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In partnership with Lire en Français اقرأ هذا باللغة العربية Good morning. African startups and growth-stage companies are increasingly looking beyond their home markets. But few conversations focus on what that expansion really costs. Beyond entering new markets lies a different challenge: fragmented payment systems, foreign exchange (FX) volatility, settlement delays, and infrastructure that wasn’t built for businesses to operate across borders. So what separates companies that scale globally from those that stall at the border? Join us for the next edition of Moonshot Conversations with Idorenyin Obong, chief executive officer and co-founder of Grey; Chijoke Dozie, co-founder & director at Carbon; Ruth Iselema, founder of Changera; and Adebiyi Aromolaran, VP of Operations at MENAT Global. Moderated by Muktar Oladunmade, Senior Reporter and Desk Lead at TechCabal, the conversation will unpack the infrastructure decisions, operational lessons, and financial strategies behind building businesses that are global by design. The conversation is happening on August 7 at 11:00 a.m. WAT. Register here. Let’s dive in. Become smarter about tech and commerce in Francophone Africa, and the policies shaping them. Read our newsletter here first or subscribe below. Subscribe Moove becomes a unicorn Cloud9 acquires Chpter MTN gets the keys to IHS’ house SIM swap fraud in Kenya World Wide Web 3 Opportunities companies Moove reaches unicorn status with $250 million raise Image Source: PalmPay If you asked any African VC which startup was most likely to reach unicorn status before the end of 2026, most would have picked Moove. And, no, it’s not because they are clairvoyant. Rather, it was an open secret that the startup was nearing unicorn status. The only thing that might have caused a surprise was the eventual $2.1 billion valuation. Moove built its reputation first by helping Uber drivers buy cars in Lagos, Nigeria, and now by preparing for a future where nobody is driving them at all, which may explain why investors like Mubadala and Toyota’s growth fund led its $250 million round. Explain like I’m new here: When Moove launched in 2020, it saw that ride-hailing drivers couldn’t afford to buy a car. So, it started a drive-to-own model. Moove bought the vehicles, while drivers paid them off through their earnings on ride-hailing platforms like Uber, and eventually they owned the cars after paying in full. But somewhere along the way, Moove realised its future lay beyond vehicle financing. It did something about that: In 2024, the company partnered with Alphabet-owned Waymo to manage fleets of robotaxis, which are fully autonomous vehicles that use AI sensors and cameras to transport passengers without a human behind the wheel. To support that expansion, Moove raised $1.2 billion in debt financing in 2025. It also acquired Brazilian mobility startup Kovi in 2025, giving it a stronger operational footprint in Latin America. What’s next for Moove? Moove says it will use the money to expand its autonomous vehicle business, build dedicated service hubs for self-driving cars, and grow across the United States, Europe, and Asia. It also plans to more than triple the size of its autonomous vehicle team by the end of the year. The next phase is all about infrastructure. Moove plans to build “nests” where autonomous vehicles can be cleaned, charged, inspected, and serviced before returning to the road, as pit stops for robotaxis. It’s a bold bet that reflects where the mobility industry is headed. The autonomous vehicle market in the Middle East and Africa is projected to grow to $18.35 billion by 2034 as AI and electric vehicles (EVs) advance, and Moove’s partnership with companies like Waymo positions it to help build that future. Getting paid in cedis just got easier for African businesses operating in Ghana. Fincra now issues dedicated GHS virtual accounts to enable businesses to collect payments. See how Fincra GHS virtual accounts work. companies Cloud9 acquires Chpter, the startup its founders used to run Image Source: Canal+ Cloud9 has acquired Chpter, the WhatsApp and Instagram commerce startup its founders ran before launching their own bank, in an all-stock deal it won’t put a number on. Why it matters: It’s Cloud9’s second acquisition in three months, after buying ticketing platform M-Tickets in May. The bank is building distribution through deals, not disclosures, and paying for both with stock instead of cash. Driving the news: Chpter’s roughly 4,500 businesses are moving to Cloud9’s Business Banking app as the standalone Chpter platform shuts down. Some staff are joining too, though former Chpter executives Mark Kiarie and Kevin Kuria, who led the company’s day-to-day operations after co-founders Tesh