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It starts in an elevator in Paris, France. On Saturday, April 4, 2026, Amara Uyanna was trying to catch a 10 a.m. flight, mentally checking off her usual work-travel list. Her suitcase in hand, she made her way to the lowest floor of a Parisian hotel where she had lodged; the elevator doors slid open, and she walked in. There, a stranger stepped in, whispering, almost to himself, “Bismillah.” Without thinking, she answered, “Bismillah,” too, their first connection in a foreign land. When they got out of the elevator, they realised they were both headed to the airport. The man was still trying to find a ride. Uyanna, who was in a hurry to catch her flight, offered to share her Uber with him. In the car, they fell into an easy conversation, switching between Arabic and English; the stranger and the Uber driver were surprised that she could speak Arabic. Uyanna recalls this specific camaraderie fondly. It is a snapshot of how she moves through the world: switching languages, sectors, and continents like she switches tabs on a laptop. She works as the Chief of Staff at Schneider Electric, the global energy firm, yet her life and work history read like the itinerary of a perpetual commuter between worlds: oil and gas, global policy, media, fintech, crypto, and energy; Nigeria, the United States, the Middle East, Europe, and Southeast Asia. “The vision is [to be] a global expert,” she told me. But that vision started far from Paris. This is the life of Uyanna, a globe-trotter. Get The Best African Tech Newsletters In Your Inbox Select your country Nigeria Ghana Kenya South Africa Egypt Morocco Tunisia Algeria Libya Sudan Ethiopia Somalia Djibouti Eritrea Uganda Tanzania Rwanda Burundi Democratic Republic of the Congo Republic of the Congo Central African Republic Chad Cameroon Gabon Equatorial Guinea São Tomé and Príncipe Angola Zambia Zimbabwe Botswana Namibia Lesotho Eswatini Mozambique Madagascar Mauritius Seychelles Comoros Cape Verde Guinea-Bissau Senegal The Gambia Guinea Sierra Leone Liberia Côte d’Ivoire Burkina Faso Mali Niger Benin Togo Other Select your gender Male Female Others TC Daily TC Events Next wave Entering Tech Subscribe The scholarship child who wanted to run Chevron Uyanna grew up in Lagos, where she finished primary school before winning a scholarship to Nigerian Turkish International College (NTIC) in Abuja for high school. She went on to Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, Louisiana, United States, to study Chemical Engineering & French. At a young age, she wanted to be the Managing Director of a global oil company, and for a while, she was on course to achieve that goal. In the summer of 2015, she landed an internship at the Nigerian subsidiary of ExxonMobil, the multinational oil and gas firm. It came with the prestige she had dreamt about as a kid: the exposure, the above-average stipends, and other little privileges she earned from working in a Fortune 500 company. During her internship, she visited the Qua Iboe Terminal, a crude oil export facility in Akwa Ibom State, southern Nigeria. It felt like a dream assignment on paper: a front-row seat to the industry she’d always wanted to lead. But the reality was different. She watched as crude oil spills stained the waterways that the local communities depended on. She watched people cough in the air they were supposed to breathe, and she saw crops die in ways that felt anything but natural. The work she had romanticised, she realised, was not as she had thought. It was rather an occupational hazard for the people living in a resource-rich region that did not feel rich at all. Her quasi-honeymoon ended after that experience. In its place, a single, stubborn question took root: why wasn’t a multinational company held to the same environmental standards in Nigeria as it was abroad? The answers she found were not enough. She went looking for better tools. After her graduation in 2016, Uyanna felt her Chemical Engineering background was no longer enough. To change the rules, she realised, she had to sit in rooms where the rules were written. She enrolled for a master’s in global policy at The Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin, in the US, focusing on development, innovation, and economics. In March 2016, during a summer break, she joined Sustainability International, a nonprofit working to clean up the Niger Delta region. But philanthropy has its own bottleneck: donors were far removed from the affected region, she realised. “I said to my boss [at Sustainability International], ‘let’s make a virtual reality documentary, so that way, we’ll be able to bridge the empathy gap,’” said Uyanna. “And even if people haven’t heard of where we are talking about, once