Asili Africa
This podcast explores the origins of Africa's largest companies. Each episode provides an in-depth look at how these businesses began and evolved. The show focuses on the foundational stories behind their success, offering a deep dive into the early days of Africa's corporate giants.
Episodes
Timon (Nigeria): Stablecoins in wallets, not dollar cards
Timon exists for the traveler whose dollar card fails abroad, funded by stablecoins like USDT and USDC rather than traditional bank rails. Co-founded in Mannheim after leaving CrowdForce's FairMoney exit, CEO Tomi Ayorinde and COO Chizaram Ucheaga built the solution not from regulatory fear but from the reality that seventy percent of their customers hold digital dollars in wallets.
Bitnob (Nigeria): Plumbing Bitcoin's Retail Loss in Africa
Bitnob turned Bitcoin's lost retail argument into a profitable plumbing system by partnering with Strike to move Tether across borders. Founded in a Ghanaian hostel, it navigated regulatory walls while scaling operations beyond the original founders' expectations. This story explains how a niche technical rail became critical infrastructure for billions transferred globally, revealing why
Weego (Morocco): Endurance is the strategy
Weego Mobility Lab refuses the startup myth, proving endurance over hype as four co-founders—two from Senegal, two from Morocco—navigate a pandemic pivot in Kenitra. The story traces the journey from Sunubus to today's modest seed, ignoring the hero narrative and focusing instead on the quiet reality of building something that doesn't need an audience to exist yet.
OKO Finance (Mali): What Nine Years of Silence Revealed
This is the story of OKO Finance. Simon Schwall, and two co-founders barely on the record — Raphael Haziza the actuary, Shehzad Lokhandwalla the CTO. A 2019 pilot in Mali with 450 farmers, Allianz underwriting, Orange Money paying out on a parametric trigger — a rainfall satellite crossing a threshold, no adjuster in the field. Twenty thousand CFA in, thirty thousand CFA out, automatically.
Ampersand (Rwanda): The Battery Grid, Not the Motorcycle Maker
The battery grid, not the motorcycle maker - and when a competitor with three to four times the capital came for the motorcycle, Ampersand let it come.In the mid-2010s an engineer in Rwanda was keeping lithium batteries running on the rooftops of rural health clinics. In 2016 he and three others incorporated a company in Kigali to put that same chemistry under a motorcycle seat.This is the story o
Onafriq (Pan-African): Be the Wire, Not the Storefront
Be the wire, not the storefront — and seventeen years later, nobody outside the company can tell how well it is doing.In 2009 a man in Johannesburg registered a company on a conviction: that African mobile wallets would never talk to each other unless somebody built the wire between them.He was right, and he was unpaid for it, for eight years.This is the story of what that choice bought and what i
Naivas (Kenya): They Kept the Business by Giving Up the Company
They kept the business by giving up the company — and the one time they refused, it cost them Walmart.In 1990 a young man inherited a general store from his uncle. Today it is the largest supermarket chain in Kenya, and the founding family owns forty-nine per cent of it.This is the story of what that family sold, and when. A will that handed the company to the four children who worked in it, and t
Naspers/Prosus (South Africa): Nothing this company ever did was made to cost it anything — and the only bill it has ever been sent was for winning.
This is the one where a company spends a hundred and eleven years never once being made to pay for anything it did, and then gets handed a bill for the only thing it got right. Let's get into it.
Uchumi (Kenya): Once the oldest formal supermarket chain in Kenya
This is the story of the oldest supermarket chain in Kenya. A company that Kenyan industrial policy invented in nineteen seventy five, that Kenyan retail investors bought into on the Nairobi Stock Exchange in nineteen ninety two, that collapsed for the first time in June of two thousand and six, that came back from that collapse and looked, for a few years, like the great Kenyan corporate turnarou
Nakumatt (Kenya): Once the largest supermarket chain in East Africa
This is the story of a Nakuru mattress shop that grew, in twenty five years, into the largest supermarket chain on the eastern side of the continent. And then, in the space of thirty six months, disappeared. It is the largest documented family retail collapse in modern East African business history. And it is the specific case study that every Kenyan supermarket founder standing today, from Naivas
Shop2Shop (South Africa): Fintech solution for marginalized businesses
Two South African brothers built a payments and cash-management platform for the spaza shops, kiosks and micro-merchants that the country's retail banks and card networks quietly stopped serving — stitching together card acquiring, payment terminals, and shop-floor cash rails for informal traders across a ~R1 trillion invisible economy.
