👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – AfricInvest ships out of Centaures

Welcome to another week.

Stablecoins are becoming an important financial infrastructure for African fintechs. In today’s edition, we talk about why businesses are adopting them, Lesotho’s new deal, and Mr Price’s investments in tech and Europe.

Let’s dive in.

AfricInvest Group, a pan-African investment platform, has begun its exit from SIPO Holding, the holding company controlling Groupe Centaures, an Ivorian logistics and transport group that it first backed in 2018, bringing an eight-year investment relationship closer to an end. The firm said it plans to fully exit by the end of 2026 after reaching an agreement with the company’s founding Delsuc family.

An exit after eight years: In 2018, AfricInvest invested €12.2 million ($14.2 million) into Centaures through its AfricInvest III fund to support the company’s growth plans.

Neither AfricInvest nor Centaures has disclosed the valuation, stake size, or exit terms. The only visible thread is a $16 million facility that Centaures secured from BluePeak Private Capital in June, part of which has already been used to partially buy out AfricInvest. 

Exit season? Centaures is not AfricInvest’s only recent exit. In February, it exited Zambia’s Entrepreneurs Financial Centre following its acquisition by another financial institution. In June 2025, it exited AFG Holding, an Ivorian banking group it helped grow into a multi-country operation, and that same month its European affiliate exited Mathevon, a French industrial company, about eight years after investing. 

AfricInvest is clearly rotating out of several older investment bets. Whether these exits are delivering the returns investors expected is another question entirely.

There was a time when stablecoins sounded like one of those crypto concepts that required a long explanation to make it less complicated. Today, a Nigerian fintech has said that stablecoins are now the largest payment channel on its business platform.

Grey, a Nigerian cross-border payments startup, said its business platform processed $61.4 million in payment volume within four months of launch. 

Dollar-backed stablecoins, such as USDT and USDC, have become central to how businesses on the platform move money across borders, Grey said, as more African enterprises seek alternative ways to hold value and transact outside of volatile local currencies and slow correspondent banking rails. 

State of play: Grey is not alone. Across Africa, fintechs are carving out stablecoin-based rails for enterprises to manage and move money across borders. Several Nigerian and Africa-focused players, including Flutterwave, Yellow Card, and Raenest, a direct Grey competitor, all offer similar solutions to businesses. 

Some are building their own infrastructure; others are partnering with blockchain networks to get there faster. In May, Paga partnered with Sui, the blockchain network built by US-based Mysten Labs, to develop cross-border payment products. Flutterwave has done the same, partnering with Polygon and Tempo to expand its stablecoin payment infrastructure.

Why businesses are choosing them: Cross-border payments in Africa are slow, expensive, and structurally inefficient. Foreign exchange shortages, correspondent banking chains, and layered transaction fees can turn a routine international payment into a days-long ordeal. Stablecoins cut through that by settling near-instantly on blockchains, without the intermediaries that add both cost and delay.

Zoom out: Grey’s $61.4 million in stablecoin volume in four months is not yet rival territory for traditional banking rails, but it is a signal that stablecoins have crossed from experiment to infrastructure. More fintechs are seeking efficient ways to help businesses move money—and so far, all roads point to stablecoins for these startups.

Mr Price, a South African clothing and homeware retailer with over 3,100 stores across Africa, said that it spent R1.1 billion ($60.4 million) on tech upgrades and expanding its retail footprint in 2025, according to its report. 

In the 2026/2027 financial year, the retailer plans to spend an additional R1.1 billion ($60.4 million) on further tech expansion to compete and strengthen its position in several verticals, including e-commerce, telecoms, and its smartphone business, Salt.

State of play: The returns are showing up where it matters. Online sales grew 4.9% year on year, ahead of in-store growth of 4.4%, with more than half of online orders collected in store. Its telecoms segment was the biggest retail sales driver for the year, growing 10.3% to R1.5 billion ($90.5 million) in revenue.

Between the lines: South African consumers remain under spending pressure, and Mr Price is applying strict lending criteria to protect its credit book, which it says carries one of the lowest bad debt ratios in the sector. Headline earnings grew 7.7% to 1,453 cents per share. 

The retailer is also watching global supply chains closely, flagging shipping costs and oil price pressure from the US-Iran conflict as risks that could affect operations into 2027, though it said the current financial year was largely unaffected.

Zoom out: Mr Price is also moving beyond Africa. Its acquisition of NKD Group, the German clothing and homeware retailer, announced in December 2025, closed this quarter, adding 2,100 stores across seven European countries and pushing its total store count past 5,000. For a retailer that previously retreated from Nigeria and Australia, Europe is a significant statement of intent.

Lesotho, the small, landlocked, mountainous country in Southern Africa, which currently imports over 50% of its electricity from neighbours, has just signed a deal poised to turn its fortunes around, at least on paper. 

The government signed what it calls the largest investment commitment in the country’s history: a $6.2 billion agreement with Convalt Energy, a US-based renewable energy developer founded in 2011, to build a 1,200-megawatt hydropower facility and an AI data centre near the Kobong Dam. 

A major deal: The investment is nearly three times Lesotho’s entire gross domestic product (GDP) of $2.27 billion. If completed, it would flip the country from an electricity importer to a regional power exporter.

State of play: The logic of pairing hydropower with a data centre is sound. AI computing is extraordinarily energy-intensive, and data centre developers worldwide are scrambling for locations with abundant, cheap, renewable power. 

Lesotho has significant untapped hydropower potential from its rivers and high-altitude terrain, the same water resources it has long transferred to South Africa under the Lesotho Highlands Water Project. The country has been exporting its natural advantage without capturing the industrial value attached to it.

Between the lines: What was signed is a binding memorandum of agreement, a framework, not a construction contract. Feasibility studies, financing, and regulatory approvals are all still ahead, and $6.2 billion does not materialise from a signing ceremony. Convalt Energy, whose primary focus has shifted toward US solar manufacturing in recent years, has no publicly completed project at anywhere near this scale. 

The company has signed large energy agreements in India, Southeast Asia, and Africa before. Its track record of executing them to completion is less clear. Lesotho also has no prior experience building infrastructure of this complexity, and no established AI or data centre industry to anchor demand.

Zoom out: None of that makes the project impossible, but it does make the gap between announcement and delivery very wide. The realistic path runs through a creditworthy offtake agreement, a serious financing consortium, and a feasibility study that survives independent scrutiny. Until those exist, this will remain a compelling vision for Lesotho.