Category: Semafor

African startup funding dipped by 6% year on year to $1.4 billion in the first six months of 2026, after the number of early-stage companies securing venture capital investment fell, data from Africa The Big Deal shows. The largest agreement for the year so far happened in June, when four-year-old ...

Yinka’s view For years, the case for US investment in Africa has run into the same wall: Companies and financiers argued the regulations, infrastructure, and technical capacity needed to make projects bankable simply weren’t there. The US State Department thinks it finally has the answer: The Bureau of African Affairs’ ...

Saudi airlines were the only Gulf carriers with a big shopping list this year at Farnborough, one of the industry’s biggest airshows. Riyadh Air signed a deal for 34 Airbus and Boeing widebody jets, and budget carrier Flynas committed to 25 Airbus aircraft, while the UAE and Qatar, home to ...

Abu Dhabi is building a 100 billion dirham ($27 billion) waterfront expansion on Saadiyat Island, the biggest single addition to the district yet. The emirate has spent two decades turning the area into a cultural hub, home to offshoots of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums. Aldar, the developer behind Yas ...

During a recent visit to Nairobi, I accompanied a colleague to a dinner bringing together some of Kenya’s largest exporters. They sold everything from tea and avocados to flowers and leather, across East Africa, Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia. What struck me was how the gathering was ...

The News Carlyle has acquired Secturion Systems, the first deal from the private-equity firm’s new fund focused on medium-sized companies that sell to the government. The DC-based investment firm, which has $475 billion of assets under management, has been raising up to $3 billion for a new platform that focuses ...

Kuwait agreed to a long-term lease of its oil pipeline network in a $16 billion deal with Blackstone, Brookfield, and KKR. The investors will acquire a 49% stake in a joint venture with Kuwait Oil Company, which will have a 20.5-year lease on the pipelines and lease them back to ...

The Scoop A flood of paid, unlabeled influencer marketing and AI-produced political ads has prompted a Senate Democrat to look at new restrictions on political advertising online. On Monday, California Sen. Adam Schiff plans to introduce two new bills that would attempt to illuminate who is paying influencers for political ...

A second straight day without US-Iran strikes shifted attention from the battlefield to the White House, where President Donald Trump faces an increasingly narrow set of options. The weekend lull, following nearly two weeks of tit-for-tat attacks, appears to reflect strategic constraints as much as renewed diplomacy. While Trump has ...

A deadly attack on a Pride celebration in Berlin on Saturday inflamed Europe’s fraught debate over migration and extremism. Authorities said a 21-year-old man — a German citizen whose family immigrated from Lebanon — drove a van into the crowd, killing one person and injuring more than 25. It comes ...