₦airaland Forum

Payaza has partnered with Scholarships Cafe to simplify international education payments for students. The collaboration integrates Payaza's cross-border payment infrastructure into Scholarships Cafe's platform, enabling students to pay application fees and tuition deposits faster and with less friction, removing a major hurdle in the path to studying abroad.

Getting into a foreign university is hard. Paying for it often turns out to be harder.

For thousands of African students who secure admission abroad each year, the real obstacle isn't grades or language tests, it's money movement. Currency restrictions, banking bottlenecks, processing delays, and transaction fees that eat into already stretched budgets. The acceptance letter arrives; the payment portal does not cooperate. It's a friction that has quietly derailed more academic dreams than most people care to count.

Payaza, the Lagos-based payment infrastructure company, is now going after that problem directly. The fintech has announced a partnership with Scholarships Cafe, a platform that guides students through global scholarship and admissions processes, to simplify cross-border education payments. The goal is straightforward: by the time a student needs to pay an application fee or tuition deposit to an institution abroad, the money should move without a fight.

To understand why this matters, you have to understand what Payaza is and who built it. Seyi Ebenezer did not start as a startup founder. He spent years on the floors of Keystone Bank and Access Bank, working under executives including the late Herbert Wigwe, facilitating capital and debt transactions that crossed the $450 million mark. He is a chartered accountant, a Certified Treasury Professional, and an Associate of the Chartered Institute of Bankers. When he finally launched Payaza in 2021, it was not the move of someone chasing a trend; it was a calculated bet from someone who understood exactly how broken the payment rails were, and what it would actually take to fix them.

The early days were rough. Waiting months for operating licences while startup capital drained. Heavy technology investment before a single transaction could be processed. "It was very tough in the beginning, we struggled," Ebenezer has said. The company broke even within one year and nine months. Today, Payaza operates across 21 countries, employs over 210 people, and is one of the few African fintechs audited by a Big Four firm. That discipline, unglamorous, institutional, is what makes this partnership credible.

Scholarships Cafe, for its part, has built a quiet but solid reputation. Its platform connects students to scholarship opportunities, supports international admissions navigation, and now, through Payaza's integration, extends that support into the payment layer. The idea is a full-stack student journey: find the opportunity, apply, and pay, without switching platforms or calling your bank four times.

Through the partnership, students using Scholarships Cafe will be able to pay application fees and tuition deposits via Payaza's infrastructure, with faster processing, reduced friction, and more transparency on transaction status. Cross-border payment failures at critical academic deadlines are not minor inconveniences; they can mean losing a scholarship slot entirely. This integration targets exactly that risk.

The broader context is worth holding. Africa produces some of the world's most internationally mobile students. Nigeria alone consistently ranks among the top source countries for international students in the UK, the US, and Canada. Yet the financial infrastructure serving those students remains badly fragmented. Wire transfers are slow and opaque. Local bank limits are restrictive. Payment processors optimised for e-commerce often fall apart on education-specific workflows.

Ebenezer has been consistent in where he sees Payaza heading: not just collecting payments, but creating the bridges that let African individuals and businesses function globally without penalty. Helping a student pay tuition in Canada from Lagos, without losing two weeks and a service charge, is that thesis made practical.

The partnership is early-stage; both companies have indicated that further rollout updates will follow. But the logic behind it is sound. When payment infrastructure works, students stop worrying about their bank and start preparing for their semester. That shift, small as it sounds, is exactly the kind of problem worth building for.

Payaza Africa has received upgraded credit ratings from DataPro (A to AA-), Intelligence Africa (new A-), Agusto (BBB to A-), and GCR/Moody's (BBB to A-). The development validates CEO Seyi Ebenezer's debt-led, governance-first approach to building a pan-African payments infrastructure company, and marks a significant credibility milestone for the Lagos-based fintech.
Seyi Ebenezer did not come to fintech looking for a headline. He came from banking floors, KPMG audit desks, Access Bank's corporate finance divisions, where capital was serious and mistakes were expensive. That background shaped every decision he made when he co-founded Payaza Africa in 2020 and launched it in March 2022. It also explains why, four years later, four independent credit rating agencies have collectively upgraded the company's ratings, a rare feat in Nigeria's competitive payments market.

DataPro raised Payaza's rating from A to AA-, the highest upgrade in the batch. Intelligence Africa assigned a fresh A- investment-grade rating. Agusto and GCR, the latter an affiliate of Moody's, each moved the company up from BBB to A-. Four agencies, four upgrades, all announced together. In the world of institutional finance, that kind of alignment is not noise. It is a verdict.

For context: a credit rating is not a trophy a company applies for. It is an independent assessment of whether a business can meet its financial obligations, whether lenders, investors, and partners can trust it with their capital. Moving from BBB to A- is the difference between being seen as adequate and being seen as strong. A AA- from DataPro, where Payaza now sits, places it in the company of well-capitalised institutions, not scrappy startups.

Ebenezer, who holds an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management and previously facilitated capital and debt deals exceeding $450 million at Keystone Bank and Access Bank, has always been transparent about why ratings matter more to him than funding rounds. In a fintech landscape where Nigerian founders routinely face what he calls a "natural prejudice rating", the implicit discount global investors apply to African assets, strong, independently verified financials are the only real equaliser. "We knew we couldn't just walk in with a great story," he said in a previous interview. "We had to prove it with undeniable evidence."

That evidence has been building systematically. Payaza started from an unlikely place: payment reconciliation for Nigerian fuel stations. From there, it expanded into a cross-border payments infrastructure platform now operating across 20 African countries, with additional presence in Canada, the UAE, the UK, and the United States.

The company employs over 210 people and is audited by a Big Four firm, a governance credential that few African fintechs can claim.

In 2025, rather than raise equity, Ebenezer issued commercial paper under a ₦50 billion programme, a debt-led financing approach that signalled confidence in Payaza's cash flow and repayment ability. The company raised ₦20.3 billion in early series, repaid it in full, then secured SEC approval for another ₦20 billion raise that was 10 percent oversubscribed. These are not moves a company makes unless its books are in order.

The upgraded ratings come at a moment when Payaza is expanding its product ecosystem in parallel. Payaza Checkout handles collections and payouts for merchants. Chat and Pay, its WhatsApp-based payment tool, brings transactions into the messaging layer where many African users already live. Shopaza, its e-commerce platform, lets businesses sell and collect digitally. Payaza Give serves the donations and digital contributions vertical. Each product is designed to be profitable within six months, or, by Ebenezer's own rule, shut down.

"This milestone is a strong affirmation of the work we have done to build Payaza on a foundation of discipline, trust, and long-term value creation," Ebenezer said. "Receiving these upgraded ratings sends a clear message that Payaza is not only growing, but growing with strength, structure, and sustainability."

The upgrades reduce borrowing costs, open doors to institutional capital that would not otherwise engage, and give enterprise clients and regulators a shorthand for trust. In Ebenezer's own framing, it transforms Payaza from a price taker to a price giver in investor conversations.

He has also been vocal about a longer-term ambition: a pan-African credit rating agency, built by the continent, for the continent. It is not a passive observation. It reflects the frustration of an African founder who has watched global rating methodologies consistently undervalue African institutions regardless of underlying fundamentals.

If Payaza's trajectory is anything to go by, the argument is not theoretical.

Not every fintech in Africa can say it started with a gas station and ended up with Moody's on its rating panel. Payaza can.

The idea did not come from a boardroom. It came from a one-chance bus.

In 2015, Damilola Olokesusi's sister boarded what looked like a regular commercial bus in Lagos. It wasn't. She was taken to another destination, robbed, and left traumatised. For Olokesusi, a Chemical Engineering graduate from the University of Lagos who had already been grinding through the city's punishing daily commute, that moment crystallised something she had been quietly building toward. Lagos was not just a traffic problem. It was a safety problem, a time problem, a dignity problem, and nobody was solving it at scale.

She had seen what good transit looked like. A stint in Dubai showed her what buses could be when systems worked. Back home, she noticed that large companies ran staff buses for their employees. She asked a simple question: what if that model was open to everyone? What if professionals who couldn't afford a company car and wouldn't risk a danfo could book a scheduled, tracked, safe bus ride through their phone?

That question became Shuttlers.

The company officially launched in October 2016, though its roots go back to a pilot in 2015 when Olokesusi and co-founders began testing the concept in Lagos. The early days were raw, routes were communicated through Slack, email, and WhatsApp, and one of their very first clients was Andela, which used the B2B2C option to move workers across the state. There was no app, no fanfare, and no guarantee it would work. Her family staged interventions. Her sister, a different one, sat her down and gave her a thousand reasons it would fail. She didn't listen.

A decade later, Shuttlers has just crossed 10 million trips, and it has done something no other technology-enabled mass transit company in Nigeria has done before: it is now integrated into Google Maps' Transit system, making it the first of its kind in Nigeria to achieve that designation.

The integration is not cosmetic. Commuters searching for transit directions on Google Maps can now view Shuttlers' routes and book seats directly within the platform, removing the friction between discovery and action that has historically kept structured shared transport invisible to casual users. For a company whose core challenge has always been getting more people to choose the bus over chaos, being embedded inside the world's most trusted navigation tool is a meaningful unlock.

To qualify as a Google Transit Partner, Shuttlers had to align its data architecture, route systems, and real-time operational capabilities with Google's partner infrastructure requirements, a technical bar that speaks to how far the company has matured. Olumide Balogun, Google's Director for West Africa, said the integration helps make trusted transportation easier to discover and access as more Nigerians adopt digital tools for everyday mobility.

The numbers behind Shuttlers tell the story of a company that has been grinding in the background long before this visibility moment. The platform currently serves 30,000 active users across more than 1,000 itineraries, operating more than 430 buses daily across Lagos, Abuja, and Port Harcourt, with a 99 percent trip completion rate and a 99.94 percent incident-free rate across its entire journey history. Those are not startup metrics.

Those are the metrics of an operator.

The average Shuttlers commuter saves between 60 and 88 percent on transport costs compared to ride-hailing alternatives, and reclaims between 8 and 12 hours monthly that would otherwise be lost to gridlock. In a city where the Lagos State Government has estimated that traffic congestion costs the economy hundreds of billions of naira annually, that reclaimed time is not trivial.

What Olokesusi built is also a bet on African urban futures. According to the World Bank, African cities lose an estimated 2 to 5 percent of GDP annually to transport inefficiency. Shuttlers isn't trying to patch that problem with another app, it is building the coordinated infrastructure of scheduled routes, digital booking, fleet management, and now real-time mapping data that the continent's cities never got from governments.

The company is also looking ahead on sustainability. Shuttlers is integrating CNG and electric buses into its fleet as part of efforts to reduce emissions, estimating reductions of up to 60 percent compared to diesel alternatives, and introduced 20 CNG buses in April 2025.

