Asili Africa — origin stories of Africa’s biggest companies
The Pesapal Story In a Nairobi office, in two thousand and nine, a Kenyan merchant with a small e-commerce website was staring at the checkout page of that website, trying to work out how to make it accept a payment. On the page were three logos. M-Pesa. Airtel Money. Visa. Each one, a rail. Each […]
The Artcaffe Story In two thousand and eight, in a shopping mall that had opened one year earlier in Westlands, Nairobi, a small European style café opened on the ground floor terrace. The café had wooden tables. A marble counter. An in house bakery. Imported espresso equipment. A wine list. And a design language that
The Greenspoon Story In a Nairobi kitchen, in two thousand and sixteen, a young mother named Juliet Kennedy was weaning her first child. She had done what any new mother in Nairobi does. She had walked into a supermarket. She had picked up carrots, pumpkin, spinach, chicken. She had brought them home. And now she
The Quickmart Story At the end of January, two thousand and twenty, a court-appointed administrator walked into a Nakumatt supermarket in a Nairobi suburb and turned off the lights for the last time. Nakumatt Holdings had been, at its peak, the largest organised retailer in East Africa. Sixty five stores across Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and
The Pan Paper Story On the twenty seventh of January, two thousand and nine, an officer of Kenya Power and Lighting Company walked into a substation on the edge of a small Western Kenya town called Webuye, and threw a switch. The power line he disconnected fed a single customer. That customer was a paper
A serial Indian-African entrepreneur set up an electric-motorcycle company in Togo in 2020 — picked one of the African countries almost no global VC was paying attention to — and within five years was running 100,000 electric motorcycles, 2,500 battery-swap stations, 30 million swaps and operations in seven African markets; then in June 2026 closed a $215M round that put it within touching distance of unicorn and confirmed that African EV infrastructure had become institutional capital’s next bet
A quiet South African card-processing company built the boring infrastructure that lets African fintechs issue Visa and Mastercard cards in 68 countries — then May 2026 turned it into the largest payment-infrastructure raise in African history, a $175M co-led round from Apis Partners and Aspirity Partners on FY25 sales up 117% year-on-year; the unglamorous middleware play that became Africa’s biggest fintech cheque of the year
Two twenty-somethings — a Louisiana-raised American (Chris Maurice) and a self-taught Texan engineer (Justin Poiroux) — launched a crypto exchange into a continent where almost no government had decided whether crypto was legal yet, weathered Nigeria’s hostile-to-crypto Central Bank circular, became the first licensed African stablecoin operator across 20+ markets — and in May 2026 got Mastercard itself to bet on them as the cross-border-payments rail underneath the world’s biggest card network
A Sierra Leonean-American founder set up shop in Cape Town in 2018 and built Africa’s first mobile games publisher — then turned the same distribution muscle into Pay1st, a payments rail stitching together stablecoins, mobile money and card networks across 40+ African markets; a16z’s first big African consumer bet, riding the mobile-gaming-to-fintech pivot that almost no other African company has pulled off cleanly
A branchless digital bank backed by Patrice Motsepe’s African Rainbow Capital set out to crack South Africa’s big-four banking oligopoly by signing up customers at supermarket kiosks — became the country’s only black-owned, black-controlled commercial bank, reached profitability, and in Dec 2024 drew a $250M cheque led by Brazil’s Nubank to become Africa’s newest unicorn at a $1.5B valuation