Mbaabu and Mesongo Sibuti departed, are not among them. Between the lines: Chpter raised $1.2 million in pre-seed funding in September 2024 to expand into Nigeria, Ghana, and Egypt. That expansion never really happened, and the company went quiet once its founders left in 2025 to start Cloud9. They’re now buying back the business they built. What they’re saying: Cloud9 chief executive officer Tesh Mbaabu says the deal accelerates the bank’s path to profitability, though he won’t commit to a timeline. “Our focus remains disciplined growth and sound unit economics, rather than making short-term profitability promises,” he said. Zoom out: Two stock-funded acquisitions in three months suggest Cloud9 is prioritising footprint over cash burn, before it’s even a year old. Download PalmPay. Bank smarter. With PalmPay, you can bank with confidence. Enjoy seamless everyday banking with security features designed to help protect your money. Send money, pay bills, and manage your finances all in one app. Learn more. Telecoms MTN secures shareholder approval to acquire remaining shares in IHS Towers Image Source: Giphy Imagine spending years arguing with your housemates about who gets to hold the remote, only to decide the best solution is to just buy the whole house and move them out. That is essentially what MTN Group, Africa’s largest telecom operator, has done with IHS Towers, the tower company it is in the process of acquiring. The telecom giant hassecured shareholder approval to acquire the remaining shares in IHS, clearing the way
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For years, Nigerian naval ships went to sea with a basic problem: they could patrol, but they did not always know where to look. A vessel could leave a port, disappear beyond the horizon, and become little more than a guess on a naval commander’s map. Patrol boats and helicopters were available, but without a clear picture of what was happening across Nigeria’s vast waters, the Navy often conducted what officials called “blind patrols.” Falcon Eye was designed to change that. The maritime surveillance system, developed by Israeli defence company RTCom Defense, began deployment along Nigeria’s coastline in 2015. By combining coastal radar, cameras, satellite feeds, automatic identification systems and an over-the-horizon radar capable of detecting vessels hundreds of kilometres offshore, it gave the Nigerian Navy something it had lacked: a continuous picture of its waters. More than a decade after deployment began, Falcon Eye’s architects want to take the same concept inland. Ido Shalev, Chief Operating Officer, who has worked on Falcon Eye for more than a decade, says the next frontier is not the open ocean but the maze of creeks and waterways in the Niger Delta—and potentially the land itself, where Nigeria is fighting a different kind of security problem: banditry, kidnapping and other forms of organised crime. “For the past eight years,” Shalev said in an interview with TechCabal in Lagos on Monday, he had been advocating for expanding Falcon Eye into Nigeria’s “backwaters.” For the past five years, he has also pushed for what he describes as land domain awareness—the ability to build a unified, real-time picture of activity, threats and forces across the ground environment, giving security decision-makers the information needed to understand developments, respond to threats and protect national sovereignty. From blind patrols to a picture of the sea Falcon Eye over-the-horizon radar. Image source: RTCOM Defense Falcon Eye was built around a simple proposition: naval forces are more effective when intelligence tells them where to go. The system’s sensors stretch along Nigeria’s coastline, with command centres in Lagos, Yenagoa and Calabar feeding information into a main control centre at Naval Headquarters in Abuja. Its over-the-horizon radar can detect vessels as far as 200 nautical miles offshore, or about 370.4 kilometres, while electro-optical cameras and other sensors help operators identify targets. That changes the Navy’s job. Instead of sending ships out to search large areas of ocean, Falcon Eye can identify unusual movements and direct naval assets toward them. Shalev described the difference as a shift from “blind patrols” to mission-oriented operations. One of the clearest examples came on May 14–15, 2020, when pirates hijacked a Chinese vessel, the Hailufeng II, off Côte d’Ivoire and sailed it toward Nigeria. The pirates had destroyed the vessel’s tracking equipment, but Falcon Eye’s over-the-horizon radar detected it before it entered Nigerian waters. The Navy intercepted the vessel and arrested 10 pirates. Nigeria subsequently recorded a sharp decline in piracy, culminating in its removal from the International Maritime Bureau’s list of piracy-prone