South Africa’s Vodacom resists Kenyan push to split M-Pesa from Safaricom
Vodacom Group, South Africa’s largest telecom, has ruled out separating its M-Pesa mobile money platform from Safaricom and listing it separately, despite renewed pressure from Kenyan authorities to unbundle the telecom operator’s core businesses. The company, which holds a 40% stake in Safaricom alongside the Kenyan government, said M-Pesa’s operations were too closely integrated with the telco’s core business to justify a separation. “What we’re trying to position is we’re not looking to separately list the financial service businesses because we do see it intricately linked to our value proposition that we’re providing to the customer,” Vodacom CEO Mohamed Joosub said during an earnings call on Tuesday. “In fact, we see it more closely linked and then coupling that with loyalty going forward.” The statement comes amid ongoing discussions in Kenya over whether Safaricom— Kenya’s largest listed company—should be divided into separate units. Spinning off M-Pesa would give regulators more control over Kenya’s most important mobile money platform. Still, for Safaricom, it could disrupt a business that now brings in nearly half of its revenue and saddle the company with a massive tax bill. In August, the Treasury Secretary told Bloomberg that the plan to split Safaricom into three separate units—its core telecom business, a tower company, and the mobile money giant M-Pesa—was in motion, a move that could also involve the state selling part of its 35% stake in the company. Mbadi said a recent assessment found “huge benefit” to the state from such a restructuring, but added that a final decision will need cabinet approval before anything moves forward. The split would also enable the government to revalue Safaricom’s business units and list them separately in the future. A stalled split The Treasury and the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) have argued that such a structure could also strengthen regulatory oversight and consumer protection in a market where mobile money has become a critical financial infrastructure. Safaricom prefers a group reorganisation that keeps M-Pesa under the same corporate umbrella, arguing that a complete spin-off would only make sense if it adds value for shareholders and customers, not simply to meet regulatory demands. M-Pesa has grown into the most profitable arm of Safaricom, contributing KES 88.1 billion ($560 million) in revenue for the six months to September, a 14% increase from the same period a year earlier. The business now accounts for 44% of Safaricom’s total revenue of KES 199.9 billion. “Take a market like Kenya, the market is still growing very, very strongly, but our fintech services is sitting at 44% of revenue,” Joosub said. While CBK governor Kamau Thugge has pushed for the split to increase the regulatory oversight on the mobile money platform, he has also warned that separating M-Pesa could trigger a tax liability of KES 75 billion ($500 million), complicating any restructuring effort.
Read MoreFrom side hