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There is a question Jennifer Adebisi has answered more times than she can count. It comes from investors, mostly, and it goes something like this: Are you building a tech company or a food company? The answer, she will tell you, is both. But that answer, she has learned, is the problem. “Food tech is too operational for Software as a Service (SaaS) investors,” she says. “But it is too tech-driven for traditional hospitality capital.” Adebisi sits in the gap between them, building something that does not fit neatly into either world. This is not a small problem. It shapes everything: how she raises money, how she is valued, how fast she can grow. And it is a problem, she argues, that reveals something broken about how Nigeria’s tech ecosystem thinks about consumer businesses. From Uli to the professional kitchen Adebisi came to technology through food, not the other way around. She grew up partly with her grandmother in Uli, Anambra State, in the South-Eastern part of Nigeria, who farmed her own food and cooked everything from scratch. That early life shaped a deep belief in food as something beyond fuel for the body. “Food is nourishment, food is medicine, food is comfort,” she says. “Nothing is more personal.” In 2017, Adebisi graduated from Red Dish Chronicles Culinary School, a culinary school in Lagos and Abuja, and then moved to a Head Chef position at Sabor Lagos, a casual restaurant in the heart of Lagos, the following year. During her time as a head chef, competitors attempted to poach her, she says: “They’d come to me and ask if I knew someone who was as good as me, and I got an idea, to create a service to link people looking for chefs and the chefs themselves. Uche and I called it Prime Chef.” Prime Chef didn’t get off the ground at that stage due to problems surrounding the technical side of launching, but that was Adebisi’s first foray into technology. In 2021, Adebisi became Chief Culinary Officer and co-founder at FoodCourt, a YC-backed food tech startup, handling operations and quality control on the food end of the business. The operations side of that business exposed her, for the first time, to what technology could actually do. Not as a glamorous thing, but as a practical one. “Yes, you can build a nice app,” she says. “But the app is just the front. The real work exists in the operations. That is where your money lives.” Adebisi and her business partner, Uche Banye, left FoodCourt in July 2023. When they cofounded Happy Belly in September 2023, they brought that conviction with them. They were, by their own description, non-technical founders. They had no engineering background. But they knew exactly what they needed the technology to do because they had spent years inside the operations that the technology was supposed to serve. Happy Belly is a customer-facing app; a proprietary kitchen management system called Kina; a logistics app for riders; a vendor management network; a dark kitchen; and, soon, a WhatsApp ordering channel. Adebisi says she built each piece out of necessity because the technology tools available in the market did not solve the actual problems she was facing. “There is hardly any part of our operation that we do not have in hand,” she says. The funding gap nobody names When Adebisi pitches Happy Belly to investors, she runs into a version of the same wall from different directions. SaaS investors look at her unit economics and see capital expenditure: dark kitchens, equipment, riders, and packaging. They compare her to global food delivery platforms and ask why her growth does not look like DoorDash. “Local infrastructure costs are not being priced into their expectations,” she says. Traditional hospitality investors, on the other hand, do not quite follow the technology story. They understand restaurants. They do not understand why a food business needs to build its own kitchen operating system, or what the long-term value of proprietary logistics software looks like. “We are an unofficial infrastructure company,” Adebisi says. “It is real estate intensive, people intensive, capital intensive. Investors who typically fund SaaS are not looking for capex. And traditional investors do not get the tech story.” Happy Belly falls between both categories, and Adebisi has to construct a hybrid explanation of her valuation every time she enters a room. She is not the only one in this position. The problem, she argues, points to something the ecosystem has not fully worked out: how to evaluate and fund businesses that are genuinely hybrid, businesses that are neither pure software nor pure brick-and-mortar, but the increasingly common thing in between. Consumer tech in emerging markets looks different from consumer tech in San Francisco. The metrics, the timelines, the infrastructure costs, the risk profile, all of it is different. But Adebisi thinks that the frameworks investors use have not caught up. “You are just the chef.” There is a version of this misunderstanding that is more personal. Adebisi has sat in rooms and been told, in one form or another, that operations is not the real work of a tech company. That the engineers and product managers are the ones building something. That the people running the kitchen, managing the vendors, and designing the systems that keep food moving across a city are, at best, support functions. “Someone said to me, ‘You are just the chef,’” she recalls. “And it was my operational insight that was helping us optimise every section of the business, down to what technology should be built and what features we needed to improve operations.” Her argument is direct: in consumer tech, especially food, the money is in the operations. It is in inventory management, waste reduction, vendor relationships, and margin control. It is important to know that the type of rice you use for a menu item affects your volume and profitability. It is in having a system that tells you in real time how many orders