CEO Olokesusi described the two milestones as a reflection of years of hard work building reliable commuting infrastructure, which is exactly what they are. The Google Maps integration is not a pivot or a rebrand. It is the logical extension of a company that started solving a personal problem in Lagos and quietly scaled it into something far larger than anyone around her, in those early family meetings, was willing to believe.

Ten million trips in. The commute is just getting started.

The Middle East and North Africa have long been home to a particular kind of contradiction: a region brimming with young talent, pressing social problems, and entrepreneurs willing to build solutions, yet chronically starved of the capital needed to scale them. That gap is now squarely in the crosshairs of a new €80 million Social Entrepreneurship Fund (SEF), launched under the European Union's Pact for the Mediterranean.

The fund is a collaboration between the European Commission, Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), and KfW Development Bank. With SMEs providing over 85% of employment in the southern Mediterranean but struggling to access financing, the SEF was created to bridge a gap that has long frustrated purpose-driven founders trying to build commercially sustainable businesses with a social mandate.

The fund is structured in two parts: a €45 million equity component, now operational, and a €35 million debt fund to be introduced later in the year, alongside a technical assistance facility. The European Commission has committed €15 million, while Germany's BMZ is anchoring with €39 million, together making this the first EU-backed fund in the region focused specifically on scaling social enterprises.

Managing the equity arm is Anara Impact Capital, a venture capital firm spun out of Alfanar Venture Philanthropy, an organisation with over two decades of experience backing social enterprises in the Arab world. Led by Nafez Dakkak, Mohamed Hussain, and Nadia Moukaddam, and chaired by Fadi Ghandour, Anara will invest in startups across learning, wellbeing, and climate resilience.

Ticket sizes will range from $500,000 to $2 million, targeting ventures with early traction and measurable social impact across underserved MENA markets.

The timing is pointed. Data from Magnitt show that venture investment into MENA startups fell by nearly a third in 2025, with a disproportionate impact on early-stage companies outside the Gulf's major hubs. As commercial capital retreats, development finance is stepping into the breach, and Anara is designed to prove that impact and returns don't have to compete.

"Anara is here to prove that the region can develop scalable and global solutions to the most pressing challenges of our time," said Nafez Dakkak, adding that the firm is "on a mission to show that impact and returns can and do go hand in hand."

KfW's Thomas Reker put the stakes plainly: "Bridging the financing gap for purpose-driven enterprises is essential for the sustainable development of the MENA region. By anchoring this fund on behalf of the German Government and the EU Commission, our goal is to drive meaningful job creation and empower visionary entrepreneurs who are building solutions that help address shortcomings in society or the environment."

The ambition behind the SEF goes beyond writing cheques. The fund is explicitly designed to tackle youth unemployment and gender inequality, two of the region's most stubborn structural problems. It backs women-led businesses, supports the formalisation of social services like healthcare and education, and pushes the region's green and digital transitions forward through investment in scalable, sustainable models.

The SEF aims to reach more than 136,000 beneficiaries and catalyse over €67 million in additional private capital, a multiplier effect that turns public money into a catalyst rather than a crutch. That's the logic of blended finance done right: anchor with development capital, attract private co-investors, and let the deals prove the thesis.

Alongside Anara's equity vehicle, the programme includes a planned €35 million debt facility for smaller social enterprises and a technical assistance component designed to support founders as they scale. Through a single API integration framework, enterprises can access local collection infrastructure without the friction of managing multiple local systems, a nod to how seriously the fund takes operational, not just financial, scale.

The first close was anchored by a heavyweight group of investors, including KfW, the European Commission, Dara Holdings, the Innovative Startups and SMEs Fund (ISSF), plus several family offices and high-net-worth individuals from the region, a coalition that signals growing conviction that the MENA startup ecosystem, long seen as peripheral, is finally drawing serious institutional attention.

The bet, ultimately, is straightforward: the region has the problems, the founders, and now, incrementally, the capital. What remains to be seen is whether €80 million is the start of a trend or a one-off. If Anara's investments perform, expect that question to answer itself.

Tripo AI just did two things at once that most companies spend years trying to do separately: close a landmark funding round and announce a technology that could reshape how digital worlds are built.

The company completed its Series A+ and Series A++ financing rounds, raising nearly $200 million to accelerate its AI 3D foundation models and world model technologies. Paired with that announcement came the unveiling of Project Eden, not a product update, not a feature drop, but a fundamentally different idea about what AI-generated environments can be.

To understand why that matters, you have to sit with what the 3D AI space has largely been doing until now: generating objects. A model, a mesh, a textured asset. Impressive, increasingly fast, but still static. You render it, you export it, and whatever it is, it stays that way. Large language models predict the next word. Video models render the next frame. A world model must go further; it must maintain and update the state of an environment as it changes in response to user actions, agent behavior, and time. That is the problem Project Eden is being built to solve.

The technical architecture behind Project Eden separates world state management from visual rendering across three discrete layers. The first, the Structured State Layer, maintains the underlying 3D environment, scene geometry, object identity, attributes, and event logic independently of any camera viewpoint. The second, the State-to-Observation Interface, converts that world state into semantic and geometric conditions for rendering from different perspectives, with each view derived from the same underlying data to maintain consistency. The third, the Generative Rendering Layer, produces detailed visual output in real time from those state-derived conditions.

What this architecture unlocks is genuinely new territory. The decoupled design enables long-horizon environmental persistence, where worlds maintain consistent state across viewpoint changes and user exits; editable worlds, where modifications made by one user or agent persist for others; and concurrent multiplayer interaction, where multiple participants share a single evolving world state while each receives an individually rendered view. In plain terms: a world that remembers, a world that changes, and a world that multiple people can inhabit simultaneously, all without falling apart at the seams.

The company plans to use its new funding to deepen its global product footprint and ecosystem, positioning its 3D foundation models as infrastructure for gaming, film, VR/AR, digital twins, intelligent manufacturing, and embodied AI. That list alone tells you how wide Tripo AI is casting its net. This is not a company narrowly chasing one vertical; it is betting that the underlying technology will become foundational across industries where spatial content matters.

On the tools side, the company has not been standing still. Its latest model releases, Tripo H3.1 and Tripo P1.0, launched in March 2026, continued its trajectory of making high-quality spatial content faster and more accessible. Alongside those, Tripo Studio received a native 8K AI texture capability, addressing a long-standing professional complaint that AI-generated assets look fine at a distance but fall apart up close. The upgraded Intelligent Part Segmentation V2 gives creators finer control when breaking assets apart for use in game engines or 3D printing workflows.

There is also an open-source thread running through all of this. AniGen, open-sourced with the University of Hong Kong, enables the generation of animatable 3D assets from a single image, part of the company's third season of collaborative releases with academic partners. Open-sourcing core research is not philanthropic. It builds a community, accelerates external development, and quietly makes Tripo AI's standards the standards everyone else is building from.

Project Eden is positioned as a foundational engine for next-generation interactive content creation and as a simulation base for embodied AI research, multi-agent evaluation, and interactive world generation. That last phrase embodied AI research. Is the long game. As AI agents begin operating in physical and simulated environments, they need somewhere to train, somewhere to fail safely, somewhere to learn. Tripo AI is building that somewhere.

Nearly $200 million says investors believe it.

Andrew Takyi-Appiah built Zeepay on a single, stubborn conviction: that millions of Africans walking kilometres just to cash out a hundred dollars deserved a better system. He watched the problem up close, people traversing long distances to access remittances sent from Europe, Asia, or the Americas, and decided to fix it. From that frustration came one of West Africa's most ambitious fintech platforms, one that eventually set its sights beyond the continent entirely. The Caribbean was supposed to be the next chapter. Barbados was supposed to be the proof. It didn't go as planned.

Zeemoney (Barbados) Limited, which had four locations across the island, has shut down its operations following enforcement action by the Central Bank of Barbados. The regulator suspended its licence from May 5 to June 4, citing concerns about the company's financial condition, governance, regulatory compliance, and operational continuity. When the suspension window closed and the issues remained unresolved, the company announced it would wind up entirely.

Zeemoney has since applied to the Central Bank of Barbados for approval to voluntarily wind up its operations, stating it will work with the regulator to ensure an orderly process and will inform customers on how to access their funds in due course. That language, careful, noncommittal, bureaucratic, offers cold comfort to those who relied on it for cross-border transfers.

The closure stings more because of how deliberately the Caribbean play was constructed. When Zeemoney first launched in Barbados, officials promised it would result in thousands of local jobs, greater financial inclusion for the unbanked, and a robust new digital remittance corridor into the island. It was positioned not just as a product launch, but as a statement about what African fintech could do beyond its home turf. Zeepay, the Ghanaian parent company, had processed over 10 million transactions worth more than $3 billion in 2023 alone, operating across 20-plus countries and building one of the continent's most extensive remittance termination platforms.

That track record made the Caribbean expansion seem like a natural extension. Barbados was envisioned as a strategic gateway, a base from which to serve diaspora communities, flowing money between the Caribbean and Africa. The island made sense geographically, culturally, and commercially. Remittance flows into Barbados run deep, and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora connection to West Africa is well-documented. Takyi-Appiah, who spent years in traditional banking before pivoting to fintech, understood those corridors intimately. His strategy at Zeepay had long been built around regulatory compliance first, then scale, a discipline that made the company one of the few licensed remittance operators in Ghana with full central bank approval.

Which makes what happened in Barbados harder to explain. The Central Bank's enforcement order stated it took the action following a supervisory review and subsequent developments that materially deepened its concerns regarding the institution's financial condition, governance, operational continuity, and regulatory compliance. The phrasing, "materially deepened," signals this was not a paperwork shortfall. Something more fundamental had broken down.

The Central Bank had directed Zeemoney to remediate all identified deficiencies within a specified timeline, warning that failure to do so may result in further supervisory action. The company could not meet that bar. Rather than fight the process, it chose to wind down.

The customers left behind are the most immediate concern. People who used Zeemoney's four branches for international remittances, mobile wallet deposits, and bank account transfers now have no operational service and no clear timeline for recovering their funds. The company's public statement asking for patience does not resolve what is, for many, an urgent financial situation.

For Zeepay, the reputational calculus is complicated. The parent company recently raised $18 million in senior secured venture debt to support continued expansion across Africa and the Caribbean, with ambitions to enter at least 10 additional markets. The Barbados collapse does not derail the broader business; Zeepay's African operations remain active, but it does raise pointed questions about how the company manages compliance and governance when it moves into unfamiliar regulatory environments.

