₦airaland Forum

There’s a moment in every company’s life when growth stops being about speed and starts becoming about control.

For Cellulant, that moment seems to be now.

Long before Darren Makarem stepped into the role of finance chief, Cellulant had already written itself into Africa’s fintech story — processing millions of transactions daily, connecting businesses across borders, and quietly building the rails that power digital payments across more than 20 markets. But like many companies that scale quickly, it also faced something less visible: the weight of its own expansion.

Leadership exits. Strategic recalibration. The quiet pause that forces a company to look inward.

And then, the rebuild.

Makarem’s arrival is not just another executive hire. It feels more like a deliberate shift in posture. A recognition that the next chapter requires more than ambition — it requires precision.

Before Cellulant, Makarem was the Global CFO at Agoda, where he oversaw a payments network handling over $12 billion in annual transaction volume. But numbers alone don’t tell his story. What makes his journey compelling is the vantage point he brings — one shaped not just by financial oversight, but by proximity to the customer experience.

At Agoda, payments weren’t just backend processes; they were the heartbeat of global travel transactions — multi-currency, high-frequency, always-on. Every delay mattered. Every failure was visible. That kind of environment forces a different kind of thinking — one where finance is not a reporting function, but a real-time enabler of trust.

Cellulant seems to understand this.

“Darren doesn’t just understand the numbers; he understands the customer,” CEO Peter O’Toole said — a statement that reads less like praise and more like a clue to what the company is trying to build next.

Because Cellulant is no longer just trying to exist in Africa’s payments space. It is trying to lead it — at a time when the stakes are rising.

Africa’s digital payments market is projected to reach $1.5 trillion by 2030. That number carries both promise and pressure. Competition is intensifying. Banks are building their own rails. Fintech startups are becoming sharper, faster, more specialised. And infrastructure — the invisible layer that companies like Cellulant operate in — is becoming the real battleground.

Makarem’s experience extends beyond Agoda. His time at Binance as regional CFO for APAC and LATAM, and later as CEO of OnRamp, places him at the intersection of traditional finance and emerging digital assets. It’s a background that hints at where Cellulant might be heading — toward alternative settlement rails, cross-border efficiency, and systems that go beyond conventional banking frameworks.

But timing is everything.

His appointment comes just a month after Cellulant named Michael Muriuki as chief product and technology officer. Together, these moves feel coordinated — like pieces of a larger design. One focused on rebuilding the company’s executive spine, aligning product innovation with financial discipline.

Cellulant is already profitable. It processes over 4.5 million transactions daily. On paper, it is stable. But stability, in fintech, is never the end goal. It is the foundation for something more aggressive.

And that is where Makarem steps in.

“What excites me about Cellulant is the quality of what has already been built,” he said. It’s a telling statement — one that suggests his role is not to reinvent, but to refine. To bring structure to ambition. To ensure that as the company moves faster, it does not lose balance.

In many ways, this is not a story about a new CFO. It is a story about a company learning how to grow again — differently this time. More intentionally. More sustainably.

Because in the end, scaling across Africa is not just about entering markets. It’s about understanding them. Building systems that can hold complexity. And finding leaders who can see both the numbers and the people behind them.

Cellulant’s reset is no longer quiet.

It is becoming visible.

In the quiet corridors of global finance, trust is currency. Not the kind that trades on markets, but the kind that sits behind signatures, audits, and approvals — the invisible thread that binds billion-dollar projects to the people they are meant to serve.

For decades, firms like PricewaterhouseCoopers have operated as custodians of that trust. Their reports shape decisions. Their audits validate reality. Their presence in a project often signals credibility. So when that trust fractures, it does not just ripple — it unsettles entire systems.

That is what makes the recent decision by the World Bank more than a disciplinary action. It is a moment of reckoning.

The World Bank has debarred three PwC-linked entities in Africa — including affiliates in Mauritius, Kenya, and Rwanda — for 21 months after finding them guilty of collusive and fraudulent practices tied to the Eastern Electricity Highway Project. The project itself was no ordinary initiative. It was designed to transmit hydropower from Ethiopia into Kenya, a critical piece of infrastructure meant to power industries, homes, and futures across borders.

But somewhere between intention and execution, the process bent.

According to findings, confidential procurement documents were improperly obtained. Contracts were influenced. Expertise was misrepresented. Subconsultants were not fully disclosed. These are not just technical breaches — they are violations of process integrity, the very backbone of development work.

To understand the weight of this, you have to step back from the legal language and imagine the ecosystem it affects.

A project like the Eastern Electricity Highway is not just about power lines stretching across landscapes. It is about factories that depend on stable electricity, startups building solutions for energy distribution, and communities waiting for consistent light in homes that have known darkness for too long. When governance fails at the top, the consequences cascade downward.

And this is where the story deepens.

The World Bank, through institutions like the International Finance Corporation, does more than fund governments. It fuels private sector growth across emerging markets. Just days before announcing the debarment, the IFC committed $20 million toward high-growth startups in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa — a reminder that development finance and innovation are increasingly intertwined.

Now, imagine being a startup founder navigating that ecosystem. You are building in a fragile environment, dependent on grants, loans, and partnerships that often trace back to institutions like the World Bank. Then news breaks that one of the world’s most respected advisory firms manipulated processes within that same system.

It changes the atmosphere.

It raises questions about fairness, access, and the unseen forces shaping opportunities. It tightens scrutiny. It forces both investors and entrepreneurs to look closer — at governance, at compliance, at the silent details that determine who wins contracts and who doesn’t.

For PwC, the consequences are immediate. The debarment means exclusion from World Bank-financed projects and operations for nearly two years. In a region where such projects represent significant consulting revenue, the impact is both financial and reputational.

Yet, the story does not end in exclusion. As part of a settlement, the firm admitted misconduct and agreed to corrective measures — internal investigations, disciplinary actions, severing ties with implicated subconsultants, and strengthening compliance systems. The reduced length of the ban reflects that cooperation.

Still, accountability, once questioned, is not easily restored. It must be rebuilt, slowly, deliberately, and under watchful eyes.

What this moment ultimately reveals is something deeper than one firm’s misstep. It exposes the fragile architecture of trust that underpins development work in Africa. It shows how easily influence can tilt systems designed to be impartial. And it reminds us that integrity is not a static badge — it is a continuous practice.

In the end, the real story is not about PwC or the World Bank alone. It is about the evolving standards of doing business in emerging markets. It is about a continent demanding more transparency, more fairness, and more accountability from those who shape its future.

Because in a world where infrastructure projects promise light, growth, and progress, the processes behind them must be just as clean as the energy they aim to deliver.

When Olajumoke Adenowo stepped into Flutterwave’s boardroom in February 2024, few would have predicted that an architect would become an anchor in a fintech powerhouse. Known globally as “Africa’s Starchitect,” Adenowo had spent over three decades reshaping skylines and cultural narratives through architecture. Yet she brought that same structural vision, precision, and foresight to the chaotic, fast-moving world of payments technology.

Her appointment as Flutterwave’s first independent non-executive board member was unconventional — a bold statement that innovation thrives at the intersection of diverse perspectives. “I believe that Africa must evolve its own solutions. Flutterwave is tangible proof of this, with innovation that addresses Africa’s unique challenges,” Adenowo had remarked, signaling a mindset that combined African ingenuity with global relevance.

Over her more than two-year tenure, Adenowo’s fingerprints could be traced across Flutterwave’s strategic moves. Under her guidance, the company expanded its reach into Europe and the Middle East, forged partnerships with East Asian businesses, and unlocked revenue channels that contributed to processing nearly $1 billion in transactions. Her architectural eye for design translated into an ability to see systemic patterns — mapping opportunities, anticipating obstacles, and structuring frameworks that allowed Flutterwave to grow without losing its African identity.

Beyond boardroom metrics, Adenowo’s presence symbolized a convergence of disciplines and cultures. In architecture, she is renowned for weaving Africa’s heritage into contemporary forms, a philosophy captured in her acclaimed book Neo Heritage: Defining Contemporary African Architecture. In fintech, she applied the same principle: local knowledge paired with global standards. It was no coincidence that just months before her departure, she was celebrated as Africa’s sole representative in the Edelman Longevity Labs’ Power of 55 list — a nod to influence that transcends sectors.

Her exit, announced on LinkedIn, was marked by grace and reflection. Adenowo described her board service as a privilege, highlighting the opportunity to contribute to a company that embodies Africa’s capacity to innovate. While the precise reasons for her departure remain private, her legacy is tangible. Flutterwave continues to navigate transformative moves, including the acquisition of Nigerian open banking startup Mono in a deal valued between $25 million and $40 million, and rumoured plans for a future public listing. The seat Adenowo vacated will be closely watched, a testament to the value she added to the board’s composition and perspective.

What makes Adenowo’s journey compelling is not only the accolades — Forbes Woman Africa Entrepreneur of the Year, US Congressional recognitions, and a place on the Forbes ’50 Over 50’ list — but her ability to translate expertise from one domain into another. Architecture taught her to balance aesthetics, functionality, and cultural resonance. In fintech, she balanced risk, opportunity, and vision. In both, she remained committed to shaping structures that endure.

As Flutterwave continues its evolution, Adenowo’s departure reminds the tech ecosystem that innovation is not linear. It is interdisciplinary, human-centered, and informed by experience. Her story encourages leaders to look beyond traditional pipelines, to value perspectives that might at first seem unexpected, and to embrace the artistry in building systems that serve people as much as they serve markets.

Jumoke Adenowo leaves Flutterwave’s board not as a figure stepping away from influence, but as a symbol of what happens when vision, expertise, and courage intersect — whether in concrete, steel, or digital transactions.

In Nigeria, innovation rarely begins in glass towers or venture-backed studios. It begins in small rooms with unstable electricity, in crowded cafés with borrowed Wi-Fi, and in the quiet persistence of founders trying to turn ideas into something real.

For years, those founders have faced the same invisible wall: access. Access to mentorship. Access to capital. Access to the networks that transform ideas into companies.

The iDICE Startup Bridge, a new initiative launched by Nigeria’s federal government, is an attempt to break that wall.

Built under the broader Investment in Digital and Creative Enterprises (iDICE) programme, the Startup Bridge introduces a structured pathway for early-stage founders across the country. It offers two tracks of support: grants of up to ₦10 million for idea-stage entrepreneurs and $100,000 equity investments for startups that have already built a minimum viable product and are ready to scale.

But the deeper story behind the programme is not just about money. It is about geography.

For decades, Nigeria’s startup ecosystem has revolved around a narrow corridor of opportunity — largely Lagos and, to a lesser extent, Abuja. Venture capital, accelerators, and investor networks clustered around these cities, leaving talented founders in other parts of the country with little visibility or support.

The iDICE Startup Bridge is trying to redraw that map.

Designed to reach all 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, the initiative represents one of the most ambitious early-stage startup programmes the Nigerian government has launched in recent years. By expanding the innovation pipeline beyond traditional tech hubs, the programme acknowledges a simple but powerful truth: talent is not limited by location, only by opportunity.

At the centre of the programme is Founders Lab, a 12-week capacity-building initiative that opened applications on March 16. Each cohort will support 125 aspiring entrepreneurs, guiding them through the critical early steps of building a company — validating an idea, refining a business model, and developing a workable MVP.

For many participants, this will be their first exposure to structured startup education.

Cindy Ezerioha, Head of Founders Lab at iDICE Startup Bridge, describes the programme as a bridge between possibility and proof. Her vision is simple: founders should leave the programme not with just ideas, but with validated business models and clearer pathways to investment.

Every year, 250 participants will pass through the programme’s capacity-building process. The top 100 founders who meet programme milestones will receive grants of up to ₦10 million to support product development or early venture launch.

But the Startup Bridge does not end there.

A second pathway, Growth Lab, will focus on startups that have already moved beyond the idea stage. These are companies with working products, early traction, and the potential to scale. Selected startups will receive $100,000 in equity investment, along with mentorship on governance, operations, and fundraising strategy.

Perhaps more importantly, the programme promises to connect founders directly to institutional investors — an element often missing from public entrepreneurship programmes.

The iDICE initiative itself launched in 2023 with $617.7 million in funding, backed by global development partners including the African Development Bank, Agence Française de Développement, and the Islamic Development Bank. The programme’s first startup investment came in late 2025 through Ventures Platform, one of Africa’s most active seed-stage venture capital firms.

Implementation of the Startup Bridge rests with the Bank of Industry, an institution that has long served as a backbone for enterprise financing in Nigeria. In its latest financial report, the bank revealed it had disbursed ₦636 billion to enterprises across multiple sectors, including ₦43 billion specifically to digital and creative industries.

Vice President Kashim Shettima, who chairs the iDICE Steering Committee, believes the programme could reshape early-stage entrepreneurship in the country by giving young innovators a real chance to build or scale businesses.

Still, the programme faces a crucial test. Early-stage founders do not only need funding — they need mentorship, networks, and consistent guidance. Whether iDICE can deliver that high-touch support at scale will determine whether the initiative becomes another policy experiment or a genuine engine of innovation.

Applications for the first Founders Lab cohort close on April 20, 2026, and will be evaluated through a merit-based process.

Somewhere in Nigeria today, a founder with a fragile prototype and a stubborn belief in their idea is likely filling out that application form. For them, the iDICE Startup Bridge is more than a government programme.

It is a chance — perhaps the first real one — to turn imagination into enterprise.

The African creator economy has always carried a certain optimism — a belief that the internet could give writers, designers, teachers, filmmakers, and storytellers the freedom to build livelihoods beyond traditional gatekeepers. Platforms rose to serve this dream, promising creators tools to sell knowledge, courses, communities, and digital products to audiences across borders.

