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For eight years, Lara.ng, the WhatsApp-style chatbot that told you which bus to take, what the fare should be, and which backroad to avoid, was Lagos’s unofficial transit oracle. Samuel Odeloye, the founder behind that chatbot, now lives in the United States. But the data Lara.ng has collected never left Lagos. From an office thousands of kilometres away, he is working on something harder than giving bus directions: building the invisible pipes to make last-mile delivery in Nigeria reliable and effective. That tension, building deeply local infrastructure from abroad with local data, is what defines this chapter of his life as a digital nomad. 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 Act I: Leaving home to build for home Odeloye left Nigeria in 2011 for what he describes as ‘a better life’: access to an environment that inspired his entrepreneurial drive. There was better access to United States banking, corporate structures, and a dollar‑denominated fundraising environment that was almost impossible to replicate from Lagos. It was on a flight from the US that he conceived the idea for Lara.ng. “I like to introduce myself as an engineer, sometimes an entrepreneur, but in most cases, a problem solver,” Odeloye said. “I’ve refused to wait for someone else to build infrastructures in cities where I see things being needed.” Fresh out of the University of Lagos with a mechanical engineering degree, he was more obsessed with design thinking than oil‑and‑gas paychecks. A flight in 2012 made the problem he wanted to solve feel painfully obvious. On a New York–London leg en route to Lagos, he found himself seated next to an American who had never left the US and was panicking about getting around London. Odeloye talked him through Transport for London’s (TfL) system, which his cousin had shown him once. With TfL, you typed in a postcode and got step‑by‑step directions. On that flight, they laughed about how “Nigeria can never have something like that.” But the joke landed with a sting. “I had this strong call in my heart that this is something I could do,” he recalled. The question that refused to leave him was: What happens when it’s the American flying into Lagos with no cousin and no TfL? The obsession followed him into business school. In 2014, he joined Stanford Graduate School of Business for an executive master of business administration (EMBA) in innovation and entrepreneurship, hoping to add structure to his instincts. That same year, with partners Opeoluwa Bada and Nnamdi Nwanze, he started RoadPreppers (RP), a localised public transit intelligence system for Nigeria that worked like Google Maps but tried to keep up with Lagos’s ever‑shifting bus routes and fares. RoadPreppers attracted about 10,000 registered users and then grew. It was a culture misalignment, said Odeloye, as he noticed that Nigerians found it difficult to do away with inborn navigation instincts. “I was building for the Nigerian user with a Western understanding,” he said. Nigerians might appreciate a map, but they grew up asking conductors, shopkeepers, and strangers for directions. “[Nigerians] reach out to have conversations. And if [they] don’t know how to get somewhere, [they] will ask on the road.” He stopped fighting the culture and leaned into it. Act II: The chatbot that thought like Lagos In 2017, Odeloye launched Lara.ng after sunsetting his previous city navigation-based attempt, RoadPreppers. This time, he wasn’t trying to teach Nigerians how to use or love maps, he said. He taught a chatbot to talk like a Lagosian: a simple digital friend that answered navigation questions, for the shy users who weren’t bold enough to walk up to strangers on the street. He and his co‑founders took the routing intelligence they had built and wrapped it in a WhatsApp‑style interface. Users could type “from Oshodi to Ikeja” the way they would text a friend. Lara.ng would respond with the exact danfo to take, where to drop off, and how much to pay. Lara.ng sharing directions. Image Source: Bolu Abiodun via X According to Odeloye, the growing user traffic told them they were onto something: the app pulled in 10,000 users within days of going live. Just before the COVID‑19 pandemic, Lara.ng had more than 250,000 users navigating Lagos and Abuja’s transport networks. Before ChatGPT and the current wave of AI hype, a bot built by a Nigerian founder in the diaspora had become a daily companion for people trying not to get lost—or extorted—on their commute Yet, popularity didn’t translate into profit. Keeping Lara updated meant constant fieldwork, hitting the streets to map new routes, track fare hikes, and keep pace with transport unions. The business model never fully clicked, even though the need was clear. COVID‑19 exposed that fragility. As lockdowns and remote work shrank mobility, Lara’s usage dipped, and the economics stopped making sense. “For most of 2020, it was hard,” he admitted. Teammates left, and all that was left was a messy roadmap and a mountain of hard‑won data. Odeloye at the RP office in 2020. Image Source: Samuel Odeloye Eight years into the experiment, Lara.ng was taking a break. But the information it had collected—on how people move, where they get stuck, and how much they pay—was too valuable to abandon. 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
