START-UP FOUNDERS THAT HAVE IMPRESSED THE AFRICAN ECOSYSTEM AND HOW THEY BUILT THEIR START-UPS
David Lanre Messan
Board Advisor | Venture Builder | Angel Investor - Building and investing in AI startups.
The African start-up ecosystem has experienced a wave of change and is getting more recognition like never before. Although it’s not growing as expected due to a decrease in investments and funding at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the ecosystem is budding, and we have some impressive start-up founders to thank for that. The work they have done and are doing has impacted Africa in unimaginable ways, blazing trails for new start-ups to follow. This article is dedicated to them and their stories.
The African Start-up Ecosystem
The African start-up ecosystem is currently valued at $6.6 billion with only five cities (Cape Town, Lagos, Johannesburg, Nairobi and Accra) responsible for about 90% of the value. The Fintech sub-sector in the ecosystem enjoys the most early-stage funding and attracts the most investments. The African ecosystem has 7 tech start-ups that have reached unicorn status. Hopefully, other start-ups follow in the years to come.
Here are some of them.
Impressive Start-Up Founders in Africa
1.????Iyinoluwa Aboyeji: The co-founder of two unicorn companies (Andela and Flutterwave), it is only befitting for the University of Waterloo alumnus to occupy the top spot. He co-founded Andela in 2014 and worked as the Recruitment Director. In 2016, he co-founded Flutterwave with Olugbenga Agboola and served as the CEO up until 2018.
Iyinoluwa, along with the other co-founders of Andela, thought of a way to overcome the shortage of software engineers in African companies and later expanded into North-American territories. Andela was built through funding initially gotten from existing investors of the group’s first start-up. Five years later, it raised close to $200 million in funding from notable investors like Mark Zuckerberg and Google at a valuation of about $600-$700 million.
Iyinoluwa was able to achieve the same with Flutterwave—a fintech company that builds online infrastructure for businesses and people to solve payment problems. Flutterwave hit a valuation of over $1 billion, following their fund raise of $170 million in May 2021, with significant investments from Y Combinator.
Both start-ups have offices spread across Africa (Andela has a headquarter office in San Francisco) and are still expanding. But that’s not where Iyinoluwa’s achievement ends.
In 2015, he co-founded Future Africa—a platform that provides investment capital, mentoring and community support to mission-driven start-ups in Africa. Today, he serves as the current chairman of the company. He is a Forbes 30-under-30 honouree, a World Economic Forum Young Leader, and has been listed as one of the Top 100 most influential Africans by New African Magazine.
2.????Ham Serunjogi: The Ugandan-born co-founder of Chipper Cash has not only excelled in fintech but is also as a one-time Olympian.
A graduate of Grinnell College, he worked for Facebook as the Client Manager for the UK office before quitting his job. On a road trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco with his friend and co-founder, Majid Moujaled from Ghana, they discussed how digital payments in Africa were complex, and that was how the idea for Chipper Cash was birthed.
Chipper Cash was launched in 2018 and has since made cross-border peer-to-peer payments as easy as sending a text message; its 4 million users can make instant, free payments without stress. They can also send and receive cryptocurrency.
Chipper Cash has raised over $150 million in a series of funding from 18 investors with notable mention of the Bezos Expeditions (Jeff Bezos' personal venture capital fund), Rabbit Capital, and Yahoo! In May 2021, following their last raise, it hit a valuation of $1 billion, making it one of Africa's seven unicorn companies. As at the time of this article, they have over 300 employees with offices in countries like Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa and Kenya and is expanding to the U.K.
3.????Mitchell Elegbe: The founder and C.E.O of the oldest start-up on this list, Interswitch, has impressed the African ecosystem for close to two decades.
His first encounter with an ATM in Scotland led to the birth of Interswitch in 2002. He was working for Telnet and had pitched the idea of creating a system to enable electronic payments in Nigeria to his boss. He started by trying to sell the software for transaction switching but couldn't get anyone to buy it until he created Interswitch to meet his target.
Interswitch has led to the creation of other subsidiaries like Verve, Nigeria's most used payment card; Quickteller; and many more tech solutions. Today, Interswitch is present in 23 African countries with Nigeria as its main base.
In 2019, Visa acquired a minority equity stake at a valuation of $1 billion, making it a unicorn company. Mitchell Elegbe is a recipient of prestigious awards and a fellow of the African Leadership Institute.
4.???Gregory Rockson: He is the Ghanian co-founder of mPharma and an alumnus of Westminster College and Princeton University.
mPharma was created in 2013 to manage pharmaceutical inventory for pharmacies and suppliers. mPharma is a well-funded startup that has raised over $52 million in funding since its inception. The leading investor is the CDC Group in the U.K.
The healthcare start-up runs retail pharmaceutical companies and works with drug manufacturers, service providers, and third-party payment apps to ease the accessibility of quality drugs across Africa. It operates in eight countries with Ethiopia as its latest entry. It has also acquired some big retail pharmaceutical companies in Kenya and Uganda.
5.????Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi: This list will be incomplete without the co-founders of the fintech start-up that made news after its acquisition by fintech giants, Stripe, for $200 million (the biggest acquisition in Nigeria).
The duo founded Paystack in 2016, and has gone on to become the leading online payment platform in Nigeria before it was acquired.
Shola, a graduate of Babcock University, had created a software product called Precurio (a Dropbox-like platform) under his software development and consulting company, Klein Devort, in 2008. The success of the software led to the inspiration of Paystack. Paystack was accepted into the Y Combinator program and received a funding of over $100,000. This got the attention of more investors and by 2018, they had raised $8 million, with major investors like Stripe and Visa.
Stripe plans on using the acquisition of Paystack as an expansion into the African market.
Other start-up founders have also impressed the African ecosystem and continue to do so. They include:
These start-up founders and many more have made a huge impact on the African start-up ecosystem and their stories are inspirational for ambitious young Africans who dream of owning start-ups that would impact the world. They built their startups intending to solve problems and create change and they are doing just that.?