Takyi-Appiah has raised over $26 million since launching Zeepay, secured partnerships with MTN, Vodafone, and AirtelTigo, and expanded remittance corridors to more than 50 countries. The infrastructure he built is real, and the mission driving it is legitimate. But the Barbados episode is a reminder that licensing a product and sustaining it under regulatory scrutiny are two very different challenges. The gap between those two things is where Zeemoney's Caribbean story ended.

Christoph Lippuner did not set out to disrupt healthcare. He spent over a decade as an Executive Director at J.P. Morgan, then co-founded and exited a startup before landing on a problem that would not let him go: the private healthcare system was drowning in its own complexity, not from a lack of ambition, but from a surplus of disconnected software.

Doctors in England were losing 13.5 million working hours a year to inadequate IT systems alone. Clinics ran on one tool for scheduling, another for billing, and a third for clinical records, none talking to each other. Patients fell through the gaps between platforms. Lippuner, alongside co-founder Mikael Landau, founded Semble in 2016 to fix exactly that.

Today, that bet is paying off. Semble has closed a £30 million Series C funding round, bringing its total funding to approximately £57 million, nearly doubling its capitalisation since the £11.5 million Series B it closed in October 2024. The round was led by European growth investor Revaia, with new participation from Partech and continued backing from Mercia Ventures and Octopus Ventures.

The numbers behind the raise tell the story more honestly than any press release. More than 10 million patients, roughly one in six people in the UK, have received care from a clinician using Semble's platform. The company now serves 1,700 healthcare businesses across 80 specialties, used daily by 16,000 professionals. Its customer list reads like a who's who of British private healthcare: Nuffield Health, London Doctors Clinic, Welbeck, Midland Health. TIME named it one of the World's Top HealthTech Companies for 2025.

So what exactly does Semble sell? Not a single product, a nervous system. Its platform handles scheduling, billing, clinical records, prescriptions, reporting, and patient communications inside one interface, while integrating with more than 1,200 external tools, including diagnostics, labs, and CRM systems. The pitch to healthcare providers is simple and hard to argue with: stop managing technology and start managing patients.

Lippuner has been clear-eyed about the underlying problem. "For years, the industry has tried to address complex systemic issues through disconnected point solutions," he said. "Fragmented technology often adds operational complexity for healthcare providers and creates an interrupted experience for patients." His answer is what Semble calls AI care orchestration, not AI as a marketing add-on, but as the connective layer that turns a fragmented stack into something that actually thinks and responds in real time.

The fresh capital targets two fronts. The first is scale: expansion into leading healthcare groups and a deeper push into France, where Semble's platform has achieved regulatory maturity in under a year. The second is technology: advancing the platform's position as the core AI orchestration layer in modern outpatient care delivery. What this means in practice is giving healthcare organisations the ability to consolidate their fragmented operational systems into a single, interoperable infrastructure that does not require an IT department to maintain.

Revaia Partner Morgan Kessous called Semble "the system of action for modern healthcare," pointing to the company's clinical depth, scale, and provider trust across the UK and France as the thesis behind the investment. Headcount has grown by more than 50% since December 2024, a signal that Semble is not coasting on momentum; it is actively building for what comes next.

The timing is not incidental. Private healthcare in the UK is under structural pressure. Rising NHS waiting lists have pushed more patients toward private providers, many of whom are ill-equipped to absorb the demand at scale without operational infrastructure to match. Semble is positioning itself as that infrastructure, the stack that mid-to-large outpatient providers run on, rather than another point solution they have to integrate around.

There is a broader bet here too. European healthcare remains deeply fragmented, country by country, system by system. A platform that can operate across that landscape, compliant, interoperable, and AI-native, has a significant addressable market. Semble's French entry, achieved with regulatory maturity faster than most expected, is the opening move in a longer continental play.

Lippuner's background is telling. He is not a clinician who fell into tech, nor a technologist who stumbled into healthcare. He is a builder who looked at a system straining under its own weight and decided the only real fix was infrastructure. With £57 million in total funding and a platform embedded in the daily workflows of 16,000 health professionals, Semble is no longer a bet; it is a blueprint.

Sammy Mutua has spent more than two decades watching Africa's financial plumbing get built from the inside. He helped wire mobile money infrastructure at M-Pesa Africa, shaped card network expansion at Visa Sub-Saharan Africa, and drove commercial growth at Letshego Group. Now Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume and users, wants that institutional memory applied to a continent whose relationship with digital assets is accelerating faster than most regulators can keep up with.

Binance has appointed Mutua as General Manager for Africa, as it steps up efforts to expand across Sub-Saharan markets amid rising interest in digital assets. Based in Nairobi, his mandate spans regional strategy, market development, regulatory engagement, and partnerships across both public and private sector stakeholders, the kind of broad remit that signals Binance isn't just looking for a regional figurehead. It is looking for someone who can hold a room with a central banker and a startup founder in the same afternoon.

The timing matters. Sub-Saharan Africa recorded $205 billion in on-chain value between July 2024 and June 2025, marking 52% year-over-year growth. That is not a niche story. It is a structural shift, powered in large part by a continent where traditional banking has long failed to keep pace with population growth, where currency devaluation is not an edge case but a recurring reality, and where a young, mobile-native population has found in crypto a financial instrument that moves faster than the institutions around them. In Nigeria alone, 74% of crypto holders are under the age of 30. Gen Z makes up 54% of Binance's user base in Africa, and from January 2023 to May 2025, that cohort more than doubled on the platform, growing at a rate of 107.6%.

But volume alone does not build a durable market. That is where Mutua's background becomes more than a CV talking point. His years at M-Pesa gave him a front-row seat to how Africa's most consequential fintech product scaled, not through brute-force marketing but through deep integration with local telcos, agents, and regulatory frameworks. At Visa Sub-Saharan Africa, he understood what it takes to move institutional money across borders where the correspondent banking infrastructure is thin.

Crypto in Africa faces similar structural challenges, just with different rails. The difference now is that those rails are being contested, and the regulator conversations are becoming unavoidable.

Kenya signed the Virtual Asset Service Providers Bill into law in October 2025, with oversight falling under both the Central Bank of Kenya and the Capital Markets Authority. Ghana now requires virtual asset providers to register ahead of broader guidance.

Across the continent, the mood is shifting from tolerance to formal frameworks. For Binance, a company that has had its share of regulatory friction globally, having someone in the room who spent two decades building institutional trust in African markets is not incidental to the appointment. It is the point.

Mutua himself framed his mandate with the kind of deliberate language that sounds simple but carries weight on a continent where "build fast" has often meant "build for someone else." "What is critical now is building in a way that is aligned with local realities, working alongside regulators, partners, and communities to ensure digital assets deliver tangible value," he said. The phrase "local realities" is doing significant work there. It acknowledges that the assumptions baked into global crypto products, stable internet, reliable on-ramps, and liquid markets do not always hold in Lagos, Kampala, or Lusaka the way they do in Singapore or São Paulo.

Nearly eight out of ten Nigerians who use crypto do so through Binance, according to a 2025 Quidax and IFS Insights report, a market dominance that reflects both user trust and the platform's liquidity depth. But dominance in usage does not always translate to regulatory goodwill, and in several African markets, the path from popular to licensed is still being negotiated. Mutua's job is to shorten that distance.

Binance has been expanding its presence across Africa through education initiatives, industry partnerships, and regulatory dialogue, positioning itself within emerging digital finance ecosystems. The Mutua appointment is the most senior signal yet that the exchange intends to treat Africa not as an afterthought or a growth hack, but as a long-game market, one where infrastructure, trust, and regulation have to be built together, not sequentially. Whether that ambition holds up under the pressure of divergent national frameworks and evolving compliance demands will be the real test of what this hire means.

Chowdeck has launched a three-tier Vendor Badge system: Verified, Awaiting Verification, and Shopper- following an investigation that revealed a fake restaurant could be listed and process real orders on the platform. The update includes stricter documentation requirements and third-party verification via Mono and SmileID, marking a significant shift in how the food delivery company manages vendor trust and transparency.

When a reporter walked into Chowdeck's onboarding flow with a fabricated restaurant name, a fake address, tax details pulled from thin air, and photos lifted from a real Lagos eatery, and came out the other side with a live listing that processed an actual order, it said something uncomfortable about how Nigeria's food delivery boom had been built. Fast, yes. But on what foundation?

The entire process took just over an hour. The listing went live. An order came in. No alarm went off. That was the Techpoint Africa investigation, and it landed like a stone in still water.

Chowdeck's response, to its credit, wasn't silence. Founder Femi Aluko acknowledged the exposure directly: "We built Chowdeck on trust. A recent incident exposed a vulnerability in a system we created to support small businesses. It raised important questions about customer safety and how vendor verification works."

What followed was a structural overhaul, not a press release, an actual system change.

The company has rolled out a three-tier Vendor Badge system: Verified, Awaiting Verification, and Shopper. The badges are designed to give customers clearer visibility into how each business operates on the platform before placing an order. Verified vendors are fully approved. Awaiting Verification covers businesses still in the documentation pipeline. The Shopper badge applies to businesses that are not direct Chowdeck vendors, and orders are fulfilled by a trained Chowdeck agent who purchases from a local store on the customer's behalf.

It sounds neat. But the story behind why it was necessary is messier.

The investigation didn't just expose a technical gap; it exposed a philosophical one. Chowdeck, like many platforms trying to grow fast in a market where the informal economy dominates, had built its onboarding with a degree of leniency. Submitted information wasn't being cross-checked against external databases. The assumption was that friction in onboarding would push out the small vendors the platform was trying to attract. That logic made sense, until it didn't.

The controversy was compounded by a December 2025 complaint from a legitimate food brand impersonated on Glovo, which prompted wider scrutiny of the entire food delivery sector's onboarding standards. Then came Norma, a suya vendor who discovered an unauthorised listing under its name on Chowdeck and spent weeks trying to get it removed. The badges don't fix that problem. They don't retroactively audit every vendor already on the platform. And for businesses that found themselves listed without consent, the new framework arrives a little late.

Still, the mechanics of the updated verification process are substantive. Fully verified vendors must now provide CAC registration details, Tax Identification Numbers, ownership information, operational addresses, and banking details. Chowdeck works with verification providers to validate submitted information against official records before granting full platform access. That includes external identity and financial verification partners, Mono and SmileID.

This isn't cosmetic. Cross-referencing against CAC and TIN databases is exactly what the original investigation showed wasn't happening. The fact that it's now table stakes reflects how much reputational ground had to be recovered.

For Nigeria's wider food delivery industry, the badges also point to a bigger problem: platforms can no longer treat vendor verification as an internal process customers don't need to see. Chowdeck is the market leader, and what it does next sets the tone for everyone else, Glovo, and whatever regional competitor is waiting in the wings.

