Asili Africa

The Ghanaian fintech that called itself the Alipay for Africa, raised roughly eighty six million dollars from Insight Partners and a top tier syndicate of Silicon Valley names on c…

This is the story of Swvl. The first African company on Nasdaq. The cautionary tale that came home with it.

Two friends. Two laptops. Two thousand dollars. And a bet on mathematics that the rest of the world said could not be made from there. This is the story of InstaDeep.

This is the story of Wave. The app that beat a telecom at its own game, by charging almost nothing.

This is the story of how Tesh Mbaabu spent six years building Africa's most-funded business-to-business retail platform, watched it die, and walked out of the wreckage to build two…

This is the story of Sun King. The kerosene replacement company that became a finance company, and is now becoming a utility.

This is the story of Chipper Cash. The pan African remittance company that rode the cheapest capital in the history of African fintech to the top, and then had to teach itself how…

This is the story of Moniepoint. The boring software company that walked up the stack until it became one of Africa's most important consumer banks.

The Los Angeles fintech that decided the phone in a Kenyan stranger's pocket was a better paper trail than any payslip.

This is the story of how an ATM in Scotland accidentally founded Africa's first homegrown fintech unicorn. And of the engineer who built it without ever owning it.

This is the story of how one Zimbabwean engineer built a global telecoms empire by refusing to pay a bribe. And then sued his own government, all the way to the constitutional cour…

This is the story of an idea so good it raised three hundred and eighty one million dollars in seven years, made the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative write its first major investment che…

This is the story of how a Tanzanian sports television broadcaster, with a twenty thousand dollar prize and a Stanford degree, built a remittance app, watched the regulator kill it…

This is the story of a Berlin-incorporated, French-founded, Delaware-listed, Dubai-managed company that was sold to Wall Street as the Amazon of Africa, and of what was left of tha…

This is the story of how three founders in a Lagos co-working space tried to build the African Stripe, and how the company they built became, in the same year, both Africa's most v…

This is the story of how an airline founded by an emperor in a country with no paved runway became the only African flag carrier that has never failed.

On the afternoon of October 26th, 2015, a regulator in Abuja issued a press release. The number on the page was one trillion and forty billion naira. In US dollars, it was five poi…

Nigeria, the nation that for half a century had pumped some of the world's best crude out of its delta and then bought refined fuel back from Europe at a markup, was now shipping p…

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 countrie…

For most of the 2010s, the podcast boom was one of the great gold rushes in modern media. Billions of dollars. Hundreds of millions of listeners. Spotify, Apple, Google, all racing…