But every growing industry eventually reaches a moment where idealism collides with ambition.

In Lagos this March, that collision played out in public.

The Landmark Event Centre was buzzing with excitement as The Moment 2026 unfolded between March 13 and March 15. Curated by Mainstack, the conference aimed to become the largest gathering of African creators — a space where thousands of digital entrepreneurs could share ideas, attend panels, and imagine the future of online creativity on the continent.

Then the billboards appeared.

Large banners bearing the Selar logo and taglines such as “Create with intention” and “Create what sells” were mounted prominently near the venue. For many attendees arriving for Mainstack’s event, the ads felt like an unexpected interruption — almost as if a rival had slipped into someone else’s celebration.

To some observers, it looked like a calculated ambush.

To Selar’s leadership, it was simply competition.

Selar CEO Douglas Kendyson, a former engineer at Paystack and Flutterwave, maintained that the placement had been cleared with venue operators beforehand. In his view, the uproar surrounding the banners said more about the hypersensitivity of the ecosystem than the act itself. “A little playful competition never hurts anyone,” Selar stated amid the backlash.

But Mainstack reportedly objected strongly, and the banners were removed soon after.

What might have remained a small marketing spat quickly escalated into something far more personal.

Part of the tension stems from the identities of the companies themselves. Founded in 2016, Selar built its reputation quietly and methodically. It became a dependable infrastructure layer for creators selling digital products — courses, e-books, tickets, memberships. Bootstrapped and pragmatic, the company now serves more than two million users and has processed over $26 million in payouts.

Selar’s philosophy has always leaned toward utility over spectacle: build tools that simply work.

Mainstack represents a different era of creator platforms.

Launched in 2022 by Ayobami Oyaleke and Olamide Akinola, the company positions itself less as a storefront and more as an operating system for the digital entrepreneur. Its polished design language, link-in-bio ecosystem, and lifestyle-driven branding resonate strongly with younger creators seeking not just functionality, but identity.

The friction between these philosophies reached a boiling point during The Moment 2026.

In a move that stunned observers, Mainstack announced Milton Tutu, Selar’s former Chief Marketing Officer, as its new CMO. Almost immediately afterward, coordinated posts began circulating on X with nearly identical messages declaring allegiance to Mainstack.

Kendyson responded with a fiery thread, accusing competitors of orchestrating a coordinated PR attack and revealing that Tutu had been fired prior to joining Mainstack. He also alleged ongoing misinformation campaigns aimed at damaging Selar’s reputation by questioning its fees, payouts, and product quality.

What started as billboards had evolved into a full-blown public feud.

Yet beneath the drama lies a deeper truth: the African creator economy is expanding rapidly, and the stakes are rising with it. Analysts estimate the sector could grow from roughly $5 billion in 2025 to nearly $30 billion by 2032. That growth has transformed platform competition from a quiet race for users into a high-visibility struggle for market leadership.

And Selar and Mainstack are no longer alone.

New entrants such as Nestuge and Leenkies are entering the ecosystem with fresh ideas and new positioning strategies. Leenkies founder Tayo Aina, responding to the controversy, offered a calmer perspective — describing his product as a universal link hub where creators can connect Selar, Mainstack, or any other platform.

For many creators, that neutrality is appealing. It suggests the future may not belong to a single dominant platform but to an interconnected ecosystem.

Meanwhile, The Moment 2026 itself continued despite the controversy. Over 4,000 creators attended panels across three stages, networking sessions buzzed with activity, and cultural figures — including the Ooni of Ife — lent symbolic support to the idea that African creators are custodians of cultural storytelling.

The conference achieved what it set out to do: capture the industry’s attention.

Ironically, the rivalry only amplified that attention.

In the end, the banner controversy may be remembered less for the ads themselves and more for what they revealed — that Africa’s creator economy is entering a new chapter, one where competition is sharper, ambitions are louder, and the battle for the loyalty of creators is only just beginning.

Chinese brain–computer interface startup Gestala has raised $21.6 million just two months after launching, positioning itself as a fast-rising contender in the global race to decode and interact with the human brain. Led by serial entrepreneur Phoenix Peng, the company is developing a non-invasive ultrasound-based BCI system designed to unlock new treatments for chronic pain, neurological disorders, and mental health conditions.

Phoenix Peng has spent much of his career building technology companies that live at the edges of possibility. Some entrepreneurs chase market trends; Peng prefers the frontier, the places where science, ambition, and uncertainty collide. That instinct has now carried him into one of the most ambitious fields in modern technology: brain–computer interfaces.

His latest venture, Gestala, has already drawn global attention. Just two months after launching, the Chinese startup secured $21.6 million (CN¥150 million) in funding, reaching a valuation estimated between $100 million and $200 million. The round, co-led by Guosheng Capital and Dalton Venture with participation from Tsing Song Capital, Gobi Ventures, Fourier Intelligence, Liepin, and Seas Capital, was heavily oversubscribed, with investor commitments exceeding $58 million.

The funding marks the largest early-stage investment in China’s brain–computer interface industry, a signal that investors believe the next breakthrough in human–machine interaction may come from unexpected places.

To understand why, one must look beyond Gestala itself and into Peng’s wider vision. He is also the force behind NeuroXess, another BCI company focused on implantable brain interfaces. With Gestala, however, he is pursuing something different, a system that communicates with the brain without surgery.

That distinction matters.
Visit technaija.com for more related tech articles.

For years, the most visible names in BCI development, including companies in the United States pushing implantable electrode systems, have relied on invasive procedures that require opening the skull to place tiny sensors directly in brain tissue. While these technologies hold promise, the medical risks and psychological barriers of brain surgery have slowed widespread adoption.

Peng believes the future may lie elsewhere.

Gestala is developing a non-invasive ultrasound-based brain–computer interface, using advanced phased-array ultrasound to interact with neural circuits. Unlike electrode implants that access limited regions of the brain, ultrasound can potentially reach deeper neural structures and influence larger areas simultaneously. In theory, it could both monitor brain activity and stimulate or suppress it with remarkable precision.

The approach places Gestala in a rapidly emerging category within the global BCI ecosystem, one that is gaining attention from investors and neuroscientists alike.

The company’s ambitions are not purely technological. They are deeply medical.

Gestala’s first research focus is chronic pain management, a condition affecting millions of people worldwide. Academic studies suggest ultrasound stimulation may significantly reduce pain levels by altering neural signaling in key brain regions. If successful, the technology could offer relief without long-term pharmaceutical dependence.

But Peng’s team is thinking much further ahead. Researchers at Gestala are exploring applications in depression, PTSD, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and stroke rehabilitation. Longer-term possibilities include interventions for Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and essential tremor, conditions that remain among the most difficult challenges in neuroscience.

The startup is currently studying six to eight potential medical indications, though most remain in early research phases rather than clinical trials.

Part of Gestala’s strategy relies on something less glamorous but equally powerful: speed. China’s integrated manufacturing ecosystem allows companies to move from prototype to production faster than many Western competitors. Peng plans to use the new funding to accelerate research and development, expand the team from 15 to about 35 employees by the end of the year, and build a dedicated manufacturing facility.

The company also aims to complete its first-generation prototype before year’s end, an aggressive timeline for a startup operating in one of technology’s most complex fields.

Beyond hardware, Gestala is building what it calls an “Ultrasound Brain Bank.” This large clinical dataset will collect neural signals to train artificial intelligence models capable of decoding brain activity. In the future, these datasets could support advanced neurological diagnostics or personalized treatments.

Despite growing geopolitical tensions between the United States and China, Peng remains optimistic about global collaboration in deep technology. He believes the future of neuroscience depends on combining the strengths of both ecosystems: America’s scientific talent and China’s clinical research capacity and manufacturing scale.

In Peng’s mind, brain–computer interfaces are not simply gadgets or futuristic experiments. They represent a new language, a way for humans to communicate with the brain itself.

And if Gestala succeeds, that language may soon begin to speak back.

Nigeria’s tech regulator, NITDA, is seeking 37 innovation hubs, one from each state and the FCT, for the fifth cohort of its iHatch Startup Incubation Programme. The initiative, supported by the Japan International Cooperation Agency, aims to strengthen Nigeria’s startup ecosystem beyond Lagos and Abuja by empowering local innovation hubs to nurture and prepare startups for growth and investment.

On any given afternoon in Nigeria, ideas are being born in places far from the towering tech offices of Lagos or the policy corridors of Abuja. In quiet university labs in Makurdi, in modest co-working spaces in Osogbo, inside classrooms converted into coding studios in Yola, young founders sketch solutions to problems only they understand deeply. Yet for many of them, the dream of building a startup strong enough to attract funding often collapses not because the idea is weak, but because the ecosystem around them is fragile.

This quiet imbalance is something the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has been trying to confront. Through its subsidiary, the Office for Nigerian Digital Innovation (ONDI), the agency has opened applications for the fifth cohort of the iHatch Startup Incubation Programme, an initiative that aims to do something unusual: build the ecosystem first, before focusing on the startups themselves.

For the new cohort, the programme is searching for 37 innovation hubs, one from each of Nigeria’s 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, to serve as local implementation partners. These hubs will act as state-level managers of the incubation programme, guiding startups within their communities through structured development pathways.

At the centre of this approach is Victoria Fabunmi, the National Coordinator of ONDI, whose vision for iHatch goes beyond the usual playbook of startup accelerators. While many programmes compete to attract promising founders into major cities, Fabunmi’s thinking moves in the opposite direction. If innovation is happening everywhere, then support systems should exist everywhere too.

Nigeria’s startup ecosystem has grown rapidly over the past decade, producing unicorns and attracting global venture capital. But the growth has been uneven. The gravitational pull of Lagos and Abuja means that most funding, mentorship networks, and incubators remain concentrated in those cities. Founders outside these hubs often operate in isolation, navigating the complex journey of building a startup without the benefit of structured support.

The iHatch programme attempts to correct that imbalance by strengthening the very institutions that support founders. Instead of selecting startups directly, it selects innovation hubs that already understand their local environments. Once selected, each hub will recruit and manage about five startups, guiding them through an incubation process designed to improve their readiness for growth, partnerships, and investment.

The approach reflects a deeper understanding of ecosystems. Startups rarely succeed alone; they flourish when surrounded by mentors, infrastructure, community, and access to opportunities. By investing in hubs, NITDA hopes to create a distributed support system capable of nurturing founders in every corner of the country.

The initiative is being implemented in partnership with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), a collaboration that underscores the international interest in Nigeria’s growing digital economy. Across Africa, startup ecosystems have been expanding rapidly. In 2025 alone, African startups raised $3.42 billion, signaling a sustained appetite from global investors for innovation on the continent.

Yet funding headlines often hide a deeper reality: many talented founders never reach the stage where investors can discover them. Without mentorship, incubation, and structured development programmes, promising startups struggle to mature into investable businesses.

This is precisely the gap iHatch aims to bridge.
Visit technaija.com for more related tech articles.

Selected hubs will receive operational support, resources, and access to structured tools designed to standardize incubation quality across Nigeria. While specific grant amounts have not been disclosed, high-performing hubs may receive rewards based on their impact during the programme.

But the real prize is not financial.

According to Fabunmi, the programme’s deeper goal is to cultivate ecosystem leaders, people committed to strengthening local startup communities and ensuring that founders in smaller cities have the same opportunities as those in Nigeria’s established tech clusters.

Eligible hubs must have operated for at least one year and demonstrate active engagement within their local innovation communities. They must also possess the infrastructure needed to host incubation activities. Applications for the fifth cohort close on March 16, marking another step in Nigeria’s ongoing effort to decentralize innovation.

If successful, iHatch could quietly reshape Nigeria’s technology landscape. Instead of innovation flowing from a few dominant cities, it may begin to emerge from dozens of communities simultaneously, each powered by local hubs that understand their founders’ realities.

In a country of immense talent and complex challenges, the future of innovation may not belong to one city alone. It may belong to the entire map.

French health insurance startup Alan has reached a €5 billion valuation following a €100 million funding round led by Index Ventures. But behind the valuation lies a deeper story about founders who believed health insurance could feel human again, and built a company that merges technology, care, and trust into one digital experience.

In most people’s lives, health insurance enters quietly and awkwardly, as paperwork, bureaucracy, and a series of forms that feel designed more for institutions than for human beings. For Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve, that disconnect was impossible to ignore.

Long before Alan became one of Europe’s most valuable health tech companies, Samuelian-Werve was fascinated by how technology could reshape systems people had learned to tolerate rather than love. Insurance, particularly in Europe, felt frozen in time, complicated, slow, and emotionally distant from the people it was supposed to serve.

So in 2016, alongside his co-founder Charles Gorintin, he launched Alan, not simply as another insurance company, but as a digital-first rethink of healthcare coverage itself.

Nearly a decade later, that experiment has grown into a €5 billion company.
Visit technaija.com for more related articles.

Alan’s latest valuation follows a €100 million funding round led by Index Ventures, with participation from Greenoaks, Kaaf, and SH, as well as high-profile backers including Shopify founder Tobi Lütke and French football star Antoine Griezmann. The new valuation marks a rise from €4.5 billion in 2024, a notable milestone at a time when many European unicorns are losing their billion-dollar status amid tighter capital markets.

Yet the funding story is only part of the journey.

Today, Alan serves more than one million people, including employees, freelancers, and retirees. Its workforce has grown to around 740 employees, building a platform that blends traditional insurance coverage with digital wellness services.