The regulatory picture is still murky. No single Nigerian government body is specifically mandated to oversee food delivery platform integrity. The FCCPC handles consumer protection broadly. NAFDAC covers food safety. But the gap between "food you ordered from a real restaurant" and "food prepared by an entity with a fake CAC number" is no one's explicit jurisdiction yet.

Chowdeck has essentially self-regulated its way into that gap. The government's announced National Digital Trust Mark initiative signals that broader accountability frameworks are coming. Whether they arrive before the next incident is a different question.

The update also includes strengthened onboarding reviews, expanded manual verification processes, and additional checks to identify impersonation, fraud, and policy violations earlier in the process. That's the part that matters most, not the badges customers see, but the backend decisions about who gets access to those customers in the first place.

Nigeria's food delivery market isn't slowing down. Chowdeck's vendor badge system is one company deciding that scale without scrutiny is a liability, not a feature.

Brass is done. After six years of trying to reimagine what business banking could look like for African SMEs, the Nigerian fintech startup will stop operating as an independent company and migrate its customers into Paystack Microfinance Bank before July 31, 2026. It is the end of a name, and the clearest signal yet that Nigeria's fintech boom is entering a harder, more consolidation-driven chapter.

Brass was founded in July 2020 by Sola Akindolu and Emmanuel Okeke, who met while working at Kudi and Paystack, respectively. The startup raised a $1.7 million round in October 2021 that drew backing from Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga "GB" Agboola and Paystack co-founder Ezra Olubi. That early investor roster read like a who's who of Nigerian fintech, and for good reason. The platform offered business accounts, payroll management, expense tracking, and cash-flow tools to thousands of SMEs who had grown frustrated with the rigidity of traditional banks. For a moment, it worked. Brass felt like a bet worth making.

Then 2023 happened.

Beginning in October 2023, Brass ran into serious trouble: delays in processing customer withdrawals triggered a liquidity crisis, sparking widespread concern and fuelling rumours of a potential shutdown. Founders who had trusted Brass with their company funds were publicly locked out. The complaints spread fast on social media. The complete breakdown of customer trust forced an emergency market intervention in May 2024.

That intervention came in the form of an acquisition. A consortium led by Paystack, alongside PiggyVest, Ventures Platform, and P1 Ventures, acquired Brass in a deal designed to stabilise operations and protect customers. Although financial details were not disclosed, the acquisition was widely viewed as a strategic move to prevent a broader crisis in Nigeria's fintech sector. Prominent angel investors Olumide Soyombo and Oo Nwoye also joined the transaction. This wasn't charity; it was ecosystem protection. The thinking was simple: if Brass collapsed in a disorderly way, the ripple effects could shake trust in every Nigerian fintech that held customer deposits.

Following the acquisition, Brass's co-founders exited. A new leadership team led by Philip Obosi and Yvonne Obike dedicated the period that followed to rebuilding internal systems and strengthening operational processes. By all accounts, they delivered on that. The platform stabilised. But stability, it turned out, was only ever going to be step one.

As Brass grew more mature post-rescue, it became increasingly clear that the next phase of growth could not be achieved alone. So now, rather than continuing as a standalone entity competing in an increasingly crowded market, Brass's business banking operations will be absorbed into Paystack MFB, a regulated banking infrastructure with far more depth and scale than any independent neobank could build from scratch.

For Paystack, this move is anything but accidental. In January 2026, it entered Nigeria's banking space through the acquisition of Ladder Microfinance Bank, which became Paystack Microfinance Bank. The bank now provides transfers, treasury services, and other business banking tools. In March 2025, Paystack also introduced Zap, a consumer app for quick transfers, initially aimed at diasporans. The company, acquired by Stripe in 2020 for $200 million, is clearly no longer just a payments processor. It is building toward full-stack financial services, and Brass's SME customer base fits neatly into that vision.

Existing Brass customers have two options: migrate to Paystack MFB or close their accounts by July 31, 2026. For those who migrate, the promise is continuity: same account management, same payment rails, same financial tracking, just inside a more regulated and better-capitalised home. Paystack has committed to direct communication and minimal disruption for each merchant through the transition.

But what does this say about the broader landscape? Quite a lot, actually. During the funding boom between 2020 and 2022, many fintechs built overlapping products and competed for the same business customers. That expansion slowed when capital became tougher to get. Regulators also increased oversight, especially around deposit-like services and liquidity management. Several companies have since restructured or merged to stay stable. Brass is not an outlier; it is a data point in a pattern that is only going to repeat.

The story of Brass is ultimately one about timing, trust, and the unforgiving nature of financial infrastructure. Building a bank, even a digital one, requires more than great product design and startup energy. It requires capital depth, regulatory maturity, and operational resilience that most early-stage fintechs simply don't have the runway to build. What Paystack is assembling now is the kind of consolidated platform that can actually absorb that burden.

Brass gave thousands of Nigerian businesses a better banking experience when the incumbents wouldn't. That matters. This consolidation brings a dramatic six-year journey to a close, not with failure, but with an answer to a harder question: what does fintech look like when the hype fades, and only the infrastructure remains?
Visit technaija.com for more related articles.

Ten years in, and the numbers finally say what the ambition always promised. African fintech unicorn Flutterwave has surpassed one billion transactions and processed more than $40 billion in total payment value since its launch, a milestone that lands not just as a business update, but as a statement about where African fintech is heading and who is building the rails beneath it.

Founder and CEO Olugbenga Agboola disclosed this in a blog post reflecting on the company's performance and expansion over the past year, and the story he told was less about celebration and more about construction. Agboola, known inside the industry as "GB," has spent the better part of a decade arguing that Africa's payments problem is not a demand problem; it's a plumbing problem. The continent has buyers, sellers, and mobile-native consumers who have leapfrogged cash faster than any Western market predicted. What it lacked was reliable, interoperable infrastructure capable of handling that scale. Flutterwave's latest numbers suggest the plumbing is finally working.

The growth engine behind the milestone is telling. Wallet-based collections recorded a 289% increase in transaction volume over the last year, while the value of bank transfer transactions grew by 184%, reflecting the rising demand for digital financial services among businesses and consumers. These are not vanity metrics; they track behaviour change at street level. Mobile wallets and bank transfers have become the default, not the exception, for millions of African users who once operated entirely in cash. Flutterwave is riding that shift, but it has also helped cause it by building the infrastructure that makes those payments possible in the first place.

The company's regulatory posture has been equally aggressive. Flutterwave now supports payments in more than 50 global currencies across Africa, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and North America, and secured new operating licences in Senegal, Zambia, and Cameroon during the year. In a region where unlicensed fintechs have repeatedly hit walls, regulatory shutdowns, account freezes, forced exits, operating with clean licences in each market is not a bureaucratic footnote. It is a competitive moat.

The stablecoin move deserves attention too. Flutterwave deepened its partnerships with Circle and Polygon to integrate stablecoin capabilities into its payments infrastructure, aimed at improving cross-border settlement services. This is not a crypto bet; it is a settlement efficiency play. Cross-border payments across Africa have historically been expensive and slow, often routing through correspondent banks in London or New York before arriving in Lagos or Nairobi. Stablecoin rails can cut that latency and cost significantly. By baking this into its core infrastructure now, Flutterwave is positioning itself ahead of the curve.

Then there is the Mono acquisition. In January, Flutterwave acquired Nigerian open banking startup Mono in an all-stock transaction, enhancing its capabilities in open banking, financial data access, identity verification, and account-to-account payments. Mono continues to operate independently, but the deal cements Flutterwave's intent to own more of the financial data layer, not just the movement of money, but the verification, the identity, and the account access that makes that movement trusted. For enterprise clients, this kind of end-to-end capability is increasingly what separates a payments vendor from a payments partner.

Internally, Flutterwave promoted 25% of its global employees and issued a one-time economic relief payment for all staff worldwide, alongside cost-of-living adjustments and tax support for employees in Nigeria following recent regulatory changes. In a climate where African tech talent is being courted by remote-first global employers, retention investments like these matter. Agboola has consistently said his people are the company's differentiator; this move puts money behind that claim.

Looking ahead, Flutterwave says it remains focused on enabling cross-border commerce and supporting African businesses as they expand globally, describing itself as central to the continent's digital commerce transformation. At ten years old, with a billion transactions behind it and an infrastructure stack that keeps getting deeper, the company is no longer making a case for African fintech; it is the case.
Visit technaija.com

If you've been waiting for the right funding opportunity, this is your sign to stop waiting. Every grant on this list is equity-free, meaning you keep full ownership of your business while accessing real capital and support. Deadlines are close, so move fast.

💰 Cellnex Community Fund
£2,500–£10,000 for UK not-for-profits working in digital inclusion, circular economy, biodiversity, and AI education. Rolling deadline.

💰 Together Women Rise Grants
Up to $35,000 for gender equality projects, including maternal health and women-led businesses. Deadline: June 5, 2026.

💰 Standard Chartered Foundation & Village Capital
Women in Tech Accelerator — A share of $600,000+ in grants plus accelerator support for women-led tech startups across Africa. Deadline: June 30, 2026.

💰 QEST Sanderson Rising Star Craft Award
£10,000 plus mentorship for early-to-mid-career craftspeople in the UK. Deadline: June 5, 2026.

💰 @TBAT Innovation Challenge
£50,000 for UK businesses in R& and technology innovation. Deadline: June 24, 2026.

💰 United Women in Faith
Just Energy for All Seed Grants, up to $10,000 for climate justice and just energy transition projects. Deadline: June 17, 2026.

💰 Made Smarter Adoption Programme
Up to £20,000 in matched funding for SME manufacturers in the East of England going digital. Rolling deadline.

No equity. No dilution. Just funding for founders who deserve access to it. Full details and application links in the article on technaija.com

When Bloomberg published its second annual Africa Startups to Watch list on May 28, 2026, two countries stood above the rest. Kenya and Nigeria each secured four spots on the list of 25 companies, tying at the top while the remaining entries spread across twelve other African nations.

The list spotlights companies building solutions in environments where infrastructure or systems have failed to deliver, from accessing a doctor in Chad to moving goods in Kenya, securing a loan in South Africa, or safeguarding borders in Nigeria.

This is not a ranking of the richest or most hyped.

Bloomberg editors and analysts assessed companies based on the scale of the problem they address, the originality of their approach, and their traction with customers and investors. What came back was a portrait of a continent solving its own problems, on its own terms.

Kenya's Four: Transport, Logistics, and the Infrastructure of Work
Kenya's entries are not glamorous in the way that consumer apps tend to be. They are deeply structural, the kind of companies that don't make noise but quietly become load-bearing walls.

