Asili Africa

One man built Africa’s richest fortune from cement

A small Nairobi assistive-robotics startup is building AI hardware that translates speech into sign language in real time — and just beat 1,200+ applicants from 45 African countries to become Qualcomm’s sole Kenyan pick in its Make in Africa mentorship

The pan-African podcast platform built from Nairobi that let African creators reach audiences without traditional media gatekeepers — built quietly while the global podcast industry assumed Africa would always be a consumer market, not a producer one

From a single coffee shop on Adams Arcade to a pan-African chain — and the private-equity ride that followed

A cross-border casual-dining empire that exists because a Ugandan judge ruled that no one could own the word Java.

How a state telephone department with twelve thousand customers became the company that taught the world how to bank a continent.

How the institution every regulator wanted to bury became the bank the rest of Africa now studies.

Wandia Gichuru turned a Nairobi living room into East Africa’s largest women’s fashion brand — and rebuilt the production line overnight to survive COVID.

Meshack Alloys built Sendy into East Africa’s most visible logistics startup, raised $24M+, watched it collapse in 2023 — and is back with TABB, a trade-credit network letting banks lend to SMBs off transaction data

Pay-as-you-go solar for 3 million homes