Read MoreIf Orpheus had loved Eurydice with the same conviction that Temidayo Oniosun brought to the space industry, he might not have looked back. As a teenager preparing for his university entrance exam, he was deeply interested in the space sector. “I’ve always wanted to start a company in the space industry,” he said. He meant it then. He still means it now. In 2011, Oniosun was a student at the Federal University of Technology, Akure (FUTA), in Ondo State, Southern Nigeria, trying to find his way into an industry that barely existed around him. He wanted to study aerospace engineering, but no Nigerian university offered it at the time, so he chose the next closest thing: Meteorology. He didn’t wait for the space industry to find him; he went looking for it. While at FUTA, he joined global space communities and research circles, started a space club in his second year, and gathered students who were just as curious. Together, they searched for asteroids using software, launched high-altitude balloons, and ran projects that made space feel local. In 2017, he travelled to Colorado Springs in the United States for a space congress. He already understood how the space world worked, but at that conference, he realised how little that world knew about space activities in Africa. “There was some space activities going on in Africa, and nobody was talking about them,” he recalled. “The people outside of Africa and most Africans were also very unaware of this.” He came to Lagos after completing his National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) in Akure in 2017, and in February 2018, started Space in Africa, a space and satellite intelligence company, to make an invisible industry visible. Day 1: The $3,000 dilemma Space in Africa began as a website that published articles about Africa’s space industry. On the day Oniosun decided to start the company, he went looking for a domain name and found that spaceinafrica.com—the name that said exactly what he was building—cost $3,000. He bought a cheaper alternative, africanews.space, and got to work. It would take three years before he returned to buy the name he had wanted from the beginning. On that first day, he built a WordPress website, opened social media pages, and began writing articles on everything he could find about Africa’s space activity, from satellite launches to national space initiatives. Space in Africa was generating no revenue at the time. “It felt like I was doing something right,” he said. In October 2018, he hired his first employee. The question of how to make money from what he had built became harder to ignore. “Just writing and publishing articles was not going to make money, and the traffic was not that much,” he said. “We were getting important views, but that’s not something that would generate a heavy amount from Google Ads.” He looked outward, studying media companies like SpaceNews and SpaceWatch Global, that served European and American audiences on a subscription model. In early 2019, Space in Africa introduced a paywall with monthly, biannual, and annual subscription plans that ranged from $100 to $150. The first few months brought in only a handful of subscribers, maybe two or three, Oniosun said. Some paid for the monthly plan and never renewed; the option was scrapped with the hope that longer commitments would stick. But that did not solve the problem. “One of the lessons that I learned is that subscription business is extremely hard to sell in Africa… it doesn’t matter the product you’re trying to sell,” he said. “The same subscription business that would sell in the US or Europe, and will make you a lot of money, if you try it in Africa, it’s not going to work.” Still, the subscription plan was not discontinued, and the small revenue it brought in was folded into everything else the team was trying to figure out. By then, it was obvious that the model would not sustain the company; it would have to be something else. The answer came from something Oniosun said no one had done before. The industry report that changed everything If people wouldn’t consistently pay for articles, maybe they would pay for something deeper that they could actually use. In 2019, Oniosun and his team began working on their first industry report about the state of Africa’s space sector. “No one had ever quantified what the African space industry looked like,” he said. The report detailed which African countries had satellites, the structure of their national space agencies, ongoing space projects, and funding sources, Oniosun said. The report, priced at $2,000 at the time, was built for companies trying to understand the market. It was a risk because there was no guarantee that anyone would pay that much for information about an industry many people barely knew. “For some reason, it actually worked,” Oniosun added. Companies bought it, with some wanting higher-tier packages that included presentations and strategy sessions. A global licence costs $5,000, allowing large organisations to share the report across their multiple offices. At the same time, a premium offering included a two-hour session in which the Space in Africa team would break down the market and answer questions. According to Oniosun, in 2019, the company generated roughly $20,000 in revenue driven largely by report sales, and positioned Space in Africa as a source of truth about the space sector. “Pretty much everybody in the industry knew about us.” The 2020 pandemic slowed momentum and left the company’s revenue nearly unchanged. Oniosun wasn’t done chasing growth. In 2021, the company expanded into consulting, using its data expertise, network, and market understanding to advise governments, institutions, and private companies. Its first major project was a baseline study for the African Union Commission, focused on the establishment and operationalisation of the African Space Agency. That year, according to Oniosun, Space in Africa generated $300,000 in revenue. “With everything that we were doing, we were basically at the centre of this industry,” Oniosun said.