BuuPass, founded in 2016 by Sonia Kabra and Wyclife Omondi, is digitizing Africa's largely informal travel industry by enabling users to search and book bus, rail, and flight tickets across multiple operators, effectively creating transportation data infrastructure in markets where mobility systems often operate without integrated digital coordination. Backed by Founders Factory Africa and Google's Black Founders Fund, BuuPass is not just selling tickets, it is building the data layer underneath an entire industry.

Leta is addressing logistics inefficiencies by helping businesses optimise deliveries, assign drivers, and track supply chains in real time. Backed by Google's Africa Investment Fund, Leta entered Ghana after closing a $5 million seed round in July 2025, a signal that the company is done proving the model and ready to scale it.

Oye targets motorcycle taxi riders, linking accident insurance and credit access directly to fuel purchases. With Britam behind it and one million riders in its sights, Oye is extending financial services into an informal sector that traditional insurers have never found a way into.

WorkPay started as payroll software before expanding into HR, compliance, and financial services tools. Backed by Visa, Norrsken22, and Y Combinator, the company now serves businesses operating across more than 30 African countries. In a continent where cross-border hiring is becoming increasingly common, WorkPay is quietly becoming the administrative spine that makes it possible.

Nigeria's Four: Healthcare, Lending, and Defence
Nigeria's entries cut across sectors that share one thing in common, they are all operating in spaces where the state has either retreated or never fully arrived.

10mg Health, founded in 2022 by pharmacist Christian Nwachukwu, targets one of the most persistent bottlenecks in Nigeria's healthcare system, upfront payment for treatment. Its flagship product, 10mgCredit, provides financing to hospitals and pharmacies, enabling providers to deliver care even when patients cannot immediately pay.

Remedial Health, backed by both Y Combinator and Tencent, helps healthcare providers manage inventory, verify suppliers, and access financing. It has financed tens of millions of dollars worth of medicines through its platform, a number that reflects how broken pharmaceutical supply chains in Nigeria have historically been.

Sycamore, founded by Babatunde Akin-Moses, is a digital lending platform serving individuals and businesses in Nigeria while expanding to reach Africans in the UK and beyond. Bloomberg noted the company's navigation of the familiar tension in digital lending, balancing aggressive growth with the underwriting discipline needed to survive long-term. In 2026, Sycamore obtained a microfinance bank licence in Nigeria through an acquisition, a move that plants it deeper in the regulatory soil.

Terra Industries, founded in 2024 by Nathan Nwachuku and Maxwell Maduka, is a Lagos-based defence-tech startup that builds mid-range drones and security systems to address the growing threat of jihadist groups in West Africa's Sahel region, which have begun deploying retrofitted commercial drones against military positions and critical infrastructure. The company has attracted investment from 8VC, controlled by Palantir Technologies co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and recently raised $34 million. It is also expanding manufacturing with a second facility in Ghana, the highest-funded single startup on Bloomberg's entire list.

The Rest of the List: 14 Countries, One Continent
South Africa, Nigeria, and Tanzania each had three companies on the list, while the remaining startups came from Botswana, Cameroon, Chad, Egypt, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Mauritius, and Somalia.

In healthcare, Botswana's Deaftronics builds solar-powered hearing aids for regions without reliable electricity. Chad's Telemedan connects patients with doctors through solar-powered telemedicine stations in areas with almost no physicians.

Cameroon's Waspito offers instant online doctor consultations with no appointment required. Tanzania's SafeSip uses AI-monitored solar purification systems to make contaminated water safe to drink.

In fintech, Ivory Coast's HUB2 connects mobile money wallets, bank accounts, cards, and digital wallets through a single platform with a particular focus on the CFA franc zone. Tanzania's Black Swan uses alternative data, utility payments, transaction histories, to extend credit to borrowers with no formal records. Cameroon's Nkwa builds savings tools for informal economies. South Africa's Omniscient uses AI and retail and telecom data to help banks assess creditworthiness, with TransUnion, Arise, and Shoprite Holdings among its backers. PawaPay processes millions of transactions daily across about 20 countries and has reported profitability since 2023, a distinction that still turns heads in African fintech.

On climate, Madagascar's Bôndy pursues forest restoration without external equity. Somalia's Ecosom converts agricultural waste into biochar and cleaner fuels. South Africa's Amesect turns organic waste into fertiliser and animal feed. South Africa's Aura raised a $14.5 million Series B to expand its app-based emergency response network. Egypt's Widebot rounds out the list with Arabic-language conversational AI built to handle hundreds of millions of automated interactions monthly.

Why This List Matters Now
Global shifts are reinforcing the pressure on African startups. The conflict in Iran and cuts to healthcare assistance under President Donald Trump's administration have highlighted the need for African governments and businesses to mobilise capital locally. Nearly half of the funding raised by companies on this year's list came from African investors. Startups across the continent almost doubled their debt fundraising in 2025, even as equity financing from venture capital firms declined.

That context reframes what this list actually is. It is not a celebration of the hottest names or the biggest rounds. It is a record of what happens when a continent stops waiting, and starts building.

When Zipline touched down in Kaduna in 2022, it looked like yet another health-tech experiment, drones ferrying vaccines over the savanna with the kind of optimism that African pilots attract and often disappear into. Nobody was calling it infrastructure. Four years later, that framing has completely changed.

Zipline now says Nigeria is its biggest strategic market on the continent, and the company is backing that claim with real capital commitments.

Anthonio Pinheiro, its newly appointed Nigeria Country Director, confirmed in an interview with TechCabal that the company intends to build 12 new distribution centres across the country, scaling from three operational hubs to 15 facilities nationwide by 2028. The target: connect 20,000 health facilities and put fast access to medical commodities within reach of roughly 100 million Nigerians.

That is not a pilot. That is a national infrastructure play.

The numbers behind the ambition are grounded in a real problem. Nigeria's healthcare supply chain has been broken for decades, not in the abstract, policy-paper sense, but in the way that kills people quietly. A 2026 study found that over half of rural health facilities experienced at least one contraceptive stockout within a three-month window. Anti-venom, blood supplies, malaria treatment, and maternal care products routinely run dry in communities where the nearest alternative facility might be a boat ride and three hours away.

Patients arrive at hospitals, travel sometimes the whole day, only to find the drug that could save them is not in stock.

Zipline model attacks this directly. Rather than pushing hospitals to maintain costly storage and inventories they can never fully predict, Zipline manages supply centrally across temperature-controlled, AI-managed hubs and delivers on demand, typically within 30 to 45 minutes. "If a hospital requests 20 vaccine doses and 25 patients show up, they can call us and we can deliver the additional five," Pinheiro said. The company already claims measurable proof: vaccine stockout in supported areas have dropped significantly, maternal mortality rates at supported facilities have reportedly fallen by more than 50% due in part to faster blood delivery, and emergency deliveries, including one involving anti-venom reaching a remote hospital within 47 minutes, have pulled people back from outcomes that would otherwise have been fatal.

The current footprint covers three states, Kaduna, Cross River, and Bayelsa, serving over 1,300 health facilities and around six million people. But the architecture of the expansion is no longer state-by-state negotiation. Zipline is now pursuing a federal-scale framework, supported by Nigeria's Federal Ministry of Health and a U.S. government grant initiative covering five African countries, one that allows states to plug into a national autonomous delivery network rather than negotiate isolated deployments.

That shift reflects something larger happening inside Zipline itself. The California-based company increasingly describes itself not as a drone startup but as an AI robotics infrastructure company. The drones are autonomous. The inventory systems are AI-powered. The hubs in Kaduna and Cross River are now fully solar-powered, with energy redundancy systems that have eliminated tens of thousands of liters of diesel consumption monthly at some sites, effectively turning each hub into a mini energy ecosystem for surrounding communities.

Pinheiro is also blunt about the economics: "We end up being more affordable because of the operational efficiencies we create." States cut storage costs. They reduce transportation overhead. They get real-time visibility into what's being used, what's running low, and where delivery is needed, the kind of utilization data that most Nigerian health systems have never had.

On regulation, the path is narrowing. As of May 2026, drone operators must obtain an End-User Certificate from ONSA before approaching the Civil Aviation Authority for a permit. Pinheiro calls this a national security question, not a barrier, and says Zipline's relationship with Nigerian regulators has grown increasingly collaborative. The company defines operational corridors, works within airspace restrictions, and treats compliance as part of the infrastructure build, not an obstacle to it.

What makes this moment different from 2022 is that Zipline is no longer asking whether drone logistics can work in Nigeria. It is asking how fast the infrastructure can be built before the window closes. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how many Nigerians, in riverine communities, in hard-to-reach northern states, in places that no Lagos-based health startup has ever prioritized, were effectively outside the reach of any functioning supply chain. Zipline is building toward them.
"Nigeria is more than the big cities," Pinheiro said. "There are people in remote areas who still cannot access healthcare quickly."

The 12 new hubs are a direct answer to

For millions of Nigerians who rely on borrowed airtime to make calls, send money, or stay connected through the month's lean days, the past six weeks have felt like a quiet punishment for something they didn't do. MTN Nigeria's Xtratime, the country's most widely used airtime lending service, went dark in April 2026, and the reason had nothing to do with the subscribers who depended on it daily. It had everything to do with a regulatory standoff that put Nigeria's largest telecom operator on a tightrope between legal caution and competitive pressure.

That standoff is now beginning to ease.
MTN Nigeria is working to restore its Xtratime airtime lending service after Nigeria's consumer protection regulator suspended enforcement of new digital lending rules. "The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) has suspended the enforcement of DEON. To that extent, we will reinstate the service," a company insider told TechCabal.

The move marks a significant shift. When MTN executives faced investors during the company's May 4 earnings call, the message was measured and careful. Chief Corporate Services Officer Tobechukwu Okigbo outlined two conditions for Xtratime's return: a court ruling that sets aside the regulations empowering the FCCPC to license, or a clear directive instructing the company to reinstate the service. Neither had happened at that point, and MTN held its ground. Airtel and Globacom had already restored airtime lending following the regulatory pause, a competitive pressure that MTN was visibly absorbing, but not yet bowing to.

Then came May 22.

The FCCPC, in deference to the rule of law, suspended the implementation and enforcement of the DEON Regulations 2025 following an April 15 interim order issued by the Federal High Court in Lagos. The court acted on a lawsuit by the Wireless Application Service Providers Association of Nigeria (WASPAN), which represents value-added service providers who argued the regulations overstepped into territory governed by the Nigerian Communications Commission. Industry analysts say the dispute reflects wider tensions between the FCCPC and the NCC over regulatory jurisdiction in Nigeria's telecom and digital finance sectors.