Fuzu (Kenya): Nairobi-headquartered talent platform for African professionals
This is the story of Fuzu. The company built from a single moment when fifteen hundred people applied for one Nairobi driver job. The company that outlasted a decade of African online recruitment failures on less capital than most of its rivals had already lost. And the company that read the disruption of its own category by generative AI, and decided to move into the machinery of generative AI it
Tugende (Uganda): A Ugandan asset-financing company for boda-bodas
This is the story of Tugende. The company that bet everything on the credit of people banks refused to see, built an empire one daily payment at a time, lost its footing at the worst possible moment, and is now trying to ride back on an electric motorcycle.
Roam Electric (Kenya): Built in Kenya, Ridden far
Two Swedish engineers — Filip Lövström and Mikael Gånge — walked away from Sweden in 2017 to build electric motorcycles from scratch inside Nairobi rather than importing kits from Asia, then bet the company on manufacturing every part in-country while every other African EV player assembled elsewhere and shipped in.
MAX (Metro Africa Xpress) (Nigeria)
The company was called Metro Africa Xpress. Everyone called it MAX. Its two co-founders had built it out of a classroom at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology six years earlier. They had raised seven million dollars from Silicon Valley and Tokyo the previous summer. They were one of the two most recognised motorcycle hailing brands in the largest city on the African continent. And in a singl
Anka (Côte d'Ivoire): A way to sell to buyers in Paris, New York and London without ever losing a shipment or a payment to Africa's forex controls
This is the story of Anka. The company that proved a hard business, and could not survive its own cap table.
Yoco (South Africa): The preferred payments partner for 200,000+ South African small businesses
This is the story of how they did it, how they nearly ran out of cash before it worked, and how, in the last twelve months, the founder they built the company around finally stepped back.
Pesapal (Kenya): 17 years, No borders
Pesapal is the seventeen year old Nairobi payment company that was in market seven years before Flutterwave launched, that never left Nairobi as its head office, and that in mid 2026, after a wave of African fintech consolidation, is still independent, still founder run, and still doing exactly the thing it was set up in 2009 to do. This is a story about staying.
Artcaffe (Kenya): African Coffee Empire
This is the story of how a European style café at a Nairobi mall became one of the most structurally consequential casual dining chains on the continent. And how it survived the specific event, at the specific mall, that changed everything.
Greenspoon (Kenya): Green good. Green future.
The story of Greenspoon, which is, in some ways, the smallest company we have ever put on Asili Africa. One warehouse. One country. Around one hundred to two hundred employees. Founded by a mother out of her own kitchen. But that scale is exactly what makes this story worth telling.
Quickmart (Kenya): Redefining the Kenyan retail landscape
This is the story of how Kenya's collapsed supermarket sector was restarted, by a Nakuru family that walked away in time, and the patient capital that walked in behind them.
Pan African Paper Mills / Rai Paper (Webuye, Kenya)
This is the story of a factory that built a town and then killed it. And the Kenyan industrialist who, seven years later, bought what was left for nine hundred million shillings against a peak book value of eighteen billion, and is now in the middle of the most ambitious industrial restart Kenya has seen in a generation.
Spiro (Togo): African EV infrastructure is becoming institutional capital's next bet
This is the story of an Indian born industrialist who already had a port, an industrial zone, and the president's phone number in two small Francophone countries, and who decided to use that infrastructure to build the largest electric vehicle company on the African continent.
Paymentology (South Africa): A quiet South African card-processing company built the boring infrastructure that lets African fintechs issue Visa and Mastercard cards in 68 countries
This is the story of two parallel companies, one in South Africa, one in the United Kingdom, that were rolled up by a third, dragged through losses that should have killed them, rebuilt around a new CEO from the biggest United States competitor in the category, and turned into the quiet infrastructure layer underneath some of the most ambitious banking experiments on the planet.
Yellow Card: Pan- African crypto exchange
This is the story of two college kids, a Taco Bell back room, a near death encounter with the Central Bank of Nigeria, and the African crypto company that just convinced Mastercard to bet on it as the rail underneath the dollar economy of an entire continent.
Carry1st (South Africa): From mobile gaming to fintech
This is the company that walked into African gaming, found the wall between players and payments, and built the rail that broke it.
TymeBank (South Africa): Africa's newest unicorn at a $1.5B valuation
A branchless digital bank backed by Patrice Motsepe's African Rainbow Capital set out to crack South Africa's big-four banking oligopoly by signing up customers at supermarket kiosks — became the country's only black-owned, black-controlled commercial bank, reached profitability, and in Dec 2024 drew a $250M cheque led by Brazil's Nubank to become Africa's newest unicorn at a $
Dash (Ghana): Ghanaian cross-border payments startup — including one of Africa's largest-ever seed rounds
The Ghanaian fintech that called itself the Alipay for Africa, raised roughly eighty six million dollars from Insight Partners and a top tier syndicate of Silicon Valley names on claims of one million users and a billion dollars in lifetime transaction volume, and then collapsed in twenty twenty three when an internal audit found that as much as ninety five percent of its user data had been fabric
Swvl (Egypt): Egyptian bus-hailing app. The first African company to list on Nasdaq at a $1.5B valuation
This is the story of Swvl.The first African company on Nasdaq. The cautionary tale that came home with it.