Read MoreNigerian crypto startup operators have said the increased minimum capital requirements, introduced by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on January 16, will place a “disproportionate burden” on early-stage startups. In a position paper submitted to the SEC, the Stakeholders in Blockchain Association of Nigeria (SiBAN), an advocacy group comprising startups such as Dantown, Roqqu, and Breet, asked the SEC to review and refine the hiked capital thresholds for virtual asset companies. The increased capital requirements require Digital Asset Exchanges (DAXs) and Digital Asset Custodians to maintain a minimum of ₦2 billion ($1.4 million) in their operating coffers, up from ₦500 million ($351,000). Other categories of digital asset operators were also assigned higher thresholds under the revised framework. “While we recognise the policy’s intent to strengthen market integrity, investor protection, and systemic resilience, we respectfully submit that the current framework requires refinement to balance regulatory rigour with innovation sustainability,” the group said in the paper signed by its president, Barr. Mela Claude Ake. SiBAN said that while the SEC’s tougher capital rules are intended to strengthen oversight and protect investors, the blanket ₦2 billion ($1.4 million) threshold risks squeezing out early-stage blockchain startups that lack deep funding but pose far lower systemic risk for larger, well-funded companies. This could narrow Nigeria’s virtual assets market to only a few players who can afford the cost of operating well-oiled, compliant businesses. At the centre of its proposal is an alternative capital threshold system. The association recommends a tiered model with three levels: an “Innovation Track” requiring between ₦50 million ($37,300) and ₦200 million ($149,200) for startups and pilot-stage platforms; a “Growth Track” of ₦200 million–₦500 million ($149,200–$351,000) for expanding operators; and an “Institutional Track” of ₦500 million ($351,000) and above for established platforms subject to full regulatory supervision. The group says this structure would align capital obligations more closely with operational scale and risk exposure. SiBAN is also requesting an extended implementation timeline through 2028, proposing 12 months for tiered classification and transition planning, followed by an additional 18 months for capital formation and structural compliance. Under the current framework, affected entities are required to meet revised capital thresholds by June 30, 2027. It also proposed the creation of a Digital Asset Regulatory Working Group, a monitoring, review, and consultation body, comprising SEC officials, SiBAN representatives, independent subject matter experts, and other regulators, such as the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA). The aim would be to “ensure continuous feedback loops, rapid problem-solving, and adaptive policy refinement” as the market evolves. The paper also outlines alternative compliance pathways for smaller innovators and startups that may not immediately meet standalone capital requirements. These include mergers and acquisitions (M&As) for smaller players to explore and meet the capital requirements; accelerator and incubator partnerships that allow startups to operate under the regulatory cover of licenced firms; white-label arrangements that let technology providers offer backend services without holding customer funds; and venture studio models that centralise compliance and governance standards across multiple startups. SiBAN maintains that higher capital requirements could strengthen governance and encourage integration with traditional finance through venture capital engagement and strategic partnerships. However, it warns that without structural refinements, the thresholds may favour well-capitalised incumbents and foreign exchanges over domestic startups. The SEC director general, Dr Emomotimi Agama, told CNBC’s Closing Bell in a January 16 interview that it raised capital requirements to strengthen resilience and ensure firms operating in the capital market and Nigeria’s newly legalised digital asset sector have adequate financial buffers to protect investors. The regulator now faces the task of balancing that objective with concerns from industry participants about market entry barriers in a sector that remains in active development.
Read MoreNigeria’s Ministry of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy will review MTN Group’s proposed $2.2 billion acquisition of IHS Towers, a landmark deal that would hand Africa’s largest mobile operator full control of one of the continent’s most extensive tower portfolios. In a statement issued on Tuesday, Minister Bosun Tijani said the Ministry would undertake a “thorough assessment” of the transaction in collaboration with relevant regulators, citing the strategic importance of telecoms infrastructure to national security, financial services, and economic growth. “Our objective is clear: to ensure that any market consolidation or structural changes protect consumers, safeguard investments, and preserve the long-term sustainability of the sector,” he said. The ministry’s intervention underscores how sensitive infrastructure consolidation has become in Nigeria’s fragile but recovering telecoms market. After years of currency volatility, rising tower lease costs, and debt pressures that strained operators and tower companies alike, regulators are now balancing investor confidence with competition, consumer protection, and national interest. Earlier on Tuesday, MTN confirmed it had agreed to acquire all outstanding shares in IHS that it does not already own at $8.50 per share, valuing the company at approximately $6.2 billion. MTN currently owns about 24.7% of IHS and intends to increase its stake to 100% through a cash merger that would take the tower company private. The transaction would consolidate control of nearly 29,000 telecom towers across Africa, tightening MTN’s grip on the physical infrastructure that underpins its network operations in Nigeria, its largest market. MTN said it plans to fund the $2.2 billion acquisition using roughly $1.1 billion in cash on IHS’s balance sheet, alongside available liquidity and new debt at the group level. The deal marks one of the most consequential infrastructure shifts in Nigeria’s telecoms sector in over a decade. For years, operators spun off tower assets to firms like IHS to reduce capital expenditure and focus on customer growth. Reversing that model signals a strategic rethink as profitability pressures reshape the industry. IHS Towers provides services for other telecom operators, including Airtel, the second-largest mobile network operator in Nigeria. A successful acquisition would not only hand over the tower company’s assets, but it would also give MTN an advantage over its competitors in the Nigerian market. MTN already takes 52% share of the market in Nigeria, with Airtel trailing at 33.94% share of the market. MTN has also entered into infrastructure-sharing deals that allow competitors like Airtel and T2 Mobile ride on its infrastructure in areas where they are unable to reach customers. Over the past two years, Nigeria’s telecom operators have faced mounting financial pressure from naira devaluation and dollar-denominated tower lease obligations. MTN Nigeria and Airtel Africa both reported steep foreign exchange losses in 2023 before returning to improved profitability in recent results, aided by tariff adjustments and cost restructuring. For IHS, Nigeria remains its largest market, but one weighed down by currency headwinds and high power costs. Any acquisition would therefore represent not just a corporate buyout, but a structural shift in how telecom infrastructure is financed, owned, and managed in Africa’s biggest telecoms economy.
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