they wear those headsets, we’ll take them there.” Al Jazeera had just launched its Virtual Reality (VR) unit, Contrast VR, in 2017. Uyanna pitched the global media company a VR documentary that would visually pull people into the creeks of the Niger Delta, rather than just read about it. Al Jazeera said yes. By May 2017, she was back in Nigeria with a six-person Al Jazeera crew, searching for a woman whose story would anchor the film. They chose a woman because Uyanna felt that when systems fail, women absorb the shock first and longest, and putting her at the centre would force the viewers to confront the human cost they usually scroll past. “Every time there is some sort of systemic imbalance, women pay the price more,” she said. The film followed Lessi Phillips, who was 16 when an oil pipeline burst in Bodo, a coastal town in Rivers State, southern Nigeria, in 2008, causing a major spill linked to the multinational oil firm Shell. The VR documentary, “Oil in Our Creeks,” highlighted the environmental impact of oil spills on mangrove swamps and the Bodo community’s ten-year fight for justice, cleanup, and recovery. The documentary premiered at film festivals in Amsterdam, Rio de Janeiro, and Vancouver, raising the funds
Read MoreNigerian crypto startups built their businesses on facilitating the buying and selling of digital currencies for retail customers. Now, that may no longer be enough. The country is one of Africa’s largest crypto markets. Yet, at least two operators say competition is compressing margins. Costs do not fall with volume, and the customers driving the most revenue are hard to retain. Peer-to-peer (P2P) trading became a lifeline for Nigerian crypto users after the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) barred banks from servicing crypto transactions in 2021. It forced local startups to find workarounds as global platforms like Paxful, a P2P marketplace that has since shut down, and Binance competed for the same users. Nigerian startups began offering a broader range of products, including P2P and bill payments, around that time. The serious push into stablecoins, B2B payment rails, futures, and more complex financial products accelerated from 2023 onward to diversify income beyond the volatile retail cycle. Recently, that strategy has become more pronounced. Several crypto startups operating in Nigeria, including Busha, Roqqu, Dantown, Luno, and Blockchain.com, have all expanded beyond retail crypto trading. Startups like Yellow Card have shut it down entirely to focus on the B2B side of digital currencies, signalling that the pressure on retail margins is acute enough to force a complete strategic pivot. Get The Best African Tech Newsletters In Your Inbox Select your country Nigeria Ghana Kenya South Africa Egypt Morocco Tunisia Algeria Libya Sudan Ethiopia Somalia Djibouti Eritrea Uganda Tanzania Rwanda Burundi Democratic Republic of the Congo Republic of the Congo Central African Republic Chad Cameroon Gabon Equatorial Guinea São Tomé and Príncipe Angola Zambia Zimbabwe Botswana Namibia Lesotho Eswatini Mozambique Madagascar Mauritius Seychelles Comoros Cape Verde Guinea-Bissau Senegal The Gambia Guinea Sierra Leone Liberia Côte d’Ivoire Burkina Faso Mali Niger Benin Togo Other Select your gender Male Female Others TC Daily TC Events Next wave Entering Tech Subscribe The maths behind a single trade The unit economics of running a crypto retail trading business begin with one trade. On a typical $100 retail transaction, the gross revenue a platform earns ranges from about $0.3 to under $1.40, three crypto startups told TechCabal. One founder, who asked not to be named to speak freely due to the sensitivity of the details being disclosed, breaks this down: a 1% transaction fee earns $1, while foreign exchange (FX) spread on the naira conversion adds roughly $0.35. After deducting direct costs like payment processing and liquidity, gross profit exceeds $1.25. Another operator, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that gross profit after all costs is $0.30 to $0.50, reflecting the startup’s leaner, flat-fee pricing model with zero spread. In normal market conditions, a startup keeps between 0.5% and 1.6% of every transaction, a figure known as the blended take rate. During volatile periods, when spreads widen, that range climbs to between 1.6% and 2.3%, according to the three startups. One startup charges a fixed flat fee regardless of market conditions; others run tiered models from 0.35% to 1% depending on trade size. The cost side is where things get complicated. Running a regulated crypto trading platform means carrying expenses that do not shrink when trading slows: staff, security, compliance, banking and payment partnerships, and the infrastructure