Asili Africa

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

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: Fast Retail, Bold Future In September, twenty twenty six, Quickmart, Kenya’s second-largest supermarket chain, announced that half of it would be offered to the public. It has seventy-two stores, in sixteen counties. The document it published ahead of the listing puts its borrowings at six point eight million shillings. Not billion. Million.

The Pan Paper Story: Paper to Profit in Africa Webuye, in western Kenya. In the early nineteen seventies, a paper mill was built here, on the bank of the Nzoia river. By one forestry study’s count, it consumed about half a million cubic metres of pulpwood a year. Most of that wood was grown on

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