Asili Africa

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

Prince Boakye Boampong raised $86M for a Ghanaian cross-border payments startup — including one of Africa’s largest-ever seed rounds — on claims of 200,000 users and $250M in transaction volume, before an internal audit found the numbers inflated, the board suspended him over an alleged diversion of $8M into property and luxury cars, and the company collapsed in 2023

Mostafa Kandil and two co-founders turned an Egyptian bus-hailing app into the first African company to list on Nasdaq via SPAC, at a $1.5B valuation — then watched ~85% of investors redeem their money, the share price crater, and the company shed a third of its staff within two months of going public, losing its unicorn status and roughly $1.36B in market cap

Karim Beguir and Zohra Slim started an AI company in Tunis with two laptops, $2,000 and no outside capital until their fourth year — then sold it to COVID-vaccine maker BioNTech for up to $680M, the largest tech acquisition in African history

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