We’re bringing Startup Battlefield back to Africa on December 11, and we’re excited to announce our jam-packed agenda that highlights the best and brightest startups in the region.

For months we’ve been poring through hundreds of applications looking for innovative startups based in Africa. It was tough; the competition was fierce. But we were able to find 15 innovative companies to compete for the top prize. Each company will present a six-minute pitch in front of a panel of judges, vying for US$25,000 in no-equity cash. But that’s not all! Winners will receive a trip for two and the opportunity to compete in Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in 2019. In addition to Startup Battlefield, we have exciting panels covering many facets of startup funding in Africa, as well as the blockchain.

It’s not too late to buy your tickets to this exciting event. Join us as we crown the next startup champion in Africa. Get your tickets here. We still have a few tricks up our sleeves and will be adding some new names to the agenda over the next few weeks, so keep your eyes open. In the meantime, check out these agenda highlights:

9:30 AM – 10:40 AM

Startup Battlefield Session 1

TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition is back in Africa! Watch as entrepreneurs from around the region pitch expert judges and vie for the Battlefield Cup.

The first preliminary round of five contestants.

10:40 AM – 11:05 AM

Expats, Repats and Africans with Chris Folayan (Mall for Africa), Shikoh Gitau (Safaricom) and Lexi Novitske (Singularity Investments)

Africa’s tech sector is reshaping the movement of people, investment, and talent between the continent and the world. But what are the pros and cons of repatriates returning to launch companies, expats choosing Africa’s tech scene over others, and VCs deploying greater capital to region?

11:20 AM – 11:40 AM

Keynote by Konstantinos Papamiltiadis (Facebook)

Facebook’s Director of Platform Partnerships discusses the Facebook developer ecosystem. Sponsored by Facebook.

11:40 AM – 12:40 PM

Startup Battlefield Session 2

The second preliminary round of five contestants.

1:40 PM – 2:40 PM

Startup Battlefield Session 3

The third preliminary round of five contestants.

2:40 PM – 3:00 PM

Fireside Chat with Funke Opeke (Main One)

Dubbed as the person responsible for powering broadband across all of West Africa, Funke Opeke has become one of the most well-known people in the African tech community. MainOne, a telecoms company Opeke leads as CEO, is responsible for driving internet use across West Africa by investing in digital infrastructures. In this fireside chat, we will what’s next and how to equip entrepreneurs with the necessary resources to build scalable businesses.

3:00 PM – 3:25 PM

Investing in African Startups with  Kola Aina (Ventures Platform), Marieme Diop (Orange Digital Ventures) and Omobola Johnson (TLcom Capital)

Discussing the unique landscape of the African startup ecosystem and what can be learned from Silicon Valley’s approach to venture capital.

3:40 PM – 4:55 PM

Startup Battlefield Final

The final round. One of these five finalists will be the winner of Startup Battlefield.

4:55 PM – 5:15 PM

Coming Soon!

5:15 PM – 5:40 PM

Blockchain’s Potential in Africa with Olugbenga Agboola (Flutterwave), Nichole Yembra (Greenhouse Capital) and Olaoluwa Samuel-Biyi (SureRemit)

As crypto fever gripped many leading economies in 2018, Africa was shaping its own blockchain narrative—one more grounded in utility than speculation. Over the last year, the continent saw several ICOs and token launches. And use cases for blockchain in Africa are emerging to solve problems and unlock potential in agriculture, solar-energy, health-care, government, and beyond.

5:40 PM

Startup Battlefield Closing Awards Ceremony

Watch the announcement of the Startup Battlefield winner.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Announcing the agenda for TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa

Anorak Technologies, the U.K. startup building a life insurance advice platform, has raised £5 million in Series A funding. Notably, the round is led by previous backer Kamet Ventures, the tech incubator funded by insurance giant AXA. It brings the total raised by Anorak to £9 million.

In a call, co-founder and CEO David Vanek told me the startup’s mission is to build the world’s “smartest” automated life insurance advice platform. It wants to offer insurance advice at the most appropriate time and place in a person’s life, such as when buying a house or starting a family, and in turn open up life insurance cover to many more people.

As it stands, life insurance, such as accidental death cover, tends to be sold through financial advisors or brokers targeting high net worth individuals. That leaves swathes of people and their dependents without any cover at all.