The Alan app has become the centre of this experience. Users can manage reimbursements, consult doctors online, track health habits, and access preventive care tools, all within a single interface designed to remove friction from healthcare.

For Samuelian-Werve, technology was never meant to replace care; it was meant to remove the barriers around it.

That philosophy has quietly guided the company’s growth.

Alan made history early in its life when it became the first new independent health insurance company licensed in France since the 1980s, a remarkable feat in a highly regulated sector. Since then, the startup has expanded beyond its home country into Belgium and Spain, signing major corporate clients such as HP and Volkswagen.

More recently, Alan entered Canada, securing licences across all provinces and beginning commercial operations there. The move signals the company’s ambition to build a global health platform rather than a purely European insurer.

Financially, the company is scaling quickly.

Alan reported €785 million in annual recurring revenue in 2025, representing a 53% increase compared with the end of 2024.

While the company has historically posted losses, about $61 million in 2023 and $56 million in 2024, it says those losses are shrinking rapidly relative to revenue, bringing the business closer to operational break-even.

The company has already reached operational profitability in France, its largest market.

But Samuelian-Werve isn’t rushing to declare victory. Instead of focusing purely on profits, Alan is prioritizing product improvements, international expansion, and deeper investments in technology and artificial intelligence.

That focus is not accidental.

The CEO is also a co-founding advisor and board member at Mistral AI, one of France’s fastest-rising artificial intelligence companies. The overlap reflects his belief that AI could transform healthcare experiences, from faster claims processing to personalized wellness guidance.

Investors appear comfortable with Alan’s strategy. The company is targeting $1.16 billion in annual recurring revenue by 2026, even if that means delaying full profitability in the short term.

For many observers, Alan represents something larger than a successful startup.

It reflects a generational shift in how Europeans expect healthcare services to work, transparent pricing, simple digital tools, and preventative wellness rather than reactive bureaucracy.

Samuelian-Werve once described the company’s mission as building “a healthcare companion for life.” That phrase reveals something essential about Alan’s trajectory: it isn’t trying to reinvent insurance overnight. Instead, it is slowly transforming the relationship people have with it.

And in a sector that rarely inspires loyalty or trust, that may prove to be its most disruptive innovation.

At €5 billion, Alan is no longer just a startup challenging an industry. It is becoming a blueprint for what the next era of healthcare infrastructure might look like: digital, human-centered, and quietly ambitious.

German industrial giant Würth will close its Kenyan operations in May 2026 after nearly three decades in the market. The decision reflects a broader restructuring within the Würth Group and highlights the increasing pressure multinational suppliers face in price-sensitive African markets.

For nearly three decades, Würth’s presence in Kenya quietly powered the work behind the scenes. Its products were rarely seen by ordinary consumers, yet they were everywhere, inside vehicle assembly plants, auto repair workshops, construction sites, and manufacturing floors where bolts, fasteners, and precision tools held entire industries together.

Now that the chapter is coming to an end.
Visit technaija.com for more related tech articles.

Wuerth Kenya Ltd, the Nairobi-based subsidiary of the German industrial supplies giant Würth Group, has announced that it will shut down operations at the end of May 2026. The decision closes a 29-year run in the East African market, marking the end of a relationship that began in the late 1990s when Kenya’s industrial sector was still expanding, and global suppliers were eager to plant roots across Africa.

The announcement came through a notice dated March 10, signed by Managing Director John Anderson and sent to customers across the company’s network. In the message, the firm confirmed that operations will continue normally until the end of May 2026 while it winds down activities and settles outstanding commitments with partners and clients.

The explanation was brief but telling: the move forms part of a broader strategic restructuring of the Würth Group’s global footprint.

For many businesses operating in Kenya’s automotive and manufacturing sectors, the news landed with quiet significance. Würth’s catalogue of industrial fastening and assembly solutions had long served mechanics, engineers, contractors, and vehicle assemblers. Its reputation was built not on flashy branding but on precision, the idea that a single high-quality bolt or fastening system could determine the durability of an entire machine.

That philosophy traces back to the story of the company itself.

The Würth Group began in post-war Germany when Adolf Würth started selling screws from the trunk of a car in 1945. His son Reinhold Würth later transformed the modest venture into one of the world’s largest suppliers of assembly and fastening materials, building a business that would eventually span more than 80 countries.

But global reach does not always guarantee permanence in every market.

Kenya’s industrial supplies sector has evolved dramatically over the past decade. Rising operating costs, currency volatility, and shifting procurement habits have reshaped the landscape. While multinational brands once dominated specialised supply chains, local distributors and regional importers have increasingly filled the gap with cheaper alternatives.

In particular, lower-cost imports from Asian manufacturing hubs, especially China, have flooded the market with affordable industrial components. In a country where many garages, construction firms, and assembly plants operate on tight margins, price often outweighs brand prestige.

This shift has quietly reshaped procurement across industries.

Vehicle assemblers such as Kenya Vehicle Manufacturers, Mobius, BasiGo, and Roam have gradually built supply relationships with Chinese and Indian manufacturers capable of offering competitive pricing and flexible supply volumes. The result is a market where premium suppliers must justify higher costs in an environment that increasingly rewards affordability.

For companies like Würth, whose global reputation rests on premium engineering standards, competing in such a price-sensitive environment has become progressively difficult.

The company has not disclosed how many employees will be affected by the closure of its Nairobi operation, though the office historically served a regional network of automotive, engineering, and construction clients.

Yet Würth’s departure is not occurring in isolation.

In recent years, several multinational companies have reassessed their footprint in smaller African markets. Firms such as CMC Motors, GlaxoSmithKline, and Procter & Gamble have either scaled back operations or exited certain segments as global strategies shift toward consolidation and higher-growth markets.

For Kenya, the story is complex. On one hand, multinational exits raise concerns about jobs and investment stability. On the other hand, they reveal the growing competitiveness of local and regional supply ecosystems that have matured enough to challenge global incumbents.

Würth’s departure, therefore, represents more than the closing of a branch office. It marks a turning point in how industrial supply chains across East Africa are evolving, from brand-driven procurement toward cost-efficient sourcing models shaped by emerging global trade dynamics.

And somewhere in a Nairobi workshop, a mechanic tightening a bolt may not notice the difference immediately.

But the quiet withdrawal of a company that spent nearly three decades supporting the region’s industrial backbone reminds us that markets change, and even giants sometimes step aside when the ground beneath them shifts.

South African startup Yazi has secured its first institutional funding round at a $1.6 million valuation, marking a milestone for the WhatsApp-based research platform. Built to transform how organisations gather insights, Yazi is using AI-driven conversations on the world’s most popular messaging platform to redefine market research across Africa and beyond.

There are moments when technology does not need to invent new habits; it simply needs to meet people where they already are.

For Timothy Treagus, that realization came from observing something deceptively ordinary: the quiet dominance of WhatsApp in everyday life. In South Africa, it is where families speak, businesses communicate, communities organise, and news travels faster than television. Across Europe and the United Kingdom, the story is much the same. The app has become less of a tool and more of a social infrastructure.

Yet one major industry had largely ignored it, market research.
Visit technaija.com for more related tech articles.

Treagus and his co-founder, Mzwandile Sotsaka, saw the gap clearly. Traditional research methods were still tethered to outdated channels: lengthy email surveys, app downloads people rarely completed, and platforms that assumed high-speed broadband access. These tools worked in boardrooms but often failed in the real world, particularly in emerging markets where smartphones are common but digital patience is short.

So in 2022, they built Yazi.

Instead of forcing participants into unfamiliar platforms, Yazi conducts research conversations directly through WhatsApp. The system uses artificial intelligence to moderate interviews, ask follow-up questions, and gather deeper insights in real time, mimicking the curiosity and probing instincts of a skilled human researcher.

What began as an experiment quickly found traction.

Now, the company has closed its first undisclosed institutional funding round, valuing the startup at R30 million (about $1.6 million) before the investment. The round was led by 3 Capital Ventures, an early-stage venture firm spun out of the investment management powerhouse Allan Gray.

For Yazi, the funding represents something larger than capital. It is validation of a thesis: that the future of research will not happen inside specialised survey tools, but inside the digital spaces people already trust.

Treagus puts it simply. The company is not “entering” global markets in the traditional sense. Those markets are finding them.

Yazi currently ranks at the top of global search results for WhatsApp-based research tools, and a significant portion of inbound leads now comes from AI-powered search platforms where researchers ask tools like ChatGPT or Gemini for solutions.

Increasingly, the answer is Yazi.

The platform operates across more than 15 countries and allows organisations to run surveys, diary studies, panel research, and AI-moderated interviews entirely through WhatsApp. Participants simply respond as if they are chatting with a contact on their phone. Behind the scenes, the AI listens, probes deeper, and extracts themes and insights.

For researchers, what once required weeks can now happen in days.

Multi-day diary studies, often used to understand habits and behaviours, can be deployed automatically. Participants record experiences through voice notes, text, or prompts. The system transcribes everything, identifies patterns, and generates presentation-ready insights.

But perhaps Yazi’s most powerful advantage lies in its reach.

The platform has access to a panel of 1.8 million pre-qualified participants spanning multiple demographics and geographies. This scale allows organisations to capture perspectives that traditional research has historically missed, especially voices from communities that rarely participate in conventional surveys.

Sotsaka believes this is the heart of the platform’s success. When research meets people in familiar spaces, participation becomes natural rather than forced.

The company’s growth numbers reflect that shift. Yazi reports revenue growth of 2.5x over the past financial year, with recent quarterly momentum reaching 64% month-on-month. More than 65 percent of its revenue now comes from outside South Africa, signalling strong international demand.

Major organisations have already taken notice. South African brands such as Old Mutual, Pick n Pay, Discovery, and Capitec are among its clients, along with the global research firm Ipsos. Ipsos recently signed a year-long tracking contract with the platform, while Old Mutual has launched a recurring quarterly research program.

With its new funding, Yazi plans to expand product capabilities, including automated voice interviews through WhatsApp. The company will also grow its research participant network across Africa while supporting international expansion as demand from European and UK agencies increases.

Yet the deeper story behind Yazi is not about artificial intelligence or venture capital. It is about a quiet shift in how knowledge itself is gathered.

For decades, research asked people to come to it, to open emails, download apps, and fill out rigid forms.

Yazi reverses that relationship.

It walks into the conversation people are already having.

And in doing so, it may have found the simplest innovation of all: listening where the world is already speaking.

In 2025, Nigeria’s Co-Creation Hub (CcHUB) supported 3,312 ventures across 49 African countries with $4.18 million in grants and subgrants, while training over 25,000 individuals. But the story behind those numbers is not simply about funding; it is about building the invisible infrastructure that allows African innovation to survive, grow, and eventually transform industries.

On a warm Lagos afternoon more than a decade ago, a simple idea began taking shape: what if African innovators had a place to experiment, collaborate, and build technology that actually solved the continent’s problems? That question eventually became Co-Creation Hub (CcHUB), Nigeria’s first innovation centre and technology hub.

Back then, Africa’s tech ecosystem was still searching for its identity. Startups were rare, venture capital was scarce, and the idea of building global products from African cities was often met with scepticism. But CcHUB was not built for applause. It was built as a quiet laboratory for possibility.

Fast forward to 2025, and the scale of that vision is now clearer. According to its latest impact report, CcHUB deployed $4.18 million in grants and subgrants, supporting 3,312 ventures across 49 African countries. At the same time, the organisation trained more than 25,000 individuals, equipping a new generation of innovators with the skills to turn ideas into functioning solutions.

Yet the numbers only tell part of the story.

Behind every grant is often a founder navigating the fragile early days of a startup, a phase where funding gaps, uncertain markets, and limited distribution networks can quietly end promising innovations before they ever reach users. CcHUB has positioned itself as the bridge across that fragile gap.

The organisation’s strategy now focuses on three sectors where technology can drive widespread impact: education, healthcare, and the creative economy. These sectors, according to CcHUB’s leadership, hold the power to shape the future of African productivity and opportunity.

In education, the hub’s work revolves around strengthening learning outcomes through digital tools and innovation. In 2025, CcHUB supported the launch of 15 new edtech products while accelerating 27 education technology startups across Nigeria and Kenya through its fellowship programs. The goal is simple but ambitious: to improve teaching, learning, and assessment through technology designed specifically for African classrooms.

Healthcare presents an even more complex challenge. Across many African countries, digital infrastructure within public health systems remains limited, making it difficult for innovative health startups to deploy their solutions at scale. To address this, CcHUB partnered with global organisations to create sandbox environments where startups could test products directly within real health system infrastructure. Within nine months, that effort produced six interoperable digital health products, demonstrating how collaboration between startups and public institutions can accelerate innovation.

Then there is the creative economy, a sector often underestimated in conversations about technology. Yet across Sub-Saharan Africa, creative industries already account for 8.2% of all jobs, and projections suggest the region could contribute 10% of global creative goods exports worth $200 billion by 2030. In 2025 alone, CcHUB accelerated 16 creative industry cohorts spanning fashion, music, film, design, and digital media, enabling 640 women entrepreneurs to launch and scale ventures.

But perhaps CcHUB’s most important work happens behind the scenes. Beyond funding startups, the organisation focuses heavily on building the institutional relationships that allow innovation to reach real users. This includes partnerships with governments, universities, research institutions, and private-sector organisations.

Startups often struggle not just because of a lack of capital, but because they cannot access distribution networks, regulatory pathways, or industry partners. CcHUB works to connect those dots, helping founders refine products, test solutions within public systems, and gain credibility with investors.

