👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – Going Yoco for M&A

TGIF.

We’re thrilled to announce the official theme for Moonshot 2026: Courage & Conviction: Building for a New World.

This year, we’re calling on the African tech ecosystem to back bold ideas and dig deep to build an ecosystem that solves African problems on a global scale.

The continent’s most ambitious founders, investors, LPs, operators, creatives, and policymakers will converge at Moonshot 2026 to chart Africa’s next era. You don’t want to be left out.

Secure your spot.

John Eni-ibukun is an African Gospel and Afrobeats curator at Audiomack, one of the continent’s foremost music streaming platforms, where he thinks about how music travels, gets discovered, and lands with audiences in a fragmented digital world. Before that, he ran a digital press platform for artists. 

Under the alias “June Sometimes,” he channels that knowledge into something more personal. His debut project, “Memories with Nostalgic Flaws,” is an interactive web-based game built around the emotional texture of growing up in Lagos in the early-2000s;

• Explain your work to a five-year-old.

I put music in spaces they should be heard, performances at places they should be seen and I love to bring people together towards having memorable experiences. 

• Did you stumble into curation or did you plan for it? How can anybody follow the same path?

I believe the foundation of curation for me has always been my taste. I believe that I have been putting my life together as one big curated project even before I got to know what curation means. I’ve always loved to create art, and to create well, I consume a lot also. Choosing what to consume, how to consume it and making meaning of what it does to my senses has heavily influenced what I create, so I think it’s fair to say that my consumption of various artforms is what made me the curator I am today. If you’d like to be a curator, I’d say, trust your taste and consume a lot. From doing these, you’d be able to eliminate what doesn’t work for you and also get a better understanding of what you have so much affinity towards.

• How do you apply technology to your work as a curator?

As much as taste informs what I like, I think data can point towards what other people like and that in so many ways makes my work easier as a tastemaker. I work with some digital data tools, curate music from various web dashboards and of course market creative products through digital services. 

The mergers and acquisitions (M&A) machine may have reduced its intensity in announcing new deals, after a great start to the year with the Flutterwave-Mono deal. 

However, Yoco, the South African technology company and former M&A machine, is finding its footing again.

On Thursday, it acquired Dyner AI for an undisclosed amount; given how quiet the ecosystem was about it, it is likely a small deal, but a needed one, however.

Yoco’s last acquisition before this was Nona Digital, a fintech and Web3 software development agency, in March 2022, its third and largest acquisition at the time, following Cobi Interactive in 2019 and Dado in 2021. After that flurry, the M&A activity stopped. 

The reasons were not hard to read: the funding environment tightened globally after 2022, startup valuations came under pressure, and Yoco itself went through a leadership transition. Founding CEO Katlego Maphai stepped down in September 2025 after a decade, saying the skills that launch a company are not always the same ones needed to scale it. 

For a period, the company was in a holding pattern, led by two co-CEOs while it searched for a permanent replacement.

Dyner AI is the answer to what comes next. Founded by two former actuaries, the startup has built an AI operating system for restaurants that plugs into point-of-sale, accounting, and supplier data to surface real-time insights on stock movement, pricing, fraud, and margins. 

For Yoco, which already sits on transaction data from over 200,000 merchants, owning an AI layer that can turn that data into actionable intelligence is precisely the kind of move that separates a payments company from a commerce platform.

Yoco’s new CEO, Carsten Höltkemeyer, takes over on June 1, following a global search process. He joins from Solaris, the Berlin-based embedded finance group, where he led a difficult turnaround before departing at the end of 2025, and prior to that spent a decade running Barclaycard’s German business. 

He inherits a company that has just made its first acquisition in over four years, with a clear signal of where it intends to go.

In the latest episode of Europe’s hottest corporate custody battle,Uber, the ride-hailing company, has increased its stake in Delivery Hero (DH), a German food delivery giant, after buying out Aspex Management’s shares. Uber now holds a 36.83% stake in DH.

Why we’re watching: Remember Prosus, the investment firm owned by South African conglomerate Naspers? Prosus is now caught between a takeover battle for DH, where it is being forced to sell its stakes in the German food delivery company to finance another acquisition in Just Eat Takeaway.com. As part of that deal, it sold 5% DH shares to Aspers in May. Now, it seems Aspers mainly served as a pass-through medium. It has now sold its stakes in DH to Uber, leaving Prosus as the only other major shareholder in the German food delivery company.

The Uber-reverse card: On Monday, Prosus made a plea to the European Union (EU), Bloomberg reported, to soften or halt the requirement that forced it to sell its DH shares to both Uber—earlier in April—and Aspers. We analysed that Prosus did it to save skin; if it is forced to sell stakes at today’s valuation, it would lose out on a lot more money by the time DH’s value skyrockets to €18 billion ($20 billion), as Bloomberg Intelligence analysts estimated.

Now, with Uber pulling off an Asper tag-team move, Prosus’ leverage is threatened, anyway.

Between the lines: Uber now holds 24.99% voting rights in DH, just below the 30% threshold under German law that would trigger a mandatory offer to buy out all remaining shareholders.

With Uber using Aspex as a pass-through to build its stake, Prosus could find itself squeezed. Even if the EU softens its sell-down requirement, the company it was forced to sell to is now its biggest rival shareholder in DH.

Sorted Wallet, a pan-African fintech startup, raised $4.4 million in seed funding. Tether and Gnosis led the round, with participation from Movement and Angel Invest. (May 22)

Here is the other deal for the week:

• Mia Healthcare Technologies, a South African healthtech startup, raised R15 million ($910,000) in growth funding from the Vumela Fund. (May 22)

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more funding announcements. Before you go, what does it take to scale healthtech in Nigeria? We explored this at the State of Healthtech in Nigeria 2026 report launch. Read the recap here.