InstaDeep (Tunisia): One of the largest tech acquisition in African history
Two friends. Two laptops. Two thousand dollars. And a bet on mathematics that the rest of the world said could not be made from there.This is the story of InstaDeep.
Wave (Senegal): Francophone Africa's first unicorn at a $1.7B valuation
This is the story of Wave. The app that beat a telecom at its own game, by charging almost nothing.
Marketforce: One of Africa's most-funded business-to-business retail platforms
This is the story of how Tesh Mbaabu spent six years building Africa's most-funded business-to-business retail platform, watched it die, and walked out of the wreckage to build two new companies — including, against the odds of a man who had just publicly buried a unicorn, a bank.
Sun King (Kenya): The kerosene replacement company that became a finance company
This is the story of Sun King. The kerosene replacement company that became a finance company, and is now becoming a utility.
Chipper Cash (Pan-African): Two friends set out to make sending money across African borders as easy as a text
This is the story of Chipper Cash. The pan African remittance company that rode the cheapest capital in the history of African fintech to the top, and then had to teach itself how to walk on its own legs.
Moniepoint (Nigeria): It started as boring back-end software for banks, then noticed millions of Nigerians had nowhere to deposit cash
This is the story of Moniepoint. The boring software company that walked up the stack until it became one of Africa's most important consumer banks.
Tala (Kenya): The alternative-credit-scoring bet that redefined who counts as creditworthy
The Los Angeles fintech that decided the phone in a Kenyan stranger's pocket was a better paper trail than any payslip.
Interswitch (Nigeria): Before fintech was a word, a quiet Lagos company built the rails that every Nigerian bank card runs on
This is the story of how an ATM in Scotland accidentally founded Africa's first homegrown fintech unicorn. And of the engineer who built it without ever owning it.
Econet Wireless (Zimbabwe): The legal war that broke a state telecom monopoly and seeded a pan-African and global telecoms empire
This is the story of how one Zimbabwean engineer built a global telecoms empire by refusing to pay a bribe. And then sued his own government, all the way to the constitutional court, until the law itself broke the monopoly.
Andela (Nigeria): The startup that promised to turn African talent into the world's remote engineering workforce
This is the story of an idea so good it raised three hundred and eighty one million dollars in seven years, made the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative write its first major investment check, became Africa's most famous startup — and then quietly tore itself apart, twice, to survive.
NALA (Tanzania): Tanzanian diaspora remittance app into a stablecoin-powered B2B payments platform
This is the story of how a Tanzanian sports television broadcaster, with a twenty thousand dollar prize and a Stanford degree, built a remittance app, watched the regulator kill it, rebuilt it in London pointed in the opposite direction, and is now trying to put the entire cross-border payment system of Africa onto stablecoin rails.
Jumia (Nigeria): The Amazon of Africa that might be neither
This is the story of a Berlin-incorporated, French-founded, Delaware-listed, Dubai-managed company that was sold to Wall Street as the Amazon of Africa, and of what was left of that promise after fourteen years, three country exits, and roughly two billion dollars of losses.
Flutterwave (Nigeria): The fintech that dared to be Africa's Stripe
This is the story of how three founders in a Lagos co-working space tried to build the African Stripe, and how the company they built became, in the same year, both Africa's most valuable startup and Africa's most public governance crisis.
Ethiopian Airlines (Ethiopia): The only African airline that actually works — and why
This is the story of how an airline founded by an emperor in a country with no paved runway became the only African flag carrier that has never failed.
MTN (South Africa): Post-apartheid bet became Africa's largest telco
On the afternoon of October 26th, 2015, a regulator in Abuja issued a press release. The number on the page was one trillion and forty billion naira. In US dollars, it was five point two billion. It was the largest regulatory fine ever levied on a single company anywhere on Earth.Within two weeks, MTN's share price on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange had collapsed by a quarter. The Group's
Dangote Group (Nigeria): One man built Africa's richest fortune from cement
Nigeria, the nation that for half a century had pumped some of the world's best crude out of its delta and then bought refined fuel back from Europe at a markup, was now shipping petrol out.The man who had paid for it was sixty-eight years old. He had been born in Kano, in the north. And he had started, in 1977, with a family loan worth about three thousand US dollars.This is the story of Dang
Zerobionic (Kenya): A small Nairobi assistive-robotics startup building AI hardware that translates speech into sign language in real time
A small Nairobi assistive-robotics startup is building AI hardware that translates speech into sign language in real time — and just beat 1,200+ applicants from 45 African countries to become Qualcomm's sole Kenyan pick in its Make in Africa mentorship.