In 2025, the organisation collaborated with 70 universities and research institutions across Nigeria, Kenya, and Namibia, helping bridge the long-standing gap between academic research and commercial products. The aim is to ensure that promising research does not remain buried in academic journals but evolves into usable technologies and viable businesses.

The success of this ecosystem-building approach is reflected in the startups themselves. According to the impact report, every dollar deployed by CcHUB attracted roughly five dollars in additional external investment. Some companies emerging from their programs have gone on to secure major partnerships and expand into multiple African markets, reaching millions of users.

Collectively, ventures within CcHUB’s ecosystem reached 1.89 million people in 2025, a reminder that when the infrastructure around innovation works, its effects ripple far beyond individual founders.

For CcHUB, the mission has never been just about creating startups. It has always been about creating the conditions that allow African ideas to thrive.

And in a continent where innovation often struggles against structural barriers, that quiet work of building ecosystems may prove to be its most powerful contribution yet.

South African fintech startup Orca Fraud has raised $2.35 million in an oversubscribed seed round to expand its fraud intelligence systems across Africa. Led by CEO Thalia Pillay, the company is building technology tailored to Africa’s unique financial landscape, where rapid digital payments growth has created new opportunities for fraud networks.

In the quiet, invisible layer beneath Africa’s booming digital economy, a battle is unfolding. It isn’t fought with headlines or public announcements. It happens in milliseconds, between a payment request and the moment money disappears into a maze of digital pathways.

Thalia Pillay has spent much of her career studying that moment.
Visit technaija.com for more related articles

Before founding Orca Fraud, she saw how quickly financial systems were evolving across the continent. Mobile money was exploding. Cross-border transfers were becoming easier. Crypto wallets, stablecoins, and peer-to-peer payment platforms were weaving themselves into everyday life. Africa was building one of the most dynamic digital finance ecosystems in the world.

But speed, she realized, was both a blessing and a vulnerability.

When payments move instantly, criminals move instantly too.

That realization became the foundation for Orca Fraud, the South African fintech startup Pillay co-founded with CTO Carla Wilby. Their idea was not simply to build another fraud detection tool, but to create intelligence systems designed specifically for the complexities of African financial markets.

Now, that vision has gained fresh momentum.

Orca Fraud has raised $2.35 million in an oversubscribed seed round, led by venture firm Norrsken22, with participation from OneDayYes, Enza Capital, and CV VC Africa. The funding comes at a time when startup investment across Africa has slowed, making the round particularly notable. It also highlights another reality in venture capital: startups led by all-female founding teams often receive a fraction of available funding. Orca’s success, in that context, stands out.

The company had previously raised a modest but oversubscribed $55,000 pre-seed round in 2024. In just two years, Orca has grown from an emerging idea into a platform operating across more than 70 countries, including Kenya, Ghana, Uganda, Zambia, and Guinea.

Yet Pillay’s mission goes far beyond geographic expansion.

The deeper challenge Orca is tackling lies in how fraud itself is evolving. Across Africa, the rapid growth of digital financial services has created fertile ground for sophisticated fraud networks. Instant payment systems allow criminals to move stolen funds across multiple platforms before banks can react. Meanwhile, the fragmentation of financial rails, from mobile money to crypto platforms, makes detection even more complex.

The scale of the threat is becoming impossible to ignore. In 2025, Africa ranked among the regions most exposed to financial fraud. Countries like Nigeria, Tanzania, and South Africa reported significant spikes in fraudulent activity. A major INTERPOL operation conducted between December 2025 and January 2026 resulted in 651 arrests across 16 African countries and uncovered scams linked to more than $45 million in losses.

For financial institutions, the message is clear: fraud is no longer an occasional problem. It is a structural risk.

Pillay believes many existing fraud detection tools fail to address that reality because they were built for Western markets. Platforms designed around credit cards and centralized banking systems often struggle in Africa’s hybrid financial environment, where informal economies, mobile wallets, and fragmented regulations shape how money moves.

That gap is where Orca Fraud positions itself.

The company builds fraud intelligence tools that analyze payment behavior across different financial rails while adapting to the economic and cultural contexts of individual markets. According to CTO Carla Wilby, African payment data is often fragmented and difficult to interpret. Western training datasets simply do not capture the nuances of how financial activity unfolds across African economies.

In practical terms, Orca’s systems aim to detect suspicious patterns earlier, before funds vanish into networks that make recovery nearly impossible.

The new funding will allow the company to expand its engineering capabilities, strengthen its fraud monitoring infrastructure, and onboard more banks and fintech clients across Africa.

Profitability is not yet the company’s priority. Growth is.

Because the reality Pillay sees is stark: as Africa’s digital economy expands, fraud will scale with it unless the continent builds its own defenses.

In that sense, Orca Fraud is not just protecting financial institutions. It is helping safeguard trust, the invisible currency that every digital economy depends on.

And in Africa’s rapidly evolving financial future, trust may prove to be the most valuable asset of all.

After two years of sweeping financial reforms, Nigeria has officially exited the FATF grey list, marking a turning point for the country’s fintech ecosystem. With reputational barriers easing, the Central Bank of Nigeria now signals a bigger ambition: positioning the country as a rule-setter for fintech regulation, fraud defense, and digital payment infrastructure across Africa.

For years, Nigerian fintech founders carried an invisible burden that rarely appeared on balance sheets. It wasn’t the cost of servers, developers, or regulatory filings. It was the quiet hesitation on the other side of an international call, the pause when a global partner noticed the word Nigeria in a company profile.

In the world of financial technology, trust travels faster than code. And for many Nigerian startups trying to scale globally, the country’s placement on the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) grey list became a reputational toll booth. International banks imposed stricter checks. Payment partners demanded more documentation. Investors asked harder questions.

The price of being Nigerian in fintech was often paid in delays, friction, and lost opportunities.

That chapter, at least officially, has now closed.
Visit technaija.com for more related tech articles.

On October 24, 2025, during the FATF plenary in Paris, Nigeria was formally removed from the grey list after completing a comprehensive 19-point reform programme aimed at strengthening anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing frameworks. The milestone followed nearly two years of coordinated work across government agencies, financial institutions, and regulatory bodies.

At the centre of that effort stood the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU), which upgraded its intelligence infrastructure, strengthened inter-agency data sharing, and deepened collaboration with the Inter-Governmental Action Group against Money Laundering in West Africa.

By the time the decision was reached, Nigeria had achieved Compliant or Largely Compliant status on 37 of the 40 FATF recommendations, a dramatic improvement in global financial governance standing.

But the story does not end with an exit.

If anything, that moment marks the beginning of a more ambitious chapter.

In February 2026, the Central Bank of Nigeria released its Fintech Policy Insight Report, a document that reads less like a victory lap and more like a blueprint for what comes next. Rather than simply celebrating regulatory success, the report reframes Nigeria’s fintech narrative around infrastructure, credibility, and continental leadership.

One of its more striking arguments challenges a long-standing assumption. According to the report, a significant share of digital financial crimes historically attributed to Nigeria are orchestrated by cross-border actors who use the country as a proxy rather than as the true origin of fraud.

The distinction matters. It does not deny the problem of financial crime, but it shifts the conversation toward evidence rather than stereotype, a subtle but important step in rebuilding international confidence.

More importantly, Nigeria’s digital financial ecosystem is already operating at a scale that many countries are only beginning to imagine.

In 2024 alone, the NIBSS Instant Payment platform processed nearly 11 billion transactions, more than double the roughly five billion transactions recorded just two years earlier. That volume places Nigeria among the world’s most active real-time payment ecosystems, built on infrastructure first launched in 2011, years before similar systems gained traction in several advanced economies.

Behind that speed lies an expanding architecture of financial defence.

Systems like the Central Industry Fraud Desk, known internally as HAWK, coordinate rapid responses to emerging fraud threats across banks and fintech companies. The Bank Verification Number (BVN) watchlist allows institutions to monitor suspicious accounts collectively, while the Persons of Interest Portal provides enhanced visibility into potentially risky actors.

Meanwhile, Project Stallion, the Central Bank’s cybersecurity operations initiative, is nearing completion, promising an even stronger shield around Nigeria’s growing digital economy.

The vision emerging from these efforts is collaborative rather than competitive. The Central Bank is proposing a Shared Fraud Defence Framework, where financial institutions exchange intelligence in near real time and operate from a single repository of fraudulent accounts. Alongside this, a proposed Fintech Trust and Safety Charter would establish baseline standards for data protection, responsible artificial intelligence use, and consumer protection.

The philosophy echoes the same thinking that made Nigeria’s Bank Verification Number system successful: build the infrastructure once, allow the entire industry to share it, and raise the operational floor for everyone.

For Nigerian fintech founders who once struggled under the weight of reputational suspicion, this shift could redefine their global positioning. Exiting the grey list removes enhanced due diligence requirements from international banking partners and reduces compliance barriers for cross-border transactions.

In simpler terms, Nigerian startups can now spend less time explaining themselves and more time building.

And perhaps that is the deeper story hidden beneath the regulatory milestone.

Nigeria is no longer just trying to prove that its financial system is safe.

It is beginning to argue that its systems, infrastructure, and regulatory innovations might help shape how fintech works across Africa.

South African fintech startup NjiaPay has raised $2.1 million in seed funding to expand its payment routing infrastructure across Africa. Founded by entrepreneurs who first built the technology to solve their own payment struggles at Talk360, the company is now helping businesses unify fragmented payment systems and improve transaction success rates across multiple markets.

In Africa’s digital economy, the hardest part of selling something online often isn’t the product. It’s the payment.

Jonatan Allback learned that lesson the hard way. Years before NjiaPay existed, he was building Talk360, an international calling app designed to connect people across continents. The product worked. Users came. But the real problem surfaced when those users tried to pay.

Different countries demanded different payment methods. Some preferred cards, others mobile money. Some transactions mysteriously failed even when customers had funds. The deeper Allback and his co-founder, Roderick Simons, went into Africa’s payment landscape, the more chaotic it seemed: dozens of providers, fragmented systems, conflicting integrations, and finance teams drowning in reconciliation spreadsheets.

At some point, they stopped asking why payments were failing and instead asked: what if merchants didn’t have to manage all of this themselves?
Visit technaija.com for more related tech articles.

The answer slowly became NjiaPay.

Now the South African startup has raised $2.1 million in seed funding, led by European investor Newion, to scale that solution across more African markets. The investment follows an earlier $1 million raise in January 2025, signalling growing investor confidence in infrastructure companies tackling Africa’s most stubborn digital bottlenecks.

For Allback, this moment is less about capital and more about validation. The technology behind NjiaPay wasn’t born in a lab or a venture studio; it came from frustration. Talk360 had built an internal tool to unify its growing network of payment providers, a quiet piece of software that connected multiple gateways, routed transactions intelligently, and surfaced all payment data into a single dashboard.

What began as an internal fix soon revealed something bigger: nearly every online business operating across Africa faced the same problem.

NjiaPay was spun out in 2024 to address that gap.

At its core, the platform acts like an invisible traffic controller for digital payments. Through a single integration, merchants can connect to multiple payment providers and methods, cards, mobile money, and bank transfers, without building separate systems for each. The software automatically routes transactions through whichever provider is most likely to succeed, retries payments when necessary, blocks suspicious activity, and then presents the entire flow in a unified dashboard.

For finance teams, that means fewer headaches. For customers, it means fewer failed payments.

The results were immediate for Talk360 itself. After adopting the system, the company reduced six separate payment integrations down to one and reported a 25% increase in checkout conversion rates in key markets. For a digital business, that difference isn’t just technical; it translates directly into revenue.

NjiaPay is entering the market at a moment when African fintech investment is evolving. For years, consumer-facing apps dominated the headlines: wallets, neobanks, lending platforms. But investors are increasingly turning their attention to infrastructure, the invisible layers that power digital commerce behind the scenes.

South Africa sits at the centre of that shift. The country’s fintech sector attracted roughly 70% of national startup funding in 2024, and the momentum has carried into 2025. Within that ecosystem, companies like NjiaPay are positioning themselves not as consumer brands but as critical plumbing for the digital economy.

And there is plenty of plumbing to fix.

Many African companies rely on multiple payment providers simply to reach their customers. That diversity helps boost transaction success but introduces operational chaos. Each provider comes with its own integration, reporting system, and settlement timeline. As companies expand into new markets, the complexity multiplies.

NjiaPay’s ambition is to make that complexity disappear.

The company is already working with high-growth businesses such as Talk360, Anytime Fitness, and Melon Mobile. With the new funding, it plans to expand its reach across additional African markets and introduce new tools like Card Account Updater, which automatically refreshes stored card details to prevent subscription payment failures.

Investors see the opportunity clearly. Payments across Africa may be evolving quickly, but they remain fragmented, creating space for platforms that bring order.

For Allback and Simons, the journey feels strangely circular. What began as a survival tool for their own startup has grown into a product designed to support thousands of others navigating the same maze.

Sometimes the most powerful innovations don’t come from trying to change the world.

Sometimes they begin with a founder simply trying to fix a problem that refused to go away.

NjiaPay is proof of that idea, a quiet infrastructure company born from frustration, now building the connective tissue for Africa’s next generation of digital businesses.

As billions continue to flow into artificial intelligence startups, venture capitalists are quietly changing what they are willing to fund. Generic AI SaaS products, thin automation layers, and simple integrations are quickly losing investor interest. Today’s investors are shifting their attention toward companies that own real workflows, proprietary data, and deep expertise, a sign that the AI gold rush is entering a more mature and demanding phase.

There was a moment not long ago when simply attaching the letters “AI” to a product felt like unlocking a door to venture capital. Startups appeared overnight, promising to automate workflows, analyze data, summarize meetings, manage projects, or organize teams, all powered by artificial intelligence.