needed to move money reliably. These costs are largely fixed regardless of the number of trades a platform processes. When retail trading activity slows, revenue falls, and sometimes becomes disproportionately lower than these fixed expenses, according to the three operators who spoke to TechCabal. “While certain costs scale down with lower activity, a significant portion of the cost base is fixed or semi-fixed,” said Joshua Avoaja, chief technology officer and co-founder of Azza, a Nigerian WhatsApp-based crypto payments startup that said it has processed over $17 million. “Costs don’t compress proportionally during periods of lower trading volume.” A typical active retail customer makes between two and six trades a month—rising to eight during market peaks—and spends between $13 to $15 per trade, according to the range provided by the three operators. Taking the midpoint—about four trades monthly at $14 per trade—and applying the 1% take rate, a crypto startup would earn about $0.56 per customer per month in gross revenue. Set against a customer acquisition cost (CAC) of between ₦8,000 and ₦22,000 (about $5 to $14), recouping that investment on the average user spans between nine months and over two years. For a business solely dependent on retail trading, it needs a deep runway to sustain its operations. “[Crypto retail trading] is a solid but structurally constrained business,” said Avoaja. “Customer acquisition costs are relatively low, gross margins on individual trades are healthy, and demand has proven resilient. But there are limitations. Monetisation is uneven across the user base, with a smaller cohort of highly active users driving a disproportionate share of value.” The business works with sufficient scale, but it has real limits as a standalone product, Avoaja said. Those limits become clearest when you look at who actually moves the revenue needle. High-frequency retail traders called ‘power users,’ make between 20 and 30 transactions monthly and generate a disproportionate share of platform revenue, said Avoaja. These are the customers every crypto startup wants to keep. Yet, they are also the most demanding customers: price-sensitive, quick to move to a competitor offering tighter spreads, and unforgiving of downtime or rate inconsistencies. Retaining them is not a growth problem; it is a reliability problem. Despite the margin compression, Emmanuel Peter, Head of Trading and Markets at Roqqu, a Nigerian crypto exchange, said retail trading remains “a great business” for the startup. Crypto Breakeven Calculator Analyze the unit economics of retail trading Median User Power User Ticket Size ($) Trades / Mo Acquisition Cost (CAC) $10 Time to Breakeven 18 Months Data Source: TechCabal Research (Assumes 1% blended take rate & $1.25 avg gross profit per $100 trade). TechCabal Tools TC Why building beyond retail trading makes economic sense The trading business is cyclical. Volume peaks in December
Read MoreWhile working in the tax computation and advisory department at the Nigerian subsidiary of KPMG, the global professional services firm, Kelechi Ibe spent his days helping clients to calculate and structure their taxes. His role was to match the transaction descriptions, which were shared by clients, to the tax law. However, the process for each transaction remained the same. By 2019, a year and a half at KPMG, that pattern had become hard to ignore. The logic was familiar, but the process remained manual, so he tried to automate it using Excel Macros, a tool for automating repetitive tasks. “It didn’t work,” Ibe said, explaining that the task required using an intelligent tool that could read every transaction and determine the appropriate tax to apply. “This would only have been possible if every transaction were hardcoded into the database and had rules associated with each of them. It would have been tough and complicated, with a higher risk of errors,” he said Seven years later, Ibe teamed up with Sam Ayo, a senior intelligence and machine learning engineer, to build TaxStreem, an automated tax compliance platform. Launched in March 2026, TaxStreem uses AI to automate tax computation and compliance by interpreting financial transactions in real time. “AI understands context and nuances, and it gets better with training. A tax technology, as I had always envisaged, could only have been possible with AI,” Ibe said. Get The Best African Tech Newsletters In Your Inbox Select your country Nigeria Ghana Kenya South Africa Egypt Morocco Tunisia Algeria Libya Sudan Ethiopia Somalia Djibouti Eritrea Uganda Tanzania Rwanda Burundi Democratic Republic of the Congo Republic of the Congo Central African Republic Chad Cameroon Gabon Equatorial Guinea São Tomé and Príncipe Angola Zambia Zimbabwe