Asili Africa

Two American roommates from Brown built a mobile-money app in Dakar that charged a flat 1% and made deposits and withdrawals free, in a market where incumbents skimmed up to 10%; they cut the region’s money-transfer pricing by ~80%, triggered an open price war with telecom giant Orange — which retaliated by blocking airtime sales through Wave’s app — and became Francophone Africa’s first unicorn at a $1.7B valuation

Tesh Mbaabu built MarketForce into one of Kenya’s most-funded B2B startups — 270,000+ merchants across five countries, ~$160M in goods moved, a $40M Series A that was among the largest on the continent — then watched committed capital evaporate in the funding winter and had to shut RejaReja down; ‘we got this completely wrong,’ he admitted, before reinventing himself twice over into a digital bank

A kerosene-lamp fire in a rural Kenyan home in 2007 set two founders on a path to build the world’s largest off-grid solar company — selling light on layaway, one small daily payment at a time, to families the grid forgot; the pay-as-you-go bet that now lights one in five Kenyans and controls ~38% of the global PAYG solar market

The P2P app that raised $300M then stumbled

It started as boring back-end software for banks, then noticed millions of Nigerians had nowhere to deposit cash — and built an army of street-corner agents that turned it into one of Africa’s fastest unicorns; the agency-banking story hiding behind a B2B infrastructure company

An American founder built a lending company that reads a stranger’s phone — not their bank statement — to decide who deserves credit, and handed millions of unbanked Kenyans their first formal loan; the alternative-credit-scoring bet that redefined who counts as creditworthy

The phone that became a paper trail — how a UN researcher built the first smartphone lender in Kenya.

The pipes that African fintech runs on

Strive Masiyiwa fought his own government for five years — all the way to the constitutional court — just to be allowed to build a mobile network, and won; the legal war that broke a state telecom monopoly and seeded a pan-African and global telecoms empire

Training Africa’s developers for the world