What started as a compliance exercise turned into a full-blown institutional turf war. The DEON Regulations, which officially took effect on July 21, 2025, with full enforcement kicking in from January 2026, required any entity involved in digital or non-traditional consumer lending, including airtime advances, to obtain a fresh licence from the FCCPC. The regulations introduced a compliance and licensing framework covering loan disclosures, debt recovery methods, and consumer data protection. The FCCPC framed it as consumer protection. Telcos framed it as regulatory overreach.

For MTN, the stakes were real but containable. Fees from Xtratime contribute roughly 3% of revenue, while airtime and data consumption linked to the product account for a low-20% share of total airtime distribution. On a company that generated ₦5.2 trillion ($3.77 billion) in revenue in 2025 and expects at least ₦6.24 trillion ($4.52 billion) in 2026, 3% is not existential, but it is not trivial either. Airtime and data lending has historically driven about 80% of non-core fintech revenue (VAS), and MTN's fintech revenue surged 77.9% to ₦64.188 billion in Q1 2026, a number that carries Xtratime's fingerprints even in its absence.

CEO Karl Toriola made the public case to investors that customers simply adapted. "There was a short-term impact on consumption patterns, which lasted only a few days," he said. "Customers adapted.

They either shifted to self-funded usage or found alternative ways to manage short-term needs." The argument was that Xtratime changed how people paid for airtime, not whether they consumed it. But the speed with which MTN is now moving to restore the service tells a more honest story, the product matters, and losing ground to Airtel and Glo in a market with 89.5 million subscribers is not a position any telecom CEO wants to hold longer than necessary.

Nigerian banks have also moved aggressively into the gap, with GTBank, Access Bank, UBA, Zenith Bank, FirstBank, and FCMB using USSD platforms to provide instant airtime and data loans directly to customers, a structural shift that could outlast the regulatory dispute if MTN takes too long to return.

The broader question hovering over all of this is what happens when the court case reaches its conclusion. The future of airtime lending services will ultimately depend on the outcome of the ongoing court proceedings and the final determination of the legality of the FCCPC's 2025 digital lending regulations. The FCCPC's suspension is temporary obedience to a court order, not a retreat. If the court eventually validates the DEON framework, telcos will face the licensing requirements all over again, but this time without the option of saying they were waiting for clarity.

For now, Nigeria's subscribers are getting their service back. What the regulatory landscape looks like on the other side of this legal fight is still being written.

NALA, the Tanzanian-founded stablecoin payments company led by Benjamin Fernandes, has secured up to $50 million in credit financing from Liquidity through Mars Growth Capital, a joint venture with MUFG Bank. Starting with an initial $25 million tranche, the facility is designed to pre-fund enterprise transactions, expand payment corridors, and onboard large clients going live in 2026, without diluting existing shareholders. It marks a major inflection point for a company that scaled its Rafiki B2B platform from zero to $1 billion in transaction volume in 18 months.
Benjamin Fernandes was a national television presenter in Tanzania at 17. By 21, he was the youngest African ever accepted to Stanford's Graduate School of Business. He worked at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He had every credential that should make investors open doors without hesitation. And yet, he applied to Y Combinator six times before getting in, was rejected by every startup accelerator in Tanzania, and when he finally got the green light from YC in 2019, Tanzania's central bank ordered him to shut down. His co-founder quit the week before Demo Day. He ran out of money and started over.

That backstory matters now more than ever, because the company he rebuilt from scratch just secured up to $50 million in credit financing, and it is no longer a scrappy remittance app fighting for survival. NALA, the Tanzanian-founded fintech building stablecoin-powered cross-border payment rails, has secured the facility from private credit firm Liquidity, as demand rises for faster business payments between emerging markets, Europe, and the United States.

The structure of the deal is deliberate. The initial $25 million facility offers a scale-up option of at least $50 million, arranged through Mars Growth Capital, a joint venture between Liquidity and MUFG Bank Ltd., to provide working capital supporting NALA's continued global expansion, product development, and operational scaling. And crucially, this is not a distress signal. The company still holds more than 50 percent of the capital from its 2024 $40 million equity round, allowing Liquidity's financing to be used strategically to accelerate growth and expand payment corridors without additional shareholder dilution.

Fernandes has been candid about what triggered the move. "At some point our business was more than doubling every other quarter, we grew faster than we could handle pre-funding for single direction payments and everything broke," he said. That is the kind of problem founders dream about, until it becomes real. When payment volumes double quarterly, the cash required to pre-fund those transfers has to move ahead of revenue. Without it, the rails seize up. The credit facility from Liquidity is the lubricant.

At the centre of this growth story is Rafiki, NALA's B2B payments platform. The Tanzanian-founded fintech began in 2017 as a remittance app for the African diaspora before expanding into business payments through Rafiki, its enterprise infrastructure platform, which now connects more than 249 banks and 26 mobile money services across 16 countries. Enterprise partners including MoneyGram and TransferGo plug into Rafiki through a single API to reach markets where legacy banking infrastructure simply cannot move fast enough.

The timing of this deal lands squarely inside a broader market transformation. B2B stablecoin payments have grown sixfold in eighteen months, with monthly volumes now exceeding $30 billion.

Businesses are no longer experimenting with stablecoins, they are routing significant transaction volumes through them because the speed and cost advantages over traditional settlement are too large to ignore. The global stablecoin payment infrastructure market stood at $7.6 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $89.4 billion by 2034, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 32.1 percent. NALA is not chasing this wave, it built the rails before the wave arrived.

Paul Brodie, Global Head of Investments at Liquidity, noted that the facility was structured to account for NALA's compliant stablecoin rails, real-time cross-border payments, and rapid growth in emerging market corridors. That framing, compliant rails, is significant. Regulatory friction across Africa and Asia remains one of the sharpest competitive moats in this space. Companies that have built within local frameworks, rather than around them, hold an advantage that pure-tech competitors cannot easily replicate.

The new capital will be deployed to pre-fund larger customer accounts and onboard enterprise contracts set to go live in the second half of 2026.

Earlier this year, NALA also announced partnerships enabling businesses to collect US dollars globally and settle instantly in local currencies through regulated payment rails. The infrastructure is expanding in every direction simultaneously.

What Fernandes has built is not an app. It is financial plumbing for an era in which moving money between Lagos and London, Nairobi and New York, should be as fast and cheap as sending an email. Total equity funding to date stands at $50 million, following a $40 million Series A in July 2024 led by Acrew Capital, with participation from DST Global, Norrsken22, HOF Capital, Amplo, and angel investors including Vlad Tenev of Robinhood and Ryan King of Chime. The people who have backed it are not betting on Africa's potential as a talking point. They are betting on infrastructure that is already moving.

The man who got shut down, ran out of money, lost his co-founder, and rebuilt anyway just secured $50 million to scale the rails he laid. The stablecoin era is not coming. It is here, and NALA intends to carry it.

Egypt's real estate sector has long been a paradox, one of Africa's most active property markets, yet one of its most manually operated. That tension is precisely what PropTech Hub is built to resolve.

Coldwell Banker Commercial Advantage, Edafa Venture, and Prime Group Egypt have officially announced the establishment of PropTech Hub, the first specialized investment and development company dedicated to supporting and accelerating real estate technology companies in Egypt and the region. The announcement, made in late May 2026, marks a significant institutional step, not just another accelerator program with a flashy name, but a fully structured company with capital, networks, and a mandate to scale.

The timing is deliberate. Egypt's real estate PropTech platforms market is valued at $1.2 billion, driven by urbanization, rising tech adoption, and growing demand for digital solutions across Cairo and Alexandria. But valuation alone doesn't tell the full story. The infrastructure powering that market, the tools developers, brokers, and investors rely on daily, remains fractured and underpowered. That's the gap PropTech Hub is stepping into.

PropTech Hub evolves from the PropTech Program introduced in October, which was established to encourage innovation in the real estate sector. By transitioning the program into a fully-fledged company, the founding partners aim to create a structured institutional ecosystem capable of identifying, financing, and scaling promising startups. This evolution matters. Programs come and go. Companies have board rooms, investment mandates, and accountability. The decision to formalize signals that the three founding entities are not just testing an idea, they are committing to it.

The platform operates on three pillars: Connect, Innovate, and Elevate. Connect links founders with investors and real estate decision-makers. Innovate pushes new solutions for development, management, and operations. Elevate is designed to help companies expand their market reach and strengthen their business models. Together, the three pillars describe something more than a typical startup accelerator, they describe a pipeline, from idea to institutionally viable company.

Selected startups are expected to receive investment and operating support with a view to expanding regionally to the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Oman. That regional ambition is backed by the geography of the partnership itself. Edafa Venture brings Gulf experience and capital. Prime Group Egypt is a leading multi-sector investment group recognized for delivering smart, sustainable solutions, while Coldwell Banker Commercial Advantage serves as the commercial arm of the global Coldwell Banker network across Egypt and the MENA region, specializing in development, management, strategic advisory, and marketing of commercial and investment properties. Between the three, PropTech Hub has access to market intelligence, deal flow, and operational know-how that most accelerators simply cannot offer.

The macro conditions reinforce the urgency. AI-powered platforms like Nawy are already transforming property transactions, with the company processing $1.4 billion in property deals by the end of 2024, a 50x increase from $38 million in 2020. This kind of momentum signals that Egypt's real estate buyers and developers are ready for digital-first solutions. The question has never been about demand. It has always been about whether the institutional support exists to scale those solutions fast enough.

Egypt's real estate sector is entering a new era of large-scale digital integration, with the government preparing to offer more than 400,000 housing units through a unified digital system, one of the region's most ambitious coordinated digital real estate efforts. PropTech Hub enters this environment as a private-sector counterweight: where government drives standardization, PropTech Hub is positioned to drive innovation.

The three leaders behind the company have been clear about their intent. Mahmoud Farag of Prime Group Egypt described the venture as a structured investment platform for scalable real estate technology. Essam Ali, CEO of Edafa Venture, said real estate technology is among the most promising sectors over the coming decade, regionally and globally, and that PropTech Hub aims to identify and support companies capable of delivering transformative solutions that reshape the real estate industry. Sherif Hassan of Coldwell Banker Commercial Advantage added that the platform is built to connect innovation with real-world market implementation, bringing developers, investors, entrepreneurs, and technology providers under one roof.

What makes PropTech Hub credible is not the ambition behind it, ambition is cheap. It is the architecture. A dedicated company structure, three distinct founding partners with complementary capabilities, a regional expansion roadmap, and a launch event on the horizon where the first cohort will be publicly introduced. These details suggest a team that has thought past the press release.

Egypt's PropTech market is seeing increasing demand for property management platforms, virtual property viewings, online rental and sales transactions, and smart building technologies, with AI, data analytics, and blockchain driving new efficiencies across the sector. Startups solving any one of these problems now have a cleaner path to funding, mentorship, and regional scale, if PropTech Hub delivers on what it has set out to build.

