Asili Africa

The only bill sent was for winning

The Uchumi Story: Kenya’s first supermarket, two collapses inside a decade, one brand still standing On the second of June, two thousand and six, the Capital Markets Authority of Kenya suspended trading in the shares of a company called Uchumi Supermarkets. The suspension came the day after Uchumi’s own Board of Directors had resolved that

The Nakumatt Story: How a Nakuru mattress shop grew, in twenty five years, into East Africa’s biggest supermarket chain, and disappeared in thirty six months On the seventh of January, twenty twenty, in a Nairobi courtroom, the creditors of a Kenyan supermarket chain called Nakumatt Holdings sat down to vote on whether to keep trying

The Shop2Shop Story: How a Cape Town founder built two informal-market fintechs for the same buyer, and turned South Africa’s two-hundred-billion-rand shopkeeper economy into a listed asset class On the twenty second of July, twenty twenty six, five days before this episode was written, a listed South African retail group called Pepkor filed an announcement

The Fuzu Story: How two Finns turned one Nairobi driver hire into fifteen hundred CVs, outlasted a decade of African online recruitment failures, and quietly walked into the machinery of the AI industry In April of twenty twenty six, in an industrial neighborhood on the edge of Nairobi, more than eleven hundred people walked out

The Tugende Story: How a boda-boda lender in Kampala took Silicon Valley crypto money, defaulted live on the internet, and rode back on an electric motorcycle In December of twenty twenty two, on the other side of the world from Kampala, an analyst at a Silicon Valley crypto lending platform called Goldfinch opened a quarterly

Two Swedish engineers — Filip Lövström and Mikael Gånge — walked away from Sweden in 2017 to build electric motorcycles from scratch inside Nairobi rather than importing kits from Asia, then bet the company on manufacturing every part in-country while every other African EV player assembled elsewhere and shipped in; in June 2026 one of Roam’s own riders drove 1,600 kilometres from Nairobi to Addis Ababa on a single machine to prove the point, opening the door to an Ethiopia expansion in a market Spiro, BasiGo and half the continent’s e-mobility companies are all racing into

The Anka Story In the middle of twenty twenty four, in Abidjan, a small e-commerce company most of the African tech industry had barely heard of quietly did something almost none of its more famous peers had done. It closed the year at four point one million United States dollars in revenue. And at that

The Yoco Story In a small restaurant in San Francisco, in mid two thousand and twelve, a young South African management consultant named Katlego Maphai was sitting across from a friend at a corner table. When the meal was over and the bill arrived, the friend did not pull out cash. He did not hand