TechCentral (main feed)

Chinese companies have built their position in African technology one layer at a time – first phones and telecoms equipment, then fintech and now the AI models that local start-ups build on. American private capital, meanwhile, is pulling back. Lexi Novitske, general partner at Norrsken22, thinks US investors will regret it.

Novitske moved to Nigeria in 2012 and has invested from Lagos ever since. Norrsken22, a pan-African growth fund backed by Nordic tech founders including those behind Klarna, Skype and Minecraft, closed its debut fund at US$205-million in 2023. It is now about halfway through deploying that capital, with no exits yet.

In this episode of the TechCentral Show, she expands on the argument TechCentral reported last week: that African start-ups are increasingly building on Chinese AI models such as Alibaba’s Qwen because they are cheaper and more available, and that the US risks losing both a young, digital-first market and access to its data.

In the interview, with TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod, Novitske also discusses:

• How Nigeria’s start-up scene has changed since she began as an angel investor;

• Why unpredictable regulation and a shortage of top talent are bigger obstacles for Nigerian founders than power cuts;

• How Chinese-backed OPay and PalmPay won Nigerian fintech by absorbing years of losses, and why that now makes regulators uneasy;

• Why Silicon Valley’s AI boom has drawn venture capital away from Africa, and when she expects it to return;

• Why Egypt and South Africa offer the best opportunities right now, with Nigeria likely to follow; and

• What Optasia’s oversubscribed JSE listing means for Johannesburg, why the biggest African fintechs are looking to New York, London and Hong Kong instead, and why one or two winners can return an entire fund.

Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral

AI agents are no longer a thought experiment for security teams. They are breaking out of test environments, hacking real companies and, according to one of our guests, already going rogue inside large businesses.

In this episode of the TechCentral Show, TechCentral deputy editor Fanie van Rooyen talks to Dominic White, MD for South Africa at Orange Cyberdefense, and Adam Ely, GM of AI security at Check Point, about the escalating threat AI poses to cybersecurity.

They unpack the incident in which OpenAI’s own agents escaped a test environment and broke into Hugging Face’s systems. White argues the initial breach was far from sophisticated and questions whether OpenAI understands its duty of care. Ely explains why the incident shows that even highly skilled, well-resourced teams can’t rule out agents going rogue.

They also take on the widely reported story that three Hacktron researchers used Anthropic’s Claude to take over OpenAI employees’ accounts – a story White calls “deliberately misleading”.

Also discussed:

• A Check Point customer running 50 000 AI agents – and what happens when they drift

• Why sandboxing and human oversight are struggling to keep up

• Why even security professionals end up switching off their own agents’ safeguards

• The case for monitoring agents from the inside, in real time

• Whether AI development can – or should – slow down

• Who is accountable when an agent breaks the rules

• The Manhattan Project comparison both guests reach for

• What they expect to see in the next 12 months

Whether you run a security team, build with AI or simply want to understand where the technology is heading, this is a frank conversation with two practitioners who see the threat from all sides. TechCentral

Octotel CEO Trevor van Zyl joins the TechCentral Show to talk about where South Africa’s fibre market goes next – including a potential merger with MetroFibre Networx. Van Zyl told TechCentral that Octotel and MetroFibre Networx are assessing a combination that would create the country’s third-largest fibre network operator, with both companies sitting under a common investor in an AIIM-led consortium.

In the interview, he sets out Octotel’s position: just under 400 000 homes passed across the Cape Town metropole, the West Coast and the Garden Route; a balance sheet he says lets the company deploy capital when and where it chooses; and a Western Cape footprint he argues overlaps very little with MetroFibre’s.

He discusses the next phase of roll-out, too. As networks push into lower-LSM areas, “the commercials and the economics start changing”, he says, and affordability now reaches well into the middle class.

He rejects the idea that fixed-wireless access can substitute for fibre in dense settlements – wireless has improved dramatically, he says, “but when you look at the actual demand case and what is required in those environments, it absolutely has to be fibre”. The more important question, in his view, is how to distribute it economically once you get there.

On Openserve’s move into the ISP business, Van Zyl is relaxed. He says he understands why Openserve did it, but that Octotel will not follow: “We certainly don’t want to become an ISP. We’re not good at being an ISP.”

He also expects consolidation among ISPs as networks saturate, sees low-Earth orbit satellite as complementary to fibre rather than a threat to it, and will not rule Octotel out of any future move by MTN on fibre network assets.

Don’t miss the discussion. TechCentral

Chris Shortt, chief technology officer at Shoprite Group, says the work of the next five years is meeting the customer at their point of need, wherever that is – and that this does not mean the end of the store.

Speaking on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO podcast series, brought to you by NTT DATA, Shortt said Africa’s largest retailer is building towards a unified experience regardless of how a customer reaches it: ordering by voice from a home assistant, or walking in to choose their own tomatoes and their own fillet.

“How do we blend that for you so that it’s actually how you want to do things, as opposed to how we might want you to do things,” he said. The group’s store footprint, he added, is as alive and active as it has always been, and its point of presence in communities still makes a difference to customers.

Delivering on that promise rests on a real-time inventory layer, which is why modernising Shoprite’s core SAP retail platform is the largest technology project the group has running.

Shortt also discusses:

• How the CIO/CTO’s job has changed, with the infrastructure now simply expected to work and the role shifting towards helping business counterparts understand the art of the possible;

• Why about 12 000 Shoprite employees are using generative AI, and how the gateway the group built picks the least expensive model that can handle a request;

• Why his product teams now pair one or two people with several agents, and what he put to the group’s chief people officer about recruits who arrive with agents of their own;

• Why he will not comment on other retailers’ ERP failures, and the “day in the life of” testing he relies on instead;

• What he tells the audit and risk committee when they ask what keeps him up at night; and

• The book that shaped his thinking, and the productivity habit he will not work without.

Don’t miss a great discussion on the future of retail. TechCentral

The company runs 125 chargers and wants a thousand within five years, focused on urban hubs.

--

Rubicon’s public charging network is profitable and grew usage markedly in two months as fuel prices spiked, the company’s e-mobility head has told TechCentral’s Watts & Wheels.

Hilton Musk said usage climbed roughly 30% in a single month, then another 30% the month after. “We thought it was a fluke,” he said. “But it carried on.” Growth started levelling off in June, largely because importers have sold through their stock of affordable EVs.

Rubicon, founded in Port Elizabeth in 1985 as an electrical supplier to the likes of Volkswagen, now runs 125 chargers and wants a thousand within five years – about eight times its current footprint.

The network turned profitable roughly a year ago, which Musk put down to concentrating on dense urban markets: Cape Town, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Bloemfontein. Around 90% of driving happens inside those hubs, he said, with the other 10% between them.

The company has chargers on the N3 and N4 and opened the Durban-Cape Town route in 2024. The N1 remains GridCars territory.

Musk expects public charging to take a larger share in South Africa than the 80/20 home-to-public split seen in mature markets – closer to 70/30 – because many EV owners live in complexes and estates with no charging.

At R7/kWh, Rubicon’s DC charging works out to roughly R1/km, against about 50c/km on municipal power at home. Both undercut petrol comfortably.

He is sticking with 2028 as the year battery-electric vehicles reach 5% of new passenger sales. Count hybrids and plug-ins, he said, and the market is nearly there already.

Don’t miss the discussion. TechCentral