For a while, investors welcomed the excitement. Money flowed quickly, headlines followed, and founders rushed to position their products as part of the next great technological shift.

But something has changed.
Visit technaija.com for more related tech articles.

Behind the scenes, venture capitalists are becoming more selective. The conversations happening inside investment firms now sound less like hype and more like quiet recalibration. Investors are still pouring billions into artificial intelligence, but they are no longer impressed by every AI SaaS pitch that crosses their desk.

Aaron Holiday, managing partner at venture capital firm 645 Ventures, has seen the shift clearly. In his view, the categories attracting serious interest today are startups building AI-native infrastructure, vertical software powered by proprietary datasets, and systems designed to take action rather than simply present information.

The difference is subtle but powerful. Investors are no longer searching for tools that just assist humans. They are looking for systems that can actually execute work.

And that distinction is reshaping the startup landscape.

Holiday points out that some once-popular startup ideas are now considered almost dull in venture circles: thin workflow layers, surface-level analytics dashboards, generic horizontal tools, and lightweight product management platforms. In an era where AI agents can perform many of those functions automatically, the perceived value of such products is shrinking fast.

Abdul Abdirahman, an investor at F-Prime, echoes the same sentiment. According to him, vertical SaaS platforms without strong proprietary data are losing their appeal. Without unique datasets or specialized expertise, many products risk becoming interchangeable, and investors have little appetite for businesses that can be easily replicated.

That concern is becoming a defining theme in AI investing.

Igor Ryabenkiy, founder and managing partner at AltaIR Capital, believes the barrier to entry has collapsed dramatically. What once required large engineering teams and massive codebases can now be replicated by smaller AI-native teams working at astonishing speed.

“If your differentiation lives mostly in user interface and automation, that’s no longer enough,” he explains.

In the past, a polished interface and a reliable automation engine could create a defensible business. Today, that same advantage can vanish almost overnight.

The real moat now lies deeper, inside the workflow itself.

Startups that truly understand how a particular industry operates and build their product directly into the heart of that workflow stand a far better chance of survival. Ownership of the workflow, not just participation in it, has become the new prize.

Jake Saper, a general partner at Emergence Capital, believes the shift is already visible in the developer ecosystem. He points to the difference between platforms that control the workflow and those that merely execute tasks.

Developers, he says, are increasingly choosing tools that simply get the work done rather than software that forces them to operate within rigid processes.

That insight carries an unsettling implication for many traditional SaaS products. For years, “workflow stickiness” was considered a powerful competitive advantage, the idea that users would build their daily routines around a particular software platform.

But if AI agents begin performing those workflows automatically, the human user becomes less central to the equation.

Another fading advantage is integrations.

For a long time, SaaS companies competed to become the connective tissue between different tools. Integrations created ecosystems, and ecosystems created lock-in. But with emerging technologies such as model context protocols allowing AI systems to connect directly with external data and services, the integration layer itself risks becoming a commodity.

What used to be a moat may soon become basic infrastructure.

The consequence is clear: investors are reallocating capital toward startups that possess deep domain knowledge, proprietary data, and meaningful control over how work actually gets done.

Generic productivity tools, CRM clones, project management dashboards, and thin AI wrappers built on top of existing APIs are now facing a difficult fundraising environment. Not because AI is losing momentum, but because it is evolving.

The gold rush phase is giving way to something more demanding.

For founders entering the market today, the message from investors is simple but sobering: building another interface is no longer enough. To survive, a company must own something deeper: the data, the workflow, the expertise.

And in the new AI economy, depth is becoming the rarest currency of all.

Nigerian AI startup Intron has expanded its speech recognition platform, Sahara, to support 57 languages, strengthening Africa’s voice technology infrastructure. But behind the technology lies a deeper mission: building AI that understands the way Africans actually speak, accents, code-switching, and all.

In a hospital consultation room in Lagos, a doctor speaks quickly, switching between English and Yoruba while explaining a diagnosis. The patient responds partly in Yoruba, partly in Pidgin. Somewhere in the background, a nurse calls out instructions in another dialect. It is chaotic, natural, and uniquely African, a conversation that most global voice AI systems struggle to understand.

For years, this gap has quietly defined Africa’s relationship with artificial intelligence. The world’s most powerful speech recognition models were trained on Western accents, Western names, and Western patterns of speech. Africa, with its thousands of languages and deeply layered accents, was an afterthought.

Tobi Olatunji noticed the problem early.
Visit technaija.com for more related tech articles.

Before founding Intron, Olatunji spent time working with healthcare professionals and saw how much time doctors lost documenting clinical conversations. But the deeper issue wasn’t just documentation; it was language. Many existing transcription tools simply failed to recognise African speech patterns, often misinterpreting names, places, and medical terms spoken with local accents.

So in 2020, together with co-founder Olakunle Asekun, he started building something different, an AI infrastructure designed from the ground up for Africa’s linguistic complexity.

That vision has now reached a significant milestone.

Intron has expanded its speech recognition platform, Sahara, to support 57 languages, adding 24 new ones and strengthening its reach across sectors like healthcare, legal services, telecommunications, and financial technology. Within that total are 23 African languages, supported by a system trained to recognise more than 500 distinct African accents.

Languages such as Hausa, Yoruba, Swahili, Igbo, isiZulu, Twi, Wolof, Amharic, and Luganda are now part of the platform’s expanding ecosystem. But the true challenge wasn’t just adding languages; it was capturing the way people actually speak them.

Across Africa, conversations rarely stay within the boundaries of a single language. A sentence might begin in English, shift into Swahili, and end in a local dialect. This phenomenon, known as code-switching, is part of everyday communication but has historically confused most AI systems.

Sahara v2 introduces what Intron describes as the world’s first bilingual Swahili-English automatic speech recognition model built specifically to handle that fluid linguistic dance. In real-life environments like clinics, call centres, and customer service desks, such switching happens constantly.

Training the system required something Africa has long lacked: data.

When Intron began building its models, there was virtually no structured African medical speech dataset available. The company had to start from scratch, recruiting contributors across multiple countries and compensating them for recording thousands of hours of speech.

Today, Sahara v2 is trained on more than 14 million audio clips, representing over 50,000 hours of voice recordings from 40,000 speakers across 30 African countries. The dataset includes names, locations, accents, and speech patterns rarely captured in global AI systems.

According to internal benchmarks using publicly testable African voice datasets, Sahara v2 outperformed several global models, including systems from major AI providers, by up to 64% when recognising African names, organisations, and locations. It also demonstrated stronger performance with numbers, better resilience in noisy environments, and improved accuracy across multiple industries.

These improvements are not just technical achievements; they address a structural gap. Africa is home to roughly 2,000 languages, many of which exist primarily as spoken languages with limited written documentation. Voice technology may become the continent’s most natural gateway into digital services.

And investors, researchers, and enterprises are beginning to pay attention.

Sahara is already being used by organisations across Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, Rwanda, and Uganda, including government institutions like the Ogun State Judiciary and health-focused companies processing voice messages from patients.

To reach areas where internet connectivity remains unreliable, Intron has also developed offline deployment options powered by edge computing devices. These systems allow organisations to run speech models locally without depending entirely on the cloud.

Behind the technical milestones lies a philosophy that has shaped Intron from the beginning: Africa should not inherit AI systems built for other societies. It should build its own.

As the global voice recognition market races toward an estimated $81 billion valuation by 2032, companies like Intron are quietly building the linguistic infrastructure that will determine whether Africa participates fully in that future.

And in doing so, they are teaching machines something humanity often forgets: that language is not just grammar or syntax. It is culture, rhythm, identity.

Sahara’s expansion to 57 languages is not merely a product update. It is a reminder that when technology begins to understand how people truly speak, it also begins to understand who they are.

SmartCash PSB, the financial services arm of Airtel Nigeria, has crossed nearly three million active users as it pushes a zero-fee banking model and a market-leading 15% annual interest rate on savings. The milestone reflects a strategic shift from telecom-led ambition to aggressive financial inclusion in Nigeria’s fast-growing mobile money market.

On a humid afternoon in Ibadan, a petty trader sends ₦5,000 to a supplier. No transfer fee. No SMS alert charge. No silent deductions are shaving value off her margins. For many Nigerians, that small relief feels radical.

Behind that shift is SmartCash PSB, the financial services arm of Airtel Nigeria, which has now crossed nearly three million active users. But the number, as the company insists, is not inflated. These are customers who have transacted within the last 30 days, a stricter measure than the six-month definition many banks use to label accounts “active.” Internally, SmartCash says its 60- and 90-day engagement figures are even stronger, suggesting something deeper than promotional curiosity.

To understand this moment, you have to rewind to 2018, when the Central Bank of Nigeria introduced Payment Service Banks (PSBs). The idea was bold: allow telecom operators to enter the financial services sector and extend financial inclusion to the unbanked. In theory, telcos possessed what banks lacked: infrastructure, agent networks, and rural reach.

In practice, the transition was harder.
Visit technaija.com for more related tech articles.

For years, telecom-led fintechs struggled to convert subscriber scale into financial dominance. SmartCash itself generated just $6 million in revenue as of December 2025, modest compared to mobile money giants like OPay and PalmPay, whose revenues have far outpaced PSBs. PalmPay alone recorded $63.9 million in 2023. The message was clear: distribution alone does not guarantee trust.

Yet Nigeria’s mobile money market is exploding. According to the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System, transactions hit ₦20.71 trillion in Q1 2025. That figure reveals a country rapidly digitising its financial behaviour, even as structural limits constrain PSBs. They cannot lend. They face tighter capital rules. They entered late.

So SmartCash pivoted.

What began as a temporary incentive has evolved into a structural “Zero-Charges” strategy. No fees for interbank transfers. No charges for bill payments. No SMS alert deductions. In a market where banks often deduct between ₦10 and ₦50 per transfer (excluding VAT), eliminating those micro-costs is more than generosity; it is positioning.

Chief Executive Officer Ayotunde Kuponiyi describes transaction fees as a “psychological tax.” His framing is deliberate. For low-income earners and rural Nigerians, small deductions accumulate into distrust. Remove the friction, he argues, and behaviour shifts.

Then came the bolder play: a flat 15% per annum interest rate on savings balances. Interest is calculated daily and credited daily, compounding automatically. Unlike many traditional accounts, SmartCash does not restrict withdrawals to qualify for interest earnings. The offer is aggressive and strategic. In a high-inflation economy, deposits need an incentive.

Kuponiyi acknowledges that the rate is tied to Nigeria’s Monetary Policy Rate. If macroeconomic conditions change significantly, the 15% may adjust. But for now, it stands as one of the most eye-catching propositions in the retail banking space.

SmartCash has also moved to address one of Nigeria’s most persistent fintech frustrations: failed transactions. An auto-reversal system ensures funds are returned in line with regulatory timelines, while a toll-free 939 line handles disputes. Reliability, not just pricing, is part of the brand repositioning.

Still, perhaps SmartCash’s greatest advantage lies in something less visible: infrastructure. Airtel’s coverage spans all 774 local government areas, supported by over 500,000 agents for cash-in and cash-out services. Telecommunications backbone becomes financial backbone. Kuponiyi often poses a rhetorical question: if most digital banking rides on telecom networks anyway, who better to operate it?

Yet the story remains unfinished.

Zero fees compress margins. High interest rates raise sustainability questions. Regulatory limits prevent lending, often the most lucrative banking activity. SmartCash’s path to meaningful profitability may depend on building an ecosystem around deposits: remittances, insurance, merchant services, perhaps future regulatory shifts.

What the three-million milestone signals, however, is psychological traction. Nigerians are not just downloading; they are transacting. They are testing whether zero charges can be permanent, not promotional.

In a country where digital finance has become both a necessity and a battleground, SmartCash is attempting something deceptively simple: make banking feel lighter.

And sometimes, in markets shaped by hidden costs, lightness is the boldest strategy of all.

Nomba has partnered with UK-based Open Banking platform Volume to allow Nigerian businesses collect British Pounds directly from UK bank accounts. Beyond reducing cross-border card fees, the move signals a deeper ambition: to give African merchants access to global financial infrastructure without friction.

When Yinka Adewale talks about infrastructure, he doesn’t speak in abstractions. He speaks like someone who has watched Nigerian businesses hustle for every international sale, only to lose a slice of it to invisible fees, delayed settlements, and systems designed far away from their realities.

Nomba was built on a simple idea: African businesses deserve world-class financial tools. Not patched solutions. Not workaround systems. Real infrastructure.
Visit technaija.com for more related tech articles.

Now, the Nigerian fintech is pushing that vision further. Through a partnership with UK-based payment solution Volume, powered by Open Banking, Nomba is enabling Nigerian merchants to collect British Pounds directly from UK bank accounts. No card details. No dependency on international card processors as the only option. Just bank-to-bank payments authorised within a UK customer’s existing banking app.

On paper, it sounds like a feature update. In practice, it reshapes the experience of cross-border trade.

Open Banking in the UK allows banks, fintechs, and financial institutions to securely collaborate so customers can authorise payments directly from their accounts. Through this integration, when a UK customer selects the payment option at checkout, the transaction is authorised through the UK’s Faster Payments infrastructure. Volume processes the funds locally, and Nomba settles the merchant instantly into a GBP wallet managed by a licensed electronic money institution in the UK.

For Nigerian merchants, this changes the economics.

Card-based international payments often come with 6–7% in combined processing and cross-border charges. That may seem marginal on a single transaction, but for growing businesses operating on tight margins, it compounds quickly. Adewale puts it plainly: African merchants shouldn’t lose revenue simply because their customers live in another country.