Botswana Namibia Lesotho Eswatini Mozambique Madagascar Mauritius Seychelles Comoros Cape Verde Guinea-Bissau Senegal The Gambia Guinea Sierra Leone Liberia Côte d’Ivoire Burkina Faso Mali Niger Benin Togo Other Select your gender Male Female Others TC Daily TC Events Next wave Entering Tech Subscribe Tax compliance is not optional Under Nigeria’s new tax regime, small businesses are required to use the e-invoicing system from July 2027 to digitally record their transactions for stricter tax compliance. To properly issue tax-compliant invoices, businesses first need to understand the tax implications of every transaction they make, including what attracts value-added tax (VAT), what is exempt, what is zero-rated, what withholding tax applies, and why. That calculation and figuring-out layer is where TaxStreem operates. TaxStreem is designed as an infrastructure layer for tax—a tool that sits directly on top of a business’s financial activity and interprets it in real time. The platform operates four tools that each handle a different task. The first is TaxStreem Numens, an AI-powered tax intelligence and computation engine. The engine, according to Ibe, is trained on Nigerian tax laws and acts as the system’s core calculation tool. He explained that when users connect their business bank accounts from providers such as GTBank, Access Bank, and fintech rails like Kuda, Paystack, and Flutterwave, Numens reads each transaction’s narration, interprets what it represents, assigns the correct tax treatment, and provides an explanation on why it took that particular decision. Although users can still upload reconciliation documents manually to calculate their tax, Ibe noted that pulling transactions directly ensures no transactions are left out. Its second engine, Flux, is an automated filing engine that logs into government portals, particularly the Nigeria Revenue Service (NRS) portal, to submit tax returns and retrieve proof of filing for businesses. TaxStreem Prism, the third engine, focuses on invoicing and accounts, specifically Accounts Payable (AP) and Accounts Receivable (AR), a company’s revenue and expenditures. On the expenditure side, Prism replaces the traditional email-based invoice process with a dedicated vendor portal where vendors can upload their invoices. Ibe noted that Prism analyses the uploaded invoice to check if there are errors in the tax calculation or tax ID, and sends a list of noted errors to both the business and the vendor that uploaded the invoice. On the revenue accounts side, Prism allows businesses to generate invoices directly within the platform. Over a call, Ibe demo-ed how it works: businesses only need to input their product, and the system automatically determines the correct tax treatment. For example, entering ‘diapers’ would automatically be recorded as VAT-exempt, as classified under Nigeria’s tax laws. The invoice is then generated with the correct tax structure already applied. Martina, TaxStreem’s AI chatbot, is the fourth layer. Beyond answering tax questions, it sits atop all transaction data and interprets business performance by offering insights for decision-making. TaxStreem combines its internal AI model, which is trained on Nigerian tax rules, with frontier models like Google’s Gemini to run minor agentic tasks. “What we did is create a custom domain-driven model that is proprietary to us and leverage frontier models to run some mundane tasks for some of the things that would not require user data to protect data privacy within the financial sector,” co-founder Ayo noted. The business of compliance TaxStreem has two revenue streams, targeted at both small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and larger businesses. It charges a ₦25,000 ($18.49) monthly subscription and has an enterprise plan without a labelled pricetag. TaxStreem also sells its Application Programming Interface (APIs) to other platforms, particularly business banking and payments tools. The startup operates in a market with existing expense management solutions for businesses, including FlexFinance, Bujeti, Duplo, and Bumpa, as well as accounting and bookkeeping tools like QuickBooks, FreshBooks, and Xero. However, Ibe noted that he views such tools as partners that could integrate with the platform rather than competitors. For him, TaxStreem’s edge lies in its automated filing on government portals. TaxStreem has raised an undisclosed friends and family round that Ibe estimated to be “tens of thousands of dollars.” “I have not raised institutional funding, and it was very deliberate,” he noted. “I didn’t want to raise until we had launched and had some traction.” He explained that TaxStreem’s next step is to add state-level
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