Vanek says the additional capital will be used to “grow our tech, data, product and business development teams,” and to continue to invest in Anorak’s unique recommendation engine, which covers the profiling of users, analysing their risk, and connecting them to a suitable product.

The “insurtech” startup also plans to integrate with more partners in order to build out its distribution infrastructure for life insurance. This will span investment platforms, online mortgage brokers, money management apps, challenger banks, media groups, and gig economy platforms. To test these non-traditional B2B2C routes to market for life insurance advice, Anorak already has API integrations with Starling Bank, and the money management app Yolt.

So, for example, Starling customers can connect Anorak to their Starling account via the bank’s own API to provide Anorak with access to personal details and transaction data. This enables the life insurance advisor to begin building up a profile based on things like rent, mortgage, salary, outgoings etc., to provide accurate advice.

Anorak will also ask any remaining questions needed to fill out missing profiling data. It then outlines what is at risk in case of death or disability, the type of protection that might be needed (life, income protection, etc), how much, and for how long.

Finally, Anorak presents the three best-suited products (from all of the major life insurers) and provides quotes for each of them, as well as the option to apply and buy the product online through Anorak.

Moving forward, Vanek tells me that Anorak wants to expands its tech platform to advisors, such as mortgage brokers and wealths managers, who haven’t previously had tools to help them provide life insurance or accidental injury cover.

The resulting hybrid approach will enable customer journeys to start online and be finalised offline by an agent/adviser using the Anorak platform to access customer data and use the Anorak recommendation engine, or to start offline with advisers using the Anorak platform and continuing online with a dedicated customer portal so clients can visualise or adjust their insurance needs.

“Buying life insurance is not an impulse buy, it is complex, [and] some people will always want to be able to speak to an adviser,” he tells me. “We want to leverage Anorak technology to build a truly ‘channel agnostic’ protection advice.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Anorak raises £5M Series A for its life insurance advice platform

Fluidly, the London-based fintech that offers an “intelligent” cashflow management SaaS for SMEs, has raised £5 million in Series A funding. The round is led by New-York based Nyca Partners, with participation from other investors including Octopus Ventures, Anthemis, and angel investors Simon Murdoch, and Charlie Songhurst.

Claiming to define a new software category, namely “Intelligent Cash,” Fluidly want to significantly improve small and medium-sized businesses’ cashflow management. To do this it has built machine learning-based technology to predict and optimise the future cash flows for SMEs, thus helping business owners conduct better financial decision-making. As part of this, you connect Fluidly to your business bank account via Open Banking, and to your cloud accounting software.

“Fluidly is then able to access the transaction-level bank and accounting data and it uses this data to automatically forecast future cash flows by predicting when invoices will arrive, get paid or other payments will be made,” explains co-founder and CEO Caroline Plumb. “This gives a business an instant, continuously updated view of their financial future rather than having to model it in a spreadsheet”.

Since launching a year ago, Fluidly says it is now working with nine of the top twenty U.K. accounting firms as a route to market, including BDO, Baldwins, and Haysmacintyre. The fintech has also formed partnerships with various cloud accounting software providers, and says it is one of the fastest-growing apps on Xero’s marketplace and a “Champion-level” Sage partner.

To that end, businesses sign up for Fluidly on a monthly subscription basis, and Fluidly also sells volume licences to accounting firms and lenders who then in turn offer the SaaS to their own small business clients. Futrli, and Float could be considered competitors, but arguably the humble Excel spreadsheet is Fluidly’s main competitor and a far from optimum solution.

Meanwhile, Plumb tells me the new funding will be invested in product development and engineering to increase the number of platforms that Fluidly can integrate with, and to add new features such as scenario-building and insights to the software’s forecasting ability.

“We’ll be adding smart alerts, scenarios and suggested actions if you might be running into cashflow difficulty,” she says. “We’ll also start to scale our sales and marketing team”.

Adds Hans Morris, Managing Partner at Nyca: “We are thrilled to have joined Fluidly on their journey as they grow into a major AI/ ML player in the financial technology industry. Cashflow management for SME’s is an area that is long overdue for the kind of innovation that Fluidly is providing”.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Fluidly, the ‘intelligent’ cashflow management SaaS for SMEs, picks up £5M Series A