The timing is strategic. The commercial relationship between Nigeria and the United Kingdom continues to deepen. The UK holds the largest documented population of Nigerian-born individuals, and in December 2025 alone, total trade volume between the two countries reached £95.7 million. E-commerce purchases, subscriptions, remittances, and professional services flow constantly between Lagos and London.

Yet much of this activity still runs through global card networks or platforms like Stripe, Flutterwave, or Paystack. While those systems have expanded access, they were not designed specifically around the nuances of UK–Nigeria trade. Nomba’s new corridor is not trying to eliminate existing options; it is widening the gateway.

One of the early adopters, BeautyByDaz Nigeria, offers a glimpse of what that looks like in practice. The Lagos-based beauty brand, which sells to customers both locally and in the UK, processed over £5,500 from 115 UK customers within its first 60 days on the platform. For founder Zaynab Odusote, the appeal was not just lower fees but consolidation. Instead of juggling Stripe for UK payments, a separate POS provider in Lagos, and multiple bank accounts, she now manages both markets from one dashboard.

That operational simplicity is part of a broader ambition. Nomba’s GBP wallet allows merchants to hold funds in pounds, convert to Naira or Dollars, or move balances across currencies depending on business needs. Exchange rates are set in line with market trends to remain competitive.

But this move is not isolated.

In November 2025, Nomba expanded into the Democratic Republic of Congo to serve unbanked communities. By January 2026, it had acquired a Canadian payment service provider to facilitate trade between Canada and Nigeria. The Volume partnership, meanwhile, positions it to scale into other European markets. Adewale’s long-term vision stretches beyond Open Banking alone, hinting at stablecoins and other infrastructure that could make international transactions feel as seamless as local ones.

If there is a thread connecting these moves, it is this: Nomba is less interested in being a payment processor and more interested in being a bridge.

A bridge between African merchants and global buyers. Between informal hustle and formal financial rails. Between ambition and access.

And in a world where geography still determines who pays more to participate in commerce, opening a direct GBP corridor may be less about currency and more about equity.

Weego, a Moroccan-Senegalese multimodal mobility startup, has raised $1.1 million from Azur Innovation Fund to expand across Morocco and prepare for regional growth. At its core, the company is building the digital layer that connects fragmented transport systems across African cities, turning chaos into coordination.

In Casablanca’s rush-hour haze, movement feels like survival. Buses crawl. Taxis compete. Trams overflow. Every delay quietly taxes productivity. For Saad Jittou, this wasn’t just traffic; it was lost economic potential.

In 2020, alongside Mor Niane, he founded Weego to solve a simple but stubborn problem: Africa’s transport systems exist, but they do not speak to each other. Commuters juggle apps, cash, guesswork, and time. Businesses lose hours to unpredictable staff arrivals. Cities expand faster than infrastructure can adapt.



Now, Weego has raised $1.1 million from Azur Innovation Fund to accelerate its vision. The capital will fund expansion across Moroccan cities, deepen its enterprise transport solutions, and lay groundwork for growth into Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.

Casablanca ranks among Africa’s most congested cities. As Morocco pushes toward its 2030 economic ambitions, transport efficiency is no longer cosmetic; it is strategic. Weego positions itself not as another ride-hailing app, but as the digital backbone connecting buses, trams, taxis, and private fleets into a single, trackable interface.

The idea is integration over disruption. Users can plan, track, and coordinate multimodal trips in real time. Employers can manage workforce transport more efficiently. Instead of replacing infrastructure, Weego layers intelligence onto it.

For investors like Adnane Filali of Azur Innovation Fund, the appeal is clear: a scalable Moroccan innovation capable of setting a regional standard. For Jittou, the mission is more personal. Transportation, he argues, is the primary obstacle to economic activity in African cities. Fix movement, and you unlock growth.

Weego operates at the intersection of public infrastructure and private mobility. It reflects a new generation of African startups that focus less on invention and more on orchestration, making what already exists work better.
Visit technaija.com for more related tech articles.

The $1.1 million raise is modest by global standards, but significant in intent. It signals confidence that Africa’s congestion crisis is also a technology opportunity. As cities brace for unprecedented passenger flows by 2030, digital coordination may matter as much as new roads.

Weego is betting that the future of African mobility isn’t about adding more vehicles, it’s about connecting

After building Hotels.ng into one of Nigeria’s leading hotel booking platforms, Mark Essien is tackling a deeper, more complex challenge: enterprise travel. With TripDesk, his AI-driven platform launched in 2025, Essien is reimagining how large companies manage travel approvals, compliance, and bookings across Africa.

In 2012, when Mark Essien launched Hotels.ng, the mission was straightforward: make hotel bookings simple. A user searched. A room appeared. Payment confirmed it. The friction that once required dozens of phone calls was compressed into a few clicks.

It was clean. Elegant. Logical.

But by 2016, something began to unsettle him.
Visit technaija.com for more related tech articles.

Large corporate clients were not complaining about room availability or pricing. They were complaining about themselves, about internal approvals, compliance loops, policy documents scattered across HR manuals, and travel requests stuck in bureaucratic limbo. At first, Essien viewed these concerns narrowly. Surely the booking platform was the core issue. Surely better UX could solve it.

It took years of conversations before the pattern became impossible to ignore.

Enterprise travel wasn’t about booking. It was about control.

In multinational companies, banks, telecom giants, mining corporations, FMCGs, a single trip can pass through line managers, department heads, finance officers, compliance teams, and sometimes regional supervisors before approval. Each layer adds oversight. Each layer adds delay. And somewhere between PDF policy documents and email threads, visibility disappears.

Essien realised that the hotel was the smallest part of the journey.

That insight led to TripDesk, founded in 2025. Not a booking site. Not a travel agency. But an AI-powered approval system built specifically for large organisations.

Corporate travel is not a minor expense. According to the Global Business Travel Association, business travel spending in the Middle East and Africa rebounded to 111% of 2019 levels in 2025, with global spending projected at $1.57 trillion. Travel is embedded in the DNA of multinational companies. Yet internally, the systems managing it often remain fragmented.

TripDesk approaches the problem from the inside.

Each client company builds its own ecosystem within the platform: employee roles, departments, spending thresholds, policy documents — all configured digitally. When an employee submits a travel request, they input the destination, duration, projected costs, and allowances. From there, the system automatically routes the request through the correct approval hierarchy.

Managers don’t just see the request. They see context, whether it falls within policy, whether allowances exceed limits, and whether documentation aligns with compliance standards. AI scans and synthesises policy documents that were once buried across departments, creating a single layer of clarity.

Essien describes it as removing blind spots. In multi-layered organisations, decision-makers at the top rarely see the full picture. They approve based on summaries filtered through multiple levels. TripDesk tightens that chain.

Once approved, companies can choose to let TripDesk complete bookings through partners like Hotels.ng locally or other providers internationally, or use it as the compliance engine.

The business model reflects enterprise discipline. Companies pay upfront platform fees to deploy the system across their organisations. Additional revenue comes from booking service fees and commissions when travel services are fulfilled through partners.

Despite entering a market often assumed to demand global scale, TripDesk’s early growth has been concentrated and deliberate. Within four months of launch, the startup secured 30 enterprise clients and generated over $2.3 million in revenue. Its typical client employs at least 1,000 people and often operates across multiple countries.

Essien is candid about competition. Traditional corporate travel agencies exist. Global platforms like Wakanow and SAP Concur operate in similar spaces. But he argues most competitors address fragments, bookings, expense tracking, or compliance, rather than the entire approval workflow.

Winning enterprise clients, however, requires patience. Change inside large organisations is rarely swift. Stakeholders guard internal processes carefully. Essien describes the process as “hand-holding”, guiding executives through how a centralised approval system can simplify rather than disrupt.

TripDesk raised a modest, undisclosed seed round to cover early operational costs. Now profitable, the company is not under pressure to raise venture capital. Strong margins and disciplined growth offer breathing room, a rarity in tech ecosystems driven by aggressive fundraising cycles.

Over the coming years, Essien plans to deepen TripDesk’s footprint among large enterprises across Sub-Saharan Africa, expanding alongside clients that already operate regionally.

Looking back, there is a quiet symmetry in his journey. Hotels.ng simplified the visible part of travel, the room. TripDesk addresses the invisible architecture beneath it, policy, approval, and governance.

In solving one problem, Essien discovered another, more intricate one. And perhaps that is the mark of an enduring entrepreneur: not just building platforms, but noticing friction others have learned to tolerate, and deciding it deserves to be fixed.

Chowdeck has partnered with MyCoverGenius to roll out personal accident insurance for over 20,000 riders on its platform. As delivery volumes surge past one million total orders, the company is shifting its focus from speed and scale to security, embedding protection directly into the everyday realities of gig work in Nigeria.

Before the app notifications. Before the countdown timers. Before the race to beat Lagos traffic. There is always a rider.

He wakes early. Checks his phone. Checks his bike. Check the fuel gauge twice. His income today depends on how many meals he can deliver, how many minutes he can shave off a route, and how safely he can navigate potholes and impatient drivers. For thousands of delivery riders across Nigeria, the hustle is precise, physical, and fragile.

It is this fragility that Chowdeck is finally confronting head-on.
Visit technaija.com for more related tech articles.

The Nigerian on-demand delivery platform has launched a personal accident insurance scheme for more than 20,000 riders through a partnership with MyCoverGenius, a local insurance provider steadily building a reputation for embedding insurance into digital ecosystems. The partnership, which began in November 2024, automatically enrolls all active riders. It covers accidental medical expenses, temporary disability, and compensation for lost income when riders are unable to work due to injuries sustained on the job.

For a company that crossed one million total orders in November 2025, with daily volumes averaging over 40,000, this move feels less like an optional perk and more like an inevitable reckoning.

Growth changes everything.

As order volumes climb, so does exposure. More riders on the road means more risk, traffic collisions, bad weather, mechanical failures, and exhaustion. Delivery platforms often celebrate scale with investor updates and expansion headlines. But scale also magnifies responsibility.

Umar Nasir, Chowdeck’s Head of Operations, put it plainly: riders are critical to everything the company does. Without them, there is no delivery. No satisfied customer. No repeat order. No million-order milestone.

Yet gig workers in Nigeria have long operated in a grey zone. They are neither traditional employees nor fully independent contractors in practice. Their earnings fluctuate daily, shaped by fuel prices, commissions, demand spikes, and platform policies. An accident can wipe out an entire week’s income, sometimes more. Hospital bills can push riders into debt cycles that are hard to escape.

This insurance scheme introduces a stabiliser into that volatility.

Chowdeck will now cover hospital bills resulting from accident treatments and provide compensation for riders temporarily unable to work. It is a shift from reactive support to structured protection. And perhaps more importantly, it signals a cultural shift within Nigeria’s gig economy: welfare is no longer a side conversation; it is becoming part of the business model.

MyCoverGenius has been quietly positioning itself at this intersection of fintech and embedded insurance. Its CEO, Adebowale Banjo, has consistently emphasised accessibility and relevance. By integrating directly into platforms like Chowdeck, insurance becomes less intimidating paperwork and more of a seamless safety net woven into the app ecosystem riders already use daily.

Chowdeck is not alone in this evolution. In 2024, Bolt introduced insurance coverage for its riders. In 2025, inDrive rewarded hundreds of drivers with insurance packages as part of its loyalty strategy. These moves suggest a broader industry recalibration: platforms are beginning to recognise that sustainability depends not only on customer acquisition but on worker protection.

Still, the deeper story is about dignity.

Insurance, in this context, is not just financial cover. It is recognition. It acknowledges that riders are not disposable logistics units but human beings whose bodies bear the weight of platform growth. Every pothole avoided, every sudden brake, every long shift under the sun, these are invisible costs rarely reflected in quarterly metrics.

By embedding accident insurance into its operations, Chowdeck is attempting to humanise scale. To say that speed does not have to come at the expense of safety. That growth can coexist with care.

The real test, of course, will lie in execution, claims processing speed, transparency, and rider education. Trust in insurance across Nigeria has historically been fragile. If this scheme delivers on its promise, it could redefine how gig platforms structure benefits across the country.

For now, though, something meaningful has shifted.

Somewhere in Lagos, a rider refreshes his app for the next order. The risks of the road remain. Traffic will not ease overnight. But beneath the notifications and route maps sits a quiet assurance: if something goes wrong, he will not face it alone.

And that, in Nigeria’s fast-moving tech landscape, may be one of the most important innovations of all.

Nigeria’s Terra Industries has appointed counter-insurgency specialist Nnamdi Chife as Vice President of Military Relations, reinforcing its strategic engagement with the armed forces. As the defence-tech startup deepens its partnership with DICON and scales local drone manufacturing, Chife’s return signals a pivotal moment in the company’s evolution from ambitious builder to institutional defence partner.

In Nigeria, conversations about security are never abstract. They are lived realities, in headlines about insurgency, in whispered fears about kidnappings, in the quiet urgency behind calls for local defence capability. Against that backdrop, Terra Industries is not just building drones; it is positioning itself inside one of the most sensitive and consequential industries in the country.

Now, the company has made a move that speaks less about hardware and more about strategy.

Terra Industries has appointed Nnamdi Chife as Vice President of Military Relations, a role that signals its transition from startup ambition to structured defence engagement. The appointment arrives at a defining moment. In February, Terra signed a memorandum of understanding with the Defence Industries Corporation of Nigeria (DICON), the state-run defence body operated by the Nigerian Armed Forces. The agreement lays the groundwork for local assembly, research, and training in drones, robotics, and cybersecurity systems, effectively integrating Terra into Nigeria’s formal defence manufacturing architecture.