Read MoreSafaricom, Kenya’s largest telecoms operator, plans to extend data minimisation across its mobile money service M-PESA by late 2026, expanding controls that limit the exposure of customer phone numbers in mobile money transactions. The change will cover bank transfers and merchant payments, according to the telco’s chief financial services officer, Esther Waititu, who spoke on Wednesday at the company’s Nairobi headquarters. “Later in the year, we will be working with banks to make sure that that data is also masked, because we can’t be doing it in one area and then omitting the other,’ Waititu said. The move targets one of the most common ways personal data is misused in Kenya’s payments system, where phone numbers shared in transaction alerts are later reused for spam, marketing and fraud. Extending masking to merchant payments and cross-platform transfers cuts off a major source of such data at scale. The rollout builds on an earlier update scheduled for March 24, when Safaricom will begin masking part of a sender’s phone number in peer-to-peer M-PESA transactions. The next phase targets merchant payments, one of the main areas where customer data is still widely exposed. Buy Goods and Paybill, Safaricom’s cashless payment services that handle a large share of everyday transactions, typically send merchants SMS confirmations that include customers’ full phone numbers. Small businesses rely on these alerts to track sales and confirm payments. The same numbers are often reused to send promotional messages or shared beyond the original transaction, making merchant payments a key source of unsolicited marketing. Customers will still complete payments and merchants will continue to receive confirmation, but full phone numbers will no longer appear in SMS alerts. This limits how easily personal data can be collected and reused outside the transaction. The expansion will also include cross-system payments. Transfers between M-PESA, banks, and other mobile money services, such as Airtel Money, pass through several platforms, each of which creates a point where data can be viewed or stored. Applying the same limits across these flows will reduce exposure at each stage and establish a common standard for providers handling the transaction, Waititu said. The scale of M-PESA means the change will be widely felt, as the service processes 37 million daily peer-to-peer transactions worth KES 27 billion ($209 million), out of a total of 137.9 million transactions valued at KES 118 billion ($914 million). Safaricom’s data minimisation push has developed over several years. It began in 2020 with Pochi La Biashara, a product designed to allow small traders receive payments without exposing full customer details. In 2021, the company reduced internal access to customer data. A year later, it trimmed personal information from M-PESA statements. By 2023 and 2024, similar controls had been added to merchant-facing APIs used by large organisations, before extending to peer-to-peer transactions in 2026. Extending the same approach to merchant payments closes one of the main remaining gaps. It also creates new operational pressure for businesses that rely on phone numbers to reconcile transactions or follow up with customers. Without that identifier, merchants may need to depend more on transaction codes or internal systems to match payments. “If you think about security and safety, there is always some level of inconvenience. People have built habits around how they interact with each other, but it is more important to keep everyone safe,” said Peter Ndegwa, Safaricom CEO. Waititu said dispute management is likely to be the biggest risk as the change rolls out, as businesses adjust to resolving payment issues without full access to customer phone numbers. “The main risk will be dispute management. The process will require an additional step, which could introduce some friction. We are working to address that by ensuring access to information where all parties are able to consent,” Waititu added.
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