional capacity in the form of an AI Council. The council would be supported by public and private sector stakeholders, and international experts, who will oversee implementation, coordinate projects, and measure socio-economic impact. Incentives such as tax credits, grants, and regulatory support are also being deployed to encourage adoption. This governance-led approach stands in contrast to other African AI strategies. Nigeria, for instance, is prioritising large-scale deployment and talent development, with governance structures still evolving. Kenya is focused on building a regional innovation hub and a powerful AI sheriff, while South Africa is leaning
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