waters in March 2022. According to Shalev, insurance premiums on vessels operating in Nigerian waters fell by about 80% after the country was removed from the high-risk list, saving an estimated $700 million to $800 million annually. The expensive security anchorage in Lagos, where ships had previously paid about $2,000 a day to wait safely, was also no longer needed. RTCom estimates that Falcon Eye has helped save Nigeria about $4 billion since 2015, taking into account reduced insurance costs, oil-theft prevention and the disruption of smuggling and other maritime crimes. That figure is the company’s estimate, rather than an independently verified government calculation. The sea is not the Niger Delta The system’s success at sea, however, highlights one of Falcon Eye’s key limitations. It was designed primarily to monitor Nigeria’s Exclusive Economic Zone—the offshore area where the country has rights to explore, exploit and manage natural resources—and other open waters. The Niger Delta presents a very different surveillance challenge, with its dense network of creeks, mangroves and inland waterways. Dense mangrove forests, narrow waterways and countless creeks obstruct lines of sight and create thousands of potential hiding places. A radar that can see across a large stretch of open ocean cannot simply be moved inland and expected to provide the same coverage. “We have to monitor many, many more sites that are more short range,” Shalev said. That means expanding Falcon Eye into the backwaters would require a denser network of sensors, positioned around waterways, chokepoints and other strategic locations. The challenge is particularly significant because many of Nigeria’s persistent security and economic problems are concentrated in these difficult-to-monitor areas. Oil theft and illegal refining, for example, often take place deep inside the Niger Delta rather than in the open sea. A similar problem exists with the proposed expansion into land surveillance. From pirates to bandits Banditry presents a fundamentally different surveillance challenge. A ship is a large, moving object operating within a relatively predictable environment. A group of bandits can disappear into a forest, move between communities, abandon vehicles, or operate among civilians. Falcon Eye’s maritime model depends heavily on detecting movement across a defined domain. Applying the same philosophy to land would require a considerably more complex network of sensors and intelligence sources. Shalev nevertheless believes Nigeria needs such a system. He argues that the answer to insecurity is not simply buying more military hardware. Nigeria already has soldiers, vehicles, aircraft and weapons. The problem is knowing where to deploy them. “Security needs to be not by buying more cars or buying more tanks,” he said. “You have to get intelligence, you have to get real-time domain awareness to know where to send those assets.” It is a lesson Falcon Eye was designed to demonstrate at sea. The Navy had ships before the system arrived. It will have ships after it. What changed, Shalev argues, was the intelligence guiding those ships. The same principle, in theory, could apply to the army and other security agencies: instead of sending units into large
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A ₦1 million ($733.92) Bitcoin transaction can attract multiple taxes amounting to ₦64,250 ($47.15) before accounting for exchange commission, blockchain network fees or any investment gains or losses, with the government’s take increasing as the asset appreciates before it is sold. That is because Nigeria’s new virtual asset tax framework no longer taxes only crypto profits. It taxes almost every stage of a virtual asset’s lifecycle. The Nigeria Revenue Service’s (NRS) new guidelines introduce a 1.5% stamp duty on virtual asset transactions, but that is only the beginning. Crypto users could also pay a 1% withholding tax when disposing of most cryptocurrencies, income tax on realised gains, and Value Added Tax (VAT) on exchange service fees. Each tax applies to a different taxable event. Together, they make buying, selling, earning, and spending digital assets materially more expensive. The guidelines mark the government’s most comprehensive attempt yet to bring crypto into Nigeria’s tax net. Rather than imposing a single crypto tax, they create a layered tax framework where different taxes arise from different stages of the same transaction. Nigeria received an estimated $92.1 billion in crypto value between July 2024 and June 2025, making it one of the world’s largest crypto markets. After doubling revenue from the Electronic Money Transfer Levy (EMTL) by tightening compliance across fintechs, the government is now extending the same levy — now renamed stamp duty — to crypto