Orange Digital Ventures Africa, the Orange investment fund’s new initiative for Africa, has announced its first investment, helping Africa’s Talking to raise $8.6m, alongside the IFC World Bank and Social Capital.

Marc Rennard, Chairman of Orange Digital Ventures, said: “We are delighted that the first beneficiary of our African initiative is a recognised player providing access to operators’ APIs. We believe that is it essential to support every initiative that aims to make these APIs more accessible to entrepreneurs in Africa.”

“The expansion of these mobile services is one of the key ways to help generate new innovations that will have an impact on the continent. What is more, this investment strengthens Orange’s position as leader in the ongoing mobile revolution. We look forward to seeing Africa’s Talking accelerate its pan-African expansion,” he added.

Africa’s Talking’s cloud-based software platform virtualizes telco infrastructure across the continent, and provides unified access via its API (application programming interface) to a robust and growing community of more than 20,000 software developers in Africa currently serving over 1,000 fast-growing digital companies, enabling them to create real world applications faster and more efficiently.

Africa’s Talking’s scalable platform enables it to service both the one-man shop as well as larger enterprises - developers, startups, large companies - to embed messaging, voice, and video communications into their apps, allowing them to better connect with their mass market customers.  

From SMS services that help farmers improve crop yields to voice APIs that connect women to nearby family planning clinics, Africa’s Talking’s simple APIs enable businesses to build robust and value-additive digital products.

The company is headquartered in Kenya and recently expanded to Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Malawi, and Nigeria. 

Africa’s Talking aims to create a pan-African platform that enables developers across the continent to create, grow, and sustain strong businesses using their communication solutions.

Samuel Gikandi, CEO and co-founder of Africa’s Talking, said: “This new round of fundraising will enable us to grow our pan-African community of Software Developers building businesses that consume communication and payment services. In this context, the arrival of Orange Digital Ventures is excellent news for Africa’s Talking.”

“We intend to leverage this relationship to accelerate our expansion in countries where Orange is present and launch new products that deepen the engagement of Orange with Software Developers,” he said.