Egypt's real estate industry is large enough to produce significant returns and fragmented enough to reward the right technology. The companies that figure out how to move faster, price more accurately, and operate more efficiently within this market will not just win locally, they will have a template for every major property market across the Middle East and Africa. PropTech Hub is betting it can produce those companies. The infrastructure is now in place. The proof will come from the startups that build on it.

Nigeria's generator economy is enormous, invisible, and quietly brutal. Walk through any Lagos neighborhood before sunrise and you'll hear it, that low mechanical growl from a thousand small machines burning through petrol to keep a few lights on, a fan turning, a fridge cold. It is the sound of a country paying a daily tax for electricity that the grid has never reliably delivered. According to World Bank data, 43% of Nigeria's population has no grid access at all. For those who do, frequent outages have made generators less of a backup and more of a primary energy source.

That is the market bPOWERd has walked into, and it arrived with a disarmingly simple answer.

The South African clean energy startup, developed under bp and officially launched in 2025, has set up operations across seven Lagos sites in partnership with 11plc, the operator of Mobil service stations in Nigeria. The model strips away every barrier that has historically kept clean energy out of reach for ordinary households and small businesses: no upfront installation cost, no technical knowledge required, no long-term commitment. Customers complete a verification process using their National Identification Number, pay a refundable ₦15,000 deposit, and walk away with a portable, solar-charged battery. When it runs out, they return it to the nearest Mobil hub and swap it for a fully charged one.

The economics are the headline. Running a small generator, the entry-level 0.9kVA to 1.2kVA type that powers a few lights, a fan, and a television, costs Nigerian households roughly ₦10,000 per day in fuel. bPOWERd's larger 1,000Wh battery, which delivers up to 12 hours of comparable power for lighting, fans, TVs, refrigerators, and small business equipment, rents from ₦3,000 per day.

That is a 70% reduction. The smaller 300Wh unit starts at ₦1,500 and covers basic electronics. No exhaust fumes. No noise. No jerry cans.

What makes bPOWERd's timing interesting is that it is not arriving on climate messaging alone, it is arriving on price. The generator lobby in Nigeria is not ideological; it is purely economic. People use generators because they have no choice and no cheaper option. bPOWERd is betting that once a cheaper, cleaner option exists and is physically accessible through a familiar network like Mobil stations, the math does the convincing. Early numbers suggest the bet is landing. The company says it reached 60% of its six-month rental target within the first seven weeks of going live in Lagos, a signal of demand that was clearly waiting for the right vehicle.

The South Africa proof of concept matters here. bPOWERd's 2025 launch there produced 125,000 rentals in its first twelve months of operation, strong enough validation to justify the Nigerian push. But as the company itself recognises, the two markets are not the same. South Africa's grid is troubled and politically contentious; Nigeria's grid simply does not exist for tens of millions of people. The product has to work for users who may have never had stable electricity to begin with, not just those exhausted by outages. That is a harder test, and the early results suggest it is passing.

Beyond power access, bPOWERd is building deliberately into Nigeria's local economy. Oluwole Ogidan, Head of bp Global West Africa, has pointed to the creation of on-site sales roles and partnerships with Nigerian solar technicians as a core part of the rollout, essentially a cleaner, quieter version of the informal ecosystem that already exists around generator repair shops and roadside fuel vendors. Jonathan Lule, the Managing Director, put it plainly: small businesses sit at the centre of everyday economic activity in Nigeria, yet they absorb a disproportionate share of the country's energy burden. A dependable, affordable power option changes their math fundamentally.

Nigeria's solar market is growing, the Africa Solar Outlook 2026 report puts solar at 1.5% of the country's overall energy mix, but adoption has been held back by installation costs and the assumption that clean energy requires a significant upfront investment. bPOWERd's rental model is a direct challenge to that assumption. It turns energy into a daily consumer decision rather than a capital expenditure, and routes access through infrastructure, petrol stations, that already exists in every urban neighborhood.

Seven sites is a start. The question the next twelve months will answer is whether this model can scale across Lagos and eventually into Abuja, Port Harcourt, and beyond. If Nigeria's first seven weeks are any indication, the demand was never the problem.

The math has never added up. Over £4 billion flows from the UK to Sub-Saharan Africa every year, yet sending that money still costs an average of 8.5%, more than double the UN's 3% target. Behind that number is a familiar story: compliance systems built for Wall Street and the City of London trying to make sense of BVN numbers, mobile money flows, and West African transaction patterns they were never designed to read. The result is a flood of false positives, expensive manual reviews, and a quiet exodus of correspondent banking relationships from the continent, down more than 25% over the last decade.

Smartcomply, a Nigerian compliance and cybersecurity startup, is now stepping into that gap with its UK expansion, bringing Adhere, its AI-powered AML, KYC, and fraud-detection platform, directly to electronic money institutions, remittance firms, neobanks, and cross-border payment fintechs operating African corridors.

The Lagos-born company isn't pitching a generic compliance upgrade. It's selling something far more specific: an infrastructure layer that actually understands how money moves in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa. Adhere integrates into the backend systems of financial institutions through an API, connecting directly to local identity infrastructure like Nigeria's Bank Verification Number database, with machine learning models trained on regional payment behaviours. The difference between that and a standard European compliance stack isn't cosmetic, it's the difference between flagging a legitimate mobile money transfer and letting it through.

Smartcomply currently monitors over $1 billion in monthly transactions across more than 100 financial institutions in Africa. The platform reportedly cuts manual compliance workloads by 70% and reduces false positives by 40%, numbers that matter enormously for firms weighing whether African corridors are worth the operational burden.

The timing is deliberate. UK payment firms are already navigating heightened compliance pressure from the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act's failure-to-prevent-fraud offence, in force since September 2025, and the Payment Systems Regulator's mandatory reimbursement scheme for authorised push payment fraud. In that environment, the cost of getting African transaction monitoring wrong isn't just regulatory, it's reputational.

CEO Gbemisola Osunrinde has been direct about the company's positioning: "African payment corridors should be a growth opportunity for the global financial system, not a liability. Adhere exists to make that growth possible without compromising on compliance. Smartcomply's UK presence means that for the first time, UK fintechs and banks have direct access to an AML platform that understands African data the way it should be understood: from the inside out."

CTO Anita Ajalla framed it even more bluntly. "Compliance technology designed in New York or London cannot read Nigerian Bank Verification Numbers, cannot understand mobile money flows in Kenya, and cannot make sense of West African mule networks. The companies that get to participate in African growth are the ones with infrastructure built for African reality."

That argument is gaining traction not just in boardrooms but in regulatory circles. In March, the Central Bank of Nigeria introduced baseline standards for automated AML solutions, formally recognizing artificial intelligence and machine learning as tools for monitoring financial crime, a shift that signals African regulators are moving to tighten controls, not loosen them. For UK firms already invested in African corridors, the compliance bar is only going up.

Smartcomply's UK expansion focuses on Nigerian, Kenyan, Ghanaian, South African, and Rwandan payment corridors, with plans to deepen its presence in Rwanda and Côte d'Ivoire in 2026. The roadmap signals a company that isn't just chasing a market, it's methodically building the connective tissue between two financial ecosystems that have long struggled to speak the same language.

Founded in 2021, the company has evolved into a group structure with distinct products: Adhere for AML and fraud detection, Secure for GRC automation, Intel for threat intelligence, and Academy for cybersecurity training. The UK move brings the most internationally deployable of those products, Adhere, to the market where the demand is most acute.

Africa's financial systems are growing faster than the infrastructure meant to govern them. Smartcomply is betting that whoever builds that governance layer first will be indispensable. In London, it's now making that case in person.

Most investment stories from Africa lead with the headline number and stop there. This one deserves more than that.

When AHL Venture Partners announced the first close of its AHL Africa Credit Fund I at $30.5 million, it wasn't just a fundraising milestone, it was the culmination of nearly two decades of quiet, deliberate work that most of the continent's fintech and startup noise tends to drown out. Since 2007, AHL has served as advisor to the AHL Charitable Foundation, building exposure across debt, equity, and fund investments in African businesses. That's not a pivot story. That's a long game being played by people who understood something early that the market is only now beginning to accept.

Here's what they understood: equity isn't always the answer.
Over the years, AHL increasingly shifted its attention toward private credit, arguing that debt financing offers a more sustainable and scalable model for both investors and businesses operating on the continent. In markets where exits are slow, valuations are volatile, and the traditional venture capital playbook often misfires, debt, structured, flexible, and patient, starts to look a lot more attractive. AHL began sharpening its credit strategy in 2020, following a conviction that debt offered a more scalable and risk-managed pathway for investors than equity in many African market contexts.

That conviction wasn't theoretical. Since then, via the AHL Foundation and AHL-led syndications, AHL has deployed over $120 million in debt investments across the continent, with a focus on businesses operating in financial inclusion, climate action, and sustainable food and agriculture. Those aren't vanity sectors chosen for optics, they are the structural fault lines of African economies, the places where capital scarcity causes the most damage and where well-deployed debt can generate both yield and lasting change.

The new fund institutionalized that track record.

Anchored by the AHL Foundation alongside three family offices, the AHL Africa Credit Fund I will offer senior secured, mezzanine, and bridge loans to African companies. The design is deliberate. The fund will provide working capital, bridge loans and mezzanine debt to companies addressing financial inclusion, climate change, and agriculture and food systems. These aren't the kinds of deals that generate Twitter threads, they're the kind that keep supply chains running, extend mobile credit to farmers in the dry season, and help a mid-sized enterprise bridge the gap between where it is and where a bank might eventually agree to take it.

That gap is enormous. Africa's mid-market remains chronically underserved, squeezed between microfinance instruments that are too small and commercial banks that demand collateral most growing businesses cannot provide. The launch of the new fund comes at a time when more investors are exploring alternative financing structures in Africa amid growing concerns about the performance of traditional venture capital models across emerging markets. And while broader African private equity fundraising has declined sharply in recent years, the first close signals that institutional and family office appetite for structured African credit is beginning to firm up.

Rosanne Whalley, CEO of AHL Venture Partners, is clear-eyed about what this moment means. "This first close is an important milestone for AHL and reflects growing conviction that African businesses need more flexible, long-term debt capital. After nearly two decades investing alongside entrepreneurs across the continent, we believe there is a significant opportunity to build a scaled private credit platform that supports strong businesses solving real challenges across African markets."

She also framed the fund's broader function with precision: "We see ourselves as an on-ramp for private capital looking to allocate for impact and returns in the African market." That framing matters. The fund isn't positioning itself as the entire highway, it's the entry point, the credible, de-risked structure that makes it easier for family offices, high-net-worth individuals, and foundations to get exposure to African credit markets without having to build origination capability from scratch.