transactions as it searches for new sources of tax revenue. The government’s medium-term revenue projections show just how important that expansion has become. Revenue from stamp duty is projected to reach ₦456.07 billion ($334.72 million) in 2026, rise to ₦579.82 billion ($425.54 million) in 2027, and hit ₦752.45 billion ($552.24 million) by 2028. A ₦1 million Bitcoin purchase starts with an immediate tax Suppose a user wants to buy ₦1 million ($733.92) worth of Bitcoin. Previously, aside from exchange commissions, the buyer received almost ₦1 million ($733.92) worth of Bitcoin. Under the new framework, the buyer still pays ₦1 million ($733.92), but receives only 98.5% of the Bitcoin purchased. The remaining 1.5% is withheld as stamp duty and remitted to the government. The total tax burden becomes clear once the entire transaction cycle is considered. Assume a user buys ₦1 million ($733.92) worth of Bitcoin at ₦1 million ($733.92) per BTC. The purchase attracts a 1.5% stamp duty of 0.015 BTC (₦15,000/$11.01), leaving the buyer with 0.985 BTC (₦985,000/$722.91). If Bitcoin later doubles in value to ₦2 million ($1,467.84) per BTC and the investor decides to sell their 0.985 BTC at ₦1.97 million ($1,445.82), the taxes increase as well. The buyer in that second transaction pays a 1.5% stamp duty on the Bitcoin received, equivalent to 0.014775 BTC, or about ₦29,550 ($21.69) at the prevailing market price. The new buyer gets 0.970225 BTC. The exchange also withholds 1% of the value of the Bitcoin being disposed of, about ₦19,700 ($14.46), from the seller as withholding tax. The transaction generates ₦64,250 ($47.15) in tax liabilities across both sides of the trade. Because both taxes are calculated using the value of the asset at the time of sale, the government’s take rises as Bitcoin’s price appreciates. The estimate excludes exchange trading fees, blockchain network fees and value-added tax on exchange service fees. If the investment generates a taxable gain, income tax would apply separately. A user who buys Bitcoin worth $2,000 (₦2.72 million) and later sells it for $4,000 (₦5.45 million) realises a gain of $2,000 (₦2.72 million). Under the guidelines, the first ₦800,000 of annual gains is exempt from tax, while the remaining ₦1.93 million would be taxed at 15%, producing an income tax bill of about ₦288,765. Depending on the taxpayer’s applicable income tax band under the guidelines, the income tax can rise to 25%. Crypto Tax Receipt: Where does the money go? Nigeria’s 2026 framework taxes your trade at entry, exit, and on profit. Type a scenario below to see the exact 6-tier extraction. You Invest (₦) You Sell For (₦) Small Trader Active Trader Whale After all taxes, you keep ₦0 Net ProceedsTax Drain (₦0) Stamp Duty (Entry)1.5% of investment -₦0 Stamp Duty + WHT (Exit)1.5% SD + 1% WHT withheld -₦0 Progressive Income TaxCalculated across 6 tiers -₦0 Profit Tier (Rate)TaxableTax 1. First ₦800k (0%)₦0₦0 2. Next ₦2.2m (15%)₦0₦0 3. Next ₦9m (18%)₦0₦0 4. Next ₦13m (21%)₦0₦0 5. Next ₦25m (23%)₦0₦0 6. Above ₦50m (25%)₦0₦0 WHT Advance Credit Applied +₦0 Generating insight… Rather than taxing gains created solely by naira depreciation, the NRS will calculate appreciation in US dollars before converting the real gain into naira for tax purposes. This provision ensures that investors are not taxed on currency depreciation, preventing a situation where a user owes taxes simply because the naira weakened even if the asset value remained flat. The new guidelines do not create a single virtual asset tax. They create multiple taxes that interact. “VA (Virtual Assets) transactions shall be subject to the applicable taxes imposed under the NTA. A single transaction may give rise to more than one tax liability such as income tax, VAT or stamp duty, where different taxable events arise from the same transaction,” the NRS stated. In practice, a straightforward virtual asset investment will now involve: This is not Nigeria’s first attempt to tax virtual assets. The Finance Act 2023 introduced a 10% tax on gains from disposing of digital assets, but enforcement remained weak. Nigeria is not alone in taxing digital assets, but its approach differs from many major crypto markets. In the United States, cryptocurrencies are generally treated as property, with investors paying capital gains tax only when they sell or dispose of their holdings at a profit. The United Kingdom similarly taxes gains after the sale of assets. Rather than imposing taxes at multiple points in a transaction, many jurisdictions focus primarily on taxing realised gains or income. Stablecoins become a more expensive digital dollar Stablecoins are digital assets whose value is pegged to relatively stable assets such as fiat currencies. They are
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