Asili Africa

The company was called Metro Africa Xpress. Everyone called it MAX. Its two co-founders had built it out of a classroom at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology six years earli…

This is the story of Anka. The company that proved a hard business, and could not survive its own cap table.

This is the story of how they did it, how they nearly ran out of cash before it worked, and how, in the last twelve months, the founder they built the company around finally steppe…

Pesapal is the seventeen year old Nairobi payment company that was in market seven years before Flutterwave launched, that never left Nairobi as its head office, and that in mid 20…

This is the story of how a European style café at a Nairobi mall became one of the most structurally consequential casual dining chains on the continent. And how it survived the sp…

The story of Greenspoon, which is, in some ways, the smallest company we have ever put on Asili Africa. One warehouse. One country. Around one hundred to two hundred employees. Fou…

This is the story of how Kenya's collapsed supermarket sector was restarted, by a Nakuru family that walked away in time, and the patient capital that walked in behind them.

This is the story of a factory that built a town and then killed it. And the Kenyan industrialist who, seven years later, bought what was left for nine hundred million shillings ag…

This is the story of an Indian born industrialist who already had a port, an industrial zone, and the president's phone number in two small Francophone countries, and who decided t…

This is the story of two parallel companies, one in South Africa, one in the United Kingdom, that were rolled up by a third, dragged through losses that should have killed them, re…

This is the story of two college kids, a Taco Bell back room, a near death encounter with the Central Bank of Nigeria, and the African crypto company that just convinced Mastercard…

This is the company that walked into African gaming, found the wall between players and payments, and built the rail that broke it.

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 kios…

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…