For Terra’s founders, CEO Nathan Nwachuku and co-founder Maxwell Maduka, this is no longer just about proving technical capability. It is about trust. Alignment. Institutional coordination.

And that is where Chife enters the story.
Visit technaija.com for more related tech articles.

Described by Terra as a counter-insurgency specialist with a PhD in Peace and Conflict Studies, Chife brings over 15 years of experience in Nigeria’s defence ecosystem. His background is layered. Nearly a decade in finance at Ecobank Nigeria. A pivot into security and intelligence. The founding of Chive GPS in 2018 was a Lagos-based conflict resolution and security intelligence firm known for geolocation intelligence, asset tracing, and collaboration with law enforcement agencies, including the EFCC.

Chife has advised on counter-insurgency strategy, spoken publicly about Nigeria’s kidnapping crisis, and operated in the spaces where intelligence, policy, and on-the-ground realities intersect. His credibility does not come from theory alone; it comes from navigating the complexities of Nigeria’s security terrain.

His relationship with Terra is not new. In 2023, during the company’s earlier phase as Terrahaptix, Chife served on its board while the startup was building its robotics factory in Abuja. When Terra restructured and rebranded in 2024, he stepped away. Now, he returns — not as a board member, but as an executive charged with leading military engagement strategy and advising at the highest level.

The timing is deliberate.

Terra Industries has raised $34 million from US and local investors, including 8VC, Lux Capital, and Resilience17 Capital, making it Africa’s most-funded defence-tech startup in 2026. Capital, however, is only one side of the equation. Defence partnerships require diplomacy, procedural fluency, and alignment with military command structures. The DICON agreement raises the stakes. Execution now matters more than promise.

Chife’s mandate will focus on managing relationships with the armed forces and guiding board-level strategy as Terra works to develop smart weapons systems and autonomous surveillance solutions tailored to Nigeria’s security challenges. In a sector where missteps can carry national consequences, relationship stewardship is as critical as engineering precision.

Yet beyond the corporate announcement lies a deeper narrative: Nigeria’s attempt to reclaim agency over its defence supply chain. For decades, the country has relied heavily on imported systems. Terra’s emergence represents a push toward indigenous capability, locally assembled drones, robotics platforms, and cybersecurity infrastructure designed within Nigeria for Nigerian realities.

Chife stands at the intersection of that ambition. His experience in intelligence and counter-insurgency bridges operational needs with technological innovation. In many ways, his appointment reflects Terra’s recognition that defence technology is not just about machines. It is about doctrine, relationships, and understanding the human dimensions of conflict.

As insecurity pressures governments across Africa to rethink defence procurement and domestic manufacturing, Terra Industries is carving out its place in that conversation. With Chife back in its ranks, the company appears intent on deepening its integration into Nigeria’s military framework rather than operating at its edges.

This is not just an executive hire. It is a signal that Terra’s next chapter will be defined not only by the drones it builds, but by the institutions it works alongside.

And in Nigeria’s evolving defence landscape, that distinction may matter most.

Luno Nigeria is preparing to introduce derivatives trading as part of its broader “all-in-one” investment strategy, following the rollout of tokenised U.S. stocks in South Africa and Nigeria. The move reflects a deeper shift in how the crypto exchange sees its role in Nigeria’s volatile market, not as a speculative playground, but as a structured gateway into diversified investing.

There was a time when crypto in Nigeria felt like rebellion.

Young Nigerians downloaded trading apps not just to invest, but to escape currency instability, capital controls, and a financial system that often felt out of reach. In those early days, platforms like Luno were not simply exchanges; they were bridges. Bridges between the naira and Bitcoin. Between local uncertainty and global markets.

Now, that bridge is widening.
Visit technaija.com for more related articles.

Luno Nigeria has announced plans to introduce derivatives trading as part of what it calls an “all-in-one” investment strategy. On the surface, it sounds like product expansion. In reality, it signals something more deliberate: a company attempting to mature alongside its market.

The move follows a carefully sequenced rollout. In August, Luno launched tokenised U.S. stocks in South Africa. One month later, the feature landed in Nigeria, allowing users to shift seamlessly from cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum into equities, all within the same app. For a generation of retail investors accustomed to juggling multiple platforms, that integration was more than convenience. It was a consolidation.

The early traction was telling. Within its first month in South Africa, the product drew 10,000 users. By year-end, total users reached 30,000, with Nigerian investors accounting for roughly 15% of that base, according to Luno Nigeria’s country manager, Olumide Alabi. That detail matters. It suggests Nigerian appetite is not fading; it is evolving.

Derivatives, however, represent a different class of instrument. They are structured, leveraged, and often misunderstood. In volatile markets, they can magnify gains and losses. So why introduce them now?

Part of the answer lies in positioning. Nigeria’s crypto landscape has seen waves of speculative frenzy, meme-token hype cycles, and painful crashes. Luno has chosen a contrasting tone. Rather than chase every trending token, the company says it applies strict internal risk criteria before listing assets.

“We only list tokens that are backed by real-world utilities,” Alabi has said, emphasising due diligence around backers, liquidity, and alignment with risk standards. The message is subtle but strategic: Luno wants to be seen not as a casino, but as a custodian.

This conservative posture becomes even more significant when derivatives enter the picture. Offering such products in Nigeria requires careful calibration, education, safeguards, and responsible rollouts. For Luno, the challenge will not simply be making derivatives available, but framing them within a disciplined investment culture.

Behind the strategy is a broader recognition: Nigerian investors are no longer satisfied with single-asset exposure. They want range. Crypto for growth. Equities for diversification. Structured instruments for hedging. In an economy shaped by inflation and currency pressure, financial agility has become a survival instinct.

For 2026, Alabi says the focus will be on consolidation, strengthening recently launched products, while expanding into new segments. That suggests the derivatives rollout will not be an isolated splash, but part of a layered ecosystem.

It is also a quiet acknowledgement that crypto alone is no longer the headline. The future belongs to platforms that can unify digital assets and traditional finance in one coherent experience. In that sense, Luno’s derivatives play is less about risk-taking and more about relevance.

The company’s journey in Nigeria mirrors the country’s own financial coming-of-age. What began as a workaround is turning into infrastructure. What started as speculative enthusiasm is shifting toward structured investing.

Luno’s challenge now is to balance ambition with restraint, to provide access without encouraging recklessness. If it succeeds, it could redefine what a crypto platform looks like in Nigeria: not just a trading app, but a diversified investment gateway built for a complex economy.

And in a market that has seen both euphoria and correction, that balance may be its most valuable product yet.

Nigerian crypto startup Zap Africa has reduced its workforce by 44% as part of an AI-driven restructuring aimed at improving efficiency and preserving capital amid a prolonged crypto downturn. The move marks a defining moment for the two-year-old company as it balances automation, survival, and long-term ambition.

On a humid Lagos afternoon in early 2023, Zap Africa felt like a possibility.

Crypto was still echoing with optimism. Retail traders were active. Telegram groups were buzzing. Founders were building not just platforms, but narratives about financial freedom and borderless opportunity. For Moore Dagogo Hart, co-founder and CTO of Zap Africa, it wasn’t just another startup. It was a statement that a Nigerian-built crypto platform could compete boldly in a volatile global market.

Fast-forward to February 2026, and the tone is quieter.
Visit technaija.com for more related tech articles.

Zap Africa has cut 44% of its workforce, shrinking from 18 employees to 10 in what the company describes as an “AI-driven efficiency shift.” The layoffs, which affected staff across design, operations, marketing, and support, began subtly in December 2025, then culminated in a broader restructuring two months later.

“This was not a company-wide layoff,” Dagogo Hart said publicly. “Zap Africa intentionally moved from 18 to 10 as part of an AI-driven efficiency shift.”

Behind that phrasing lies a harder truth that many young crypto startups are confronting: survival in a down market demands ruthless clarity.

Launched in 2023, Zap Africa positioned itself as a retail crypto trading platform at a time when digital asset enthusiasm was still strong across Nigeria. By 2024, the startup had raised $300,000 in pre-seed funding to expand product development. In 2025, Dagogo Hart shared that the platform had processed over $17 million in transactions and was generating up to $100,000 in monthly revenue, with weekly transaction volumes averaging around $500,000.

But crypto is cyclical, and unforgiving.

Since October 2025, the global crypto market has shed roughly $2 trillion in value. Retail enthusiasm cooled. Trading slowed. Liquidity tightened. And like many platforms dependent on transaction fees, Zap Africa felt the contraction.

Over-the-counter (OTC) trades, large transactions executed outside the public order book, began to contribute more meaningfully to revenue, partially offsetting weaker in-app retail activity. Still, the shift exposed a tension: growth ambitions built during bullish periods can quickly become a financial strain in a bear cycle.

At the centre of Zap Africa’s restructuring is automation.

The company integrated Martha AI, a tool developed by Dagogo Hart’s other venture, Cognito Systems, into its customer support workflow. Instead of customers beginning with human agents, AI now handles first-line enquiries. For a lean startup, that move reduces response times and payroll costs simultaneously. But for some former employees, it also meant redundancy.

Two former staff members confirmed that automation rendered certain operational and support roles unnecessary. Dagogo Hart maintains that only non-core teams were affected and that product, engineering, finance, legal, operations, and growth remain intact. He also stated that severance packages were provided in line with tenure and contractual terms, and that no further layoffs are planned.

Yet this restructuring is about more than headcount.

Crypto startups operate at the intersection of volatility and trust. In 2024 and 2025, Zap Africa faced operational pressures, including a double-counted customer deposit that was later refunded and a fraudulent transfer incident that reportedly resulted in a $5,000 loss. While such challenges are not uncommon in fast-moving crypto environments, they underscore the complexity of running a digital asset platform in a low-trust, high-risk market.

Public visibility added another layer of contrast. In 2025, Zap Africa was involved in a trademark dispute with Paystack over the use of the name “Zap” for a consumer product. The episode amplified its brand awareness across Nigerian tech circles. The startup later increased its presence in the ecosystem, hosting community events and expanding media engagement. Outwardly, momentum seemed strong.

Internally, however, revenue pressures and market volatility were tightening the screws.

In cyclical industries like crypto, downturns test conviction. They force founders to choose between preserving runway and preserving structure. Automation becomes not just innovation, but insulation. Workforce reductions are not a failure but a recalibration.

Zap Africa insists it remains operationally stable, with sufficient capital and revenue to continue executing its roadmap, including development of its wallet and exchange products. Whether leaner will also mean stronger is the real question.

For Moore Dagogo Hart, this moment is likely less about optics and more about arithmetic, aligning costs with revenue in a market that no longer rewards exuberance.

If the early years of Zap Africa were about expansion and visibility, 2026 may become its year of discipline. In crypto, survival is often the truest form of growth. And for a two-year-old Nigerian startup navigating global volatility, cutting deep may be the price of staying alive long enough to see the next bull run.

MTN Nigeria has recorded an unprecedented ₦5.2 trillion in revenue for 2025, marking the highest ever in the country’s telecom history. After years of currency pressure and losses, the telecom giant has returned to profitability, resumed dividend payments, and solidified its role as Nigeria’s digital backbone, powered largely by surging data demand and tariff adjustments.

There was a time not long ago when Nigeria’s telecom giants were quietly bleeding.

The naira’s sharp devaluation had thinned margins. Dollar-denominated obligations grew heavier by the month. Average revenue per user fell from $3.08 in 2023 to $1.89 in 2024. For a sector that had long symbolised resilience, the numbers felt like a reckoning.

Inside MTN Nigeria’s boardrooms, the conversation shifted from expansion to survival.
Visit technaija.com for more related tech articles.

Karl Toriola, the company’s chief executive officer, understood the weight of the moment. Since joining MTN in its early years and rising through the ranks, he had watched the company transform from a foreign-backed entrant in 2001 into a pillar of Nigeria’s digital economy. But 2024 tested that legacy. The company posted a ₦400.44 billion loss, a sobering reminder that scale alone does not shield a business from macroeconomic storms.

Then came 2025, and with it, a turning point.

MTN Nigeria reported ₦5.20 trillion ($3.82 billion) in revenue for the year, the highest ever recorded in Nigeria’s telecom sector. That figure is staggering not just in isolation, but in context. It nearly matches the entire telecommunications industry’s ₦5.30 trillion revenue recorded in 2023, according to data from the Nigerian Communications Commission. With a commanding 51.87% share of Nigeria’s 179.41 million active mobile subscriptions, MTN did not merely grow; it consolidated its dominance.

Revenue surged by 54.93%, translating into a profit after tax of ₦1.11 trillion ($816.29 million). From a deep loss to a trillion-naira profit in a single year, the reversal is as symbolic as it is financial.

What changed?

Part of the answer lies in policy. After more than a decade of lobbying for cost-reflective pricing amid rising operational expenses, telecom operators secured regulatory approval for tariff adjustments on January 20, 2025. Almost immediately, the average cost of 1GB of data doubled to around ₦575 from ₦287.5.

Yet this was not merely a pricing story. It was a demand story.

Nigeria’s appetite for data has become insatiable. Streaming platforms hum late into the night. Remote workers power laptops from living rooms in Lagos and Port Harcourt. Fintech apps process millions of transactions daily. Social media continues to blur the line between leisure and commerce. Annual data consumption jumped 35.7% to 13.25 million terabytes in 2025, with average monthly usage per subscriber rising to 89.42GB.