Company: Afripods (Kenya): The pan-African podcast platform built from Nairobi that let African creators reach audiences without traditional media gatekeepers
For most of the 2010s, the podcast boom was one of the great gold rushes in modern media. Billions of dollars. Hundreds of millions of listeners. Spotify, Apple, Google, all racing to own the world's ears.And the entire industry agreed, more or less silently, on one thing about Africa. Africa would listen. Africa would not be paid to speak.
Java House (Kenya): From a single coffee shop on Adams Arcade to a pan-African chain — and the private-equity ride that followed
Two Americans were named Kevin Ashley and Jon Wagner. Ashley had spent the previous decade flying United Nations relief missions into the South Sudan civil war. Wagner had been in Nairobi long enough to know that the coffee being served in the city's hotel lobbies was, by his lights, an embarrassment.They took a small unit in a beat-up shopping centre called Adams Arcade. They taught themselves to
CJ's / Café Javas Limited - Built on patience and petrol
How a single Nairobi diner became Kenya's most recognisable casual-dining chain.
Vivo Activewear (Kenya)
Wandia Gichuru built one of Kenya's most recognisable consumer-fashion brands — bootstrapping a category that barely existed in Nairobi.
Sendy / TABB (Kenya) - The comeback
This is the story of how one of the most-funded African startups of its generation died — and how its founder is, right now, trying to build the opposite of it.
M-KOPA (Kenya) - Pay-as-you-go solar that became a $1B fintech
Five million customers. A factory in Nairobi making seven and a half thousand smartphones a day. The largest connected consumer-financing platform in sub-Saharan Africa.All of it built on top of an idea, hatched fifteen years earlier, that you could finance a solar panel for a rural Kenyan household, forty shillings at a time, by bolting a SIM card into it.
BURN Manufacturing - A Kenyan cookstove company that has sold roughly four-point-four million stoves
In the final week of October 2024, federal prosecutors in lower Manhattan unsealed an indictment against Kenneth Newcombe, the former chief executive of C-Quest Capital, accusing him of orchestrating one of the largest carbon-credit frauds in modern history. The charges alleged that across Africa and Asia, his company had been fabricating data on cookstoves that, in reality, were never installed,
Twiga Foods - The company that tried to fix Africa's broken food supply chain — and almost broke itself!
This is the story of Twiga Foods. The would-be Amazon for Africa's kiosk economy. The company that raised one hundred and sixty million dollars to fix African food — and discovered, the hard and public way, that the math did not work.
BasiGo — The Bus That Was a Contract
Sometime in the second week of April, 2020, the people of Nairobi looked up and saw something they had not seen in years.Kenya was locked down. Public transport had stopped. The matatus — the loud, painted minibuses that move four out of every five Kenyans who travel — were idle in their depots. The diesel buses were parked. And in their absence, the air above the city cleared so completely that,
D-LIGHT: THE BOND MARKET THAT WASN'T SUPPOSED TO EXIST.
This is the story of how a kerosene burn in a village became a bond market in Nairobi.
M-PESA - A SIDE PROJECT THAT BANKED A NATION.
To understand M-Pesa, you have to begin in a place that has almost nothing to do with Kenya. You have to begin in Newbury, England, in the corporate social responsibility department of Vodafone Group, in the year 2002.The man at the centre of it was named Nick Hughes. He was Vodafone's Head of Social Enterprise — a job that meant, in practice, that he was responsible for finding development-fi
SAFARICOM - THE DEPARTMENT THAT BANKED A COUNTRY.
On the sixth of March, 2007, in a small office in Nairobi, a Kenyan telecoms company launched a product that nobody else in the world thought would work.It was called M-Pesa. It let you send money — actual money — by SMS. The banking regulator did not know what to call it. The telecoms regulator did not know who should regulate it. Vodafone, which co-owned the company, had tried versions of the sa
Equity Bank — The Bank the Poor Built
In 1993, a supervisor at the Central Bank of Kenya carried a thin folder into a meeting room in Nairobi.Inside the folder were the books of a small building society in Murang'a. Twenty-seven thousand customers. Most of the accounts dormant. More than half the loans bad. Capital — on a real basis — negative.The recommendation was simple. Wind it up. Pay back what little was left. Move on.Thirty