What AHL is doing, quietly and methodically, is infrastructure work, not the infrastructure of cables and data centres, but the financial kind. The rails that help capital actually reach the businesses that need it, at the right cost, in the right form, at the right time. Since 2020, AHL says it has deployed more than $120 million in debt financing through the AHL Foundation and syndicated investment structures. The Africa Credit Fund I is where that experience gets packaged into something replicable and scalable.

The full target size of the fund hasn't been disclosed, but the direction is clear: AHL is building a private credit platform for Africa, and this first close is proof the market is ready to follow.

Tosin Eniolorunda has never been one to speak quietly. Weeks before this announcement, the co-founder and Group CEO of Moniepoint stood before an audience at The Platform Nigeria in Lagos and said something that set the internet on fire. Despite the company's commitment to hiring Nigerians, Moniepoint had 500 open vacancies it could not fill, and the candidates it found were not up to the global quality standards the company needed. The backlash was swift and visceral. Many Nigerians didn't hear a narrow concern about recruitment standards, they heard a broader suggestion that Nigerian professionals themselves were inadequate.

Then, just weeks later, Eniolorunda stood at the Oduduwa Hall of his alma mater, Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, and put ₦3 billion on the table.
Moniepoint Inc. has announced a ₦3 billion commitment to establish innovation hubs at three federal universities, OAU in Ile-Ife, the University of Nigeria Nsukka, and Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, to be built over the next three years. The announcement was made in the presence of vice chancellors, industry leaders, traditional rulers, students, and alumni. It was deliberate in its symbolism and pointed in its geography.

The three institutions represent Nigeria's major regions: OAU for the South-West, UNN for the South-East, and ABU Zaria for the North. That's not a coincidence. It's a statement. For too long, Nigeria's tech opportunity has orbited Lagos. Moniepoint is choosing to break that orbit.

Each hub will be far more than a computer lab with good branding. They will function as permanent centres for hands-on training in software engineering, data science, artificial intelligence, design, robotics, product development, and entrepreneurship. The programmes are open to students from every faculty, engineering, arts, social sciences, law. The idea is that a history student curious about product management deserves the same shot as a computer science undergraduate. The model could produce hundreds of technology talents annually, scaling a university-based developer training model that has already shown results elsewhere.

That precedent already exists within Moniepoint's own ecosystem. The HatchDev Programme at the University of Lagos, a joint venture led by Moniepoint CTO Felix Ike and NITHub, currently trains roughly 500 software developers annually. The ₦3 billion initiative is essentially a national expansion of what already works.

Eniolorunda's tone at the launch was notably different from his Platform appearance. He came home, literally. He acknowledged that Moniepoint's foundations were rooted in Nigerian universities, calling the hubs a way of paying that trust forward. "Nigeria's digital economy cannot run on potential alone; it requires immense, localised talent density," he said. His co-founder Felix Ike, who also trained in a Nigerian university, stood beside him. The point landed without needing to be spelled out: the same system they were now investing in had, at one point, produced them.

The university leaders received the news with visible enthusiasm. OAU Vice-Chancellor Professor Adebayo Simeon Bamire described the move as a major boost that would reduce youth unemployment and accelerate startup incubation on campuses. Land has already been allocated for the OAU facility. At UNN and ABU, the sentiment was the same, this is the kind of private-sector alignment Nigerian higher education has been waiting for.

What Moniepoint is building here is a pipeline that doesn't depend on luck or geography. Curriculum input from internal teams, mentorship from product engineers, structured internship pathways that can convert into full employment, the programme is built around cohort-based, practical training designed to get graduates into industry-ready roles. The company isn't just funding buildings; it's funding outcomes.

Eniolorunda himself is proof that talent is built, not found. He worked at Interswitch before founding what eventually became Moniepoint, and that exposure shaped everything. The criticism levelled at him after his Platform comments argued precisely this: that the ladder that produced him should be the ladder he builds for others. With this ₦3 billion investment, that argument has been answered in concrete and steel.

Nigeria's tech ecosystem does not lack raw intelligence. What it has historically lacked is structured, industry-connected pathways to convert potential into professional output. Moniepoint isn't solving that problem by complaining about it from a podium. It's solving it by writing the cheque.

Sending money across Africa should not be this hard. Yet it is. A transfer between two African countries still routes through a chain of correspondent banks, each one charging a fee, adding a delay, and creating another point of failure. This is not a glitch. It is the design.

The numbers make it embarrassing. According to the World Bank, remittances to Africa hit $92.2 billion in 2024. In the same year, Sub-Saharan Africa remained the most expensive region on earth to send money, averaging 8.45% to transfer just $200. The UN's stated target is 3%. The global average is 6.4%. In some corridors, costs balloon to 12.7%. When you have to pay nearly 13 cents on every dollar just to move money, the system is not broken; it was never properly built.

That gap is what Obinna Chukwujioke kept staring at. The co-founder and CEO of Maplerad understood early that Africa's payment problem was not a product problem. It was a structural one. "Payment systems across Africa are fragmented and don't talk to each other," he said. You cannot fix that by building a better app. You have to go deeper.

In 2020, Chukwujioke and his co-founder, Miracle Anyanwu, launched Wirepay, a consumer payments product. By 2022, they had seen enough of the surface layer to know the real work was underneath it. They pivoted, rebranded to Maplerad, and opened their infrastructure to developers, startups, and enterprises as a Banking-as-a-Service platform, compliance, card issuance, multi-currency wallets, foreign exchange, automated payouts, all through a single API suite. A business can now launch a fully compliant fintech product on Maplerad in under five minutes.

Since the 2022 relaunch, Maplerad says it has processed over $500 million in transactions, serves more than 3,000 businesses, and reaches over five million end users across Africa. Chipper, Remitly, and Nombank are among the names on the platform. The company operates in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Côte d'Ivoire, Benin, and Cameroon, and works with MTN and Orange across the region.

Now consider what they are building into. Africa has 54 countries, each with its own central bank, regulatory framework, and banking network. There is no unified settlement system. The cross-border B2B payments market is estimated at between $300 billion and $500 billion annually, and researchers describe it as "vastly underserved." As of 2024, only 11 of Africa's 36 live instant payment systems supported cross-border transactions at all. Every single corridor in Sub-Saharan Africa had average transaction costs above 3%. Not most corridors. Everyone.

Harvard Business School research has found that reducing payment friction by 50% could create between 900,000 and 1.1 million remote jobs across the continent and add $3 billion to remote-work exports. For every 10% increase in transaction costs, remote-work exports contract by 4.7%. The relationship between payment infrastructure and economic opportunity is not theoretical; it is direct and measurable.

This is also the context in which the African Continental Free Trade Area has to be understood. AfCFTA is one of the most consequential economic agreements in the continent's history. But trade agreements on paper require payment infrastructure in practice. Without reliable, affordable cross-border payments, AfCFTA is an aspiration, not an architecture.

Maplerad is not alone in this space. It operates in the Banking-as-a-Service vertical alongside players like Anchor. Fintech analyst and Condia publisher Benjamin Dada draws a sharp line between Maplerad and companies like Mono. "Think of Maplerad as the infrastructure that lets a company launch a financial product quickly," Dada explains. If a lender like Fairmoney wanted to expand into Kenya, it would ordinarily face a long, expensive process of securing licences and building bank partnerships from scratch.

Maplerad removes that friction. "Instead of going through all the time and stress, they would just use a banking as a service provider like Maplerad to get up and running quickly."

Mono occupies different territory. "Mono's core is not banking as a service," Dada says. "Mono is more of an open banking player." Maplerad builds the banking product. Mono moves money between existing accounts. Same starting point, entirely different destination.

The challenges ahead are real. Regulatory environments across the continent remain complex and inconsistent. High FX margins continue to inflate costs in corridors where correspondent banking still dominates. The G20 aims to bring the global average cost of remittances down to 3% by 2027. For Sub-Saharan Africa, averaging 8.45% in 2024, that requires sustained infrastructure investment, policy reform, and the kind of unglamorous technical work that does not trend online but does make systems function.

Building the rails is one thing. Getting every train to run on them is another. But the rails have to come first, and someone has to lay them.

You can call their customer care

Amen to that
If you’re a founder of any product and you want a visibility, you can DM Technaija on LinkedIn, they will feature you on their platform for free

No it’s not, you can read about them

Paystack has rebuilt its merchant Dashboard for the first time in ten years, launching an AI-powered Command Centre that lets businesses query their own payment data using plain language. The redesign also includes full mobile parity, dark mode, and a cleaner product architecture built on Paystack's internal design system, Pax.

Read the full article on technaija.com

Moniepoint Group means business in the UK, and it just proved it.

Nigeria's fintech giant has partnered with tell.money to lock down one of the biggest pain points in diaspora remittances: sending money to the wrong account. With Confirmation of Payee now built into Monieworld, every transfer from the UK to Nigeria gets verified before it moves. No misdirected payments. No fraud. Just money reaching the right person, every time.

This is not a minor update. It is Moniepoint drawing a line in the sand in one of the most competitive remittance corridors in the world, and betting that security, not just speed, is what keeps diaspora users loyal.

Read the full article on technaija.com

Nigeria's real estate sector is the third largest contributor to the country's GDP, and yet people are still finding properties through WhatsApp messages, unverified agents, and word of mouth. Nigerent is building what this industry has needed for decades: a digital home for real estate in Nigeria. Virtual tours that let you walk through properties without leaving your house. Free listings with professional photography handled for you. Shortlets you can book directly. Legal protection for property purchases. Lagos. Then Abuja. Then everywhere. They launch June 1st, 2026, and they are just getting started.

Read the full article on technaija.com

Every day in Nigeria, skilled people go undiscovered, and businesses waste hours finding the right hire, yet Nigeria has some of the most talented people on the planet. The problem has never been the skill. It's been visibility, trust, and getting paid without drama. Vauchly solves all three.

Your skill is your business, and it deserves to be found. Vauchly is Nigeria's first map-based marketplace where workers, freelancers, and service providers get discovered by proximity, verified by identity, and paid safely through escrow. Whether you're a plumber, coder, makeup artist, or mechanic, Vauchly puts you on the map, literally.

Over 5,000 people are already on the waitlist. The question is: are you on it?

Read the full article on technaija.com

African startups are generating 128x returns. The continent has nine unicorns. And yet, most of the money funding it all still comes from abroad. AFC just dropped $100 million to fix that, and if it works, it won't just be $100 million. It'll be the catalyst that unlocks billions in African pension and insurance capital that's been sitting out the biggest wealth-creation story on the continent.

Read the full article on technaija.com