Data is now MTN’s largest revenue driver, contributing 53.39% of total earnings and growing 74.58% year-on-year. Voice revenue, often assumed to be fading, still expanded by 49.54%. Fintech revenue climbed 79.68%, reflecting the company’s growing ambition beyond connectivity.

Under Toriola’s leadership, MTN has steadily repositioned itself, not just as a telecom operator, but as a digital infrastructure. The network carries conversations, payments, entertainment, and livelihoods. It powers small businesses and multinational firms alike. It is invisible yet essential.

The company also restored positive retained earnings and shareholders’ equity, proposing a final dividend of ₦15 per share after paying an interim ₦5 earlier in September 2025. The total dividend of ₦20 marks a significant psychological shift: stability has returned.

Across the continent, competitors are experiencing similar tailwinds. Airtel Africa reported 28.3% revenue growth in reported currency, with Nigeria driving a 50.6% expansion in constant-currency revenue. The macroeconomic environment in 2025, including a more stable naira, offered breathing room to operators who had endured years of volatility.

But beyond the spreadsheets and earnings calls lies a more profound truth: MTN’s story mirrors Nigeria’s digital transformation. Since launching operations in 2001, it has grown alongside the country’s mobile revolution. SIM cards became gateways to opportunity. Data bundles became economic tools. Today, MTN is one of Nigeria’s most profitable companies, not merely because tariffs increased, but because connectivity has become indispensable.

The ₦5.2 trillion figure is not just a record. It is a statement about where Nigeria stands in the digital age, and how deeply telecom infrastructure now shapes the nation’s economic pulse.

Africa’s startup funding landscape has shifted from aggressive equity bets to carefully structured, risk-managed capital. As debt financing surpasses previous highs and cleantech overtakes fintech, investors are focusing on currency exposure, cash flow durability, and essential infrastructure. This is the story of how risk is being re-engineered, and what it means for founders navigating 2025 and beyond.

In 2021, capital moved through African startups like summer rain, fast, generous, and optimistic. Equity ruled the day. Fintech absorbed billions. Investors underwrote growth first and postponed the uncomfortable questions about margins, currency exposure, and exit timelines. Scale was the story.

By 2025, the story had changed.
Visit technaija.com for more related articles.

More than $1 billion flowed through non-equity instruments last year, with debt financing alone reaching approximately $1.6 billion, the highest ever recorded on the continent. Cleantech quietly surpassed fintech in total capital raised. Energy, logistics, and essential infrastructure began drawing more attention than payment apps and consumer marketplaces.

This is not a retreat. It is recalibration.

Kanessa Muluneh, founder of the investment firm Nyle, operates squarely inside this new logic. Her approach offers a window into how serious investors are structuring risk in Africa’s next funding cycle, not by withdrawing capital, but by controlling how and when it is exposed.

For many foreign investors, the central anxiety is no longer product-market fit. It is convertibility.

In markets like Nigeria and Egypt, legal frameworks guarantee capital repatriation. But foreign exchange liquidity has not always cooperated. Backlogs of unrepatriated earnings in sectors such as aviation and manufacturing have shown how quickly dollar access can tighten. Even when policy reforms narrow the spread between official and parallel rates, underwriting still assumes currency instability.

A $1 million transfer may arrive intact. Whether it leaves intact is another question.

Muluneh’s answer is precise. Capital is not wired in lump sums and left idle in local currency accounts. It moves in phases. Equipment sourced from Asia is paid for in dollars offshore. Software licensed from the United States is settled directly from foreign accounts. Local conversion happens only when operationally necessary.

The strategy is simple: delay currency exposure until the last possible moment. In a funding environment leaning toward structured debt and non-equity instruments, control over timing has become as important as valuation.

This discipline reflects a broader truth emerging across African venture markets: trust is no longer a strategy.

For years, diaspora capital and informal networks have driven a significant share of private investments. Personal relationships substituted for institutional safeguards. But as ticket sizes increase and global capital participates more formally, documentation, beneficial ownership transparency, and structured due diligence are no longer optional.

Regulatory reforms, including beneficial ownership registers in Nigeria, have improved disclosure standards. Yet paperwork alone does not eliminate operational risk. Investors increasingly layer traditional legal checks with independent network verification, reputation mapping, political exposure reviews, and supply chain background analysis. In this cycle, governance is priced into the deal structure from day one.

The shift is also sectoral, but not in the way headlines suggest.

Cleantech surpassing fintech is less about trend-chasing and more about predictability. Infrastructure businesses tied to energy and logistics operate on unavoidable demand. Companies pay for power because operations depend on it. Patients pay for medicine because alternatives are limited. These dynamics create revenue floors investors can model.

By contrast, consumer-driven retail and soft tech often operate within informal pricing systems. Margins fluctuate with negotiation power, currency volatility, and seasonal supply shifts. When input costs lack stability, projecting a three-year return becomes speculative.

Debt financing thrives where cash flow is visible.

Healthcare, in particular, is emerging as a quiet anchor. Across much of Africa, 70 to 90 percent of medicines are imported. Currency depreciation immediately inflates costs. Local manufacturing remains limited. For investors like Muluneh, this vulnerability signals opportunity: strengthening pharmaceutical supply chains is not just a social good; it is economic infrastructure. A workforce cannot power growth if it cannot access affordable treatment.

In that sense, Africa’s funding cycle is maturing rather than shrinking. The exuberance of 2021 rewarded speed. The discipline of 2025 rewards structure. Investors are not chasing growth at any cost; they are engineering resilience.

For founders, the message is clear. Capital is still available, but it arrives with conditions shaped by currency realities, governance expectations, and demand durability. The era of blank-cheque optimism has given way to something quieter, more methodical, and perhaps more sustainable.

Africa’s next funding chapter will not be written in bold equity headlines alone. It will be written in term sheets structured around risk, sequenced disbursements, and businesses anchored in essential demand.

And in that careful structuring, the continent’s investment ecosystem may finally be building not just scale, but staying power.

Selar is committing ₦10 million to support 150 Nigerian students through its Smart Hustle Initiative, a CSR program designed to promote education and legitimate income pathways amid rising fraud concerns. But beyond the funding lies a deeper story about responsibility, reform, and redefining hustle culture in Nigeria’s digital economy.

In Nigeria today, the word “hustle” carries two meanings. One is hopeful, the daily grind to build something legitimate, to learn, to create, to survive honestly. The other is darker, shortcuts masked as ambition, quick money wrapped in fraud.

Douglas Kendyson has watched both meanings evolve in real time.
Visit technaija.com for more related articles.

As the founder and CEO of Selar, an e-commerce platform built for digital creators, Douglas has spent nearly a decade helping Nigerians sell knowledge, art, software, courses, and expertise online. Since 2016, Selar has grown quietly but powerfully, now serving over 2.2 million users and more than 330,000 creators. In 2025 alone, the bootstrapped company paid out over ₦18 billion to users, nearly doubling its 2024 figure. No external funding. No loud theatrics. Just steady belief in digital entrepreneurship.

But growth alone is not enough.

In May 2025, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission revealed that 90% of individuals arrested for fraud were students. The statistic was not just alarming; it was revealing. For Douglas, it raised a difficult question: what does it mean to build a platform for creators while students, many financially stranded, drift toward illegitimate income streams?

The answer became the Smart Hustle Initiative.

Now in its third edition, Selar’s annual tuition support program will distribute ₦10 million to 150 Nigerian students. Fifty final-year undergraduates in accredited tertiary institutions will receive ₦100,000 each. One hundred SS3 students will receive ₦50,000 each to prepare for WAEC and JAMB. Applications run from February 24 to March 13, 2026, and will be reviewed by an independent committee.

But this is not charity in its simplest form. It is an intervention.

“There is so much to the fraud culture in Nigeria today, and the Smart Hustle Initiative is our response to it,” Douglas said. That sentence carries weight. It reframes corporate social responsibility from brand optics to moral positioning.

The initiative began with awareness campaigns across Lagos State schools during its pilot phase. Selar understood that the problem does not begin at university graduation; it begins in corridors where financial anxiety meets peer pressure. Supporting students at key transition stages, final-year undergraduates preparing to enter the labour market, and SS3 students sitting for life-defining exams, is deliberate. It is preventive architecture.

The eligibility requirements also tell a story. Undergraduates must maintain a minimum CGPA of 3.0 or 65%, demonstrate financial need, and submit transcripts and a video statement. SS3 students must provide proof of status, WAEC or JAMB registration, and a video application. This is not a random giveaway; it is a structured pathway.

Selar’s own trajectory strengthens the symbolism. Operating without external venture capital, the company represents a version of Nigerian tech that thrives on sustainability rather than spectacle. In a funding landscape often obsessed with valuation headlines, Selar’s numbers speak quietly but firmly: billions paid to creators, thousands empowered to earn legitimately online.

The Smart Hustle Initiative extends that philosophy offline.

If fraud thrives in environments where opportunity feels distant, then building visible, legitimate alternatives becomes revolutionary. Selar’s platform shows creators they can monetise skills. The tuition fund shows students they are seen and supported, before desperation takes root.

This is where the story moves beyond ₦10 million.

It becomes about narrative correction. About redefining hustle not as speed, but as substance. About telling a generation that digital prosperity can be earned transparently.

In a country wrestling with youth unemployment, economic pressure, and reputation challenges, the smallest structural supports can ripple widely. One supported final-year student may graduate without financial panic. One SS3 student may sit for WAEC without paying exam fees.

Multiply that by 150.

Selar’s commitment does not claim to solve systemic inequality. But it acknowledges responsibility. It demonstrates that tech platforms, especially those built by Nigerians for Nigerians, can move beyond profit and into stewardship.

And perhaps that is the deeper story here: in a climate where fraud headlines dominate, a tech founder chose to answer with access, education, and belief.

The real hustle, after all, is building something that outlives you.

Wearable startup CUDIS has launched a new line of health rings equipped with an AI-driven “Agent Coach” designed to guide users toward smarter fitness and longevity decisions. But beyond tracking sleep and steps, CUDIS is building something deeper, a behavioral engine that blends AI, incentives, and blockchain-backed data security to reshape how healthy habits are formed and sustained.

The modern wellness movement is obsessed with data. We count our steps. We measure our sleep. We track our heart rates and stress levels like traders watching stock charts. Yet for all the numbers flashing across our screens, something often feels missing: direction.

Edison Chen noticed that gap.
Visit technaija.com for more related articles.

Before founding CUDIS, Chen was fascinated by a simple question: why do people with access to health data still struggle to change their habits? Fitness apps were excellent at recording behavior, but few were truly good at influencing it. Metrics alone, he believed, were passive. What people needed was interpretation, and sometimes, accountability.

This week, CUDIS is launching its newest line of health rings, a refined version of its earlier models that have already sold more than 30,000 units since the company’s 2024 debut. The startup’s app ecosystem has expanded to 250,000 users across 103 countries, with strong adoption in North America, Europe, and Asia. But the new hardware is only part of the story.

At the center of this release is the AI “Agent Coach.”

Unlike many wearables that stop at reporting heart rate variability or sleep cycles, CUDIS’ Agent Coach is designed to act. Powered by generative AI, it builds tailored programs for users, daily tasks, recovery protocols, supplement suggestions, and even direct referrals to licensed medical professionals when needed. It watches for patterns: chronic poor sleep, declining HRV, and elevated resting heart rate. When trends begin to tilt in the wrong direction, it nudges the user toward corrective action or escalates toward professional care.

Chen describes it as pattern recognition for people who want to optimize. But beneath that phrasing lies a broader ambition: to move wearables from passive trackers to active partners.

The new ring continues to monitor sleep quality, stress, movement, and recovery, while introducing a metric the company calls Pace of Aging (PoA). This feature compares biological trends against chronological age, offering users insight into whether their bodies appear to be aging faster or slower than expected. It is both motivating and sobering, a mirror not just of today’s habits, but of tomorrow’s consequences.

What differentiates CUDIS, however, may not be its AI but its incentive model.

Users earn digital “health points” for positive behaviors: consistent sleep, 10,000 daily steps, sports activities, and even interactions with the AI coach. These points can be redeemed through an integrated marketplace for discounts on supplements and other wellness products. In essence, the company is gamifying longevity.

This behavioral loop, measure, guide, reward, is CUDIS’ thesis on habit formation. Data creates awareness. AI creates structure. Incentives create momentum.

There is also a technological layer that sets the company apart. CUDIS claims it encrypts and secures user health data via the Solana blockchain, positioning itself as a web3 AI wellness company. While independent verification of its security architecture remains limited, the blockchain element appeals to users concerned about data ownership and privacy in an era where personal health metrics are increasingly monetized.

The company raised $5 million in seed funding in 2024, led by Draper Associates, with participation from investors including Skybridge, DraperDragon, Monke Ventures, and Foresight Ventures. Many of these backers have strong ties to blockchain ecosystems, reinforcing CUDIS’ hybrid identity at the intersection of health tech and decentralized technology. A Kickstarter campaign is also planned, signaling the company’s intention to engage its community directly in scaling the product.

Yet funding and features aside, the deeper story is about control.

In a world where algorithms influence everything from shopping habits to political opinions, CUDIS is betting that AI can be repurposed toward personal health, not to manipulate, but to empower. The ring does not simply tell you how you slept. It asks what you will do about it. It does not just record stress. It suggests recovery.

The difference is subtle but profound.

CUDIS is not selling jewelry with sensors. It is selling the possibility of a guided future, one where intelligence wraps quietly around your finger, watching patterns you might miss, and reminding you that optimization is not about perfection, but consistency.

In that sense, the new ring line is less about hardware and more about habit architecture. And if Chen’s instincts are correct, the next generation of wearables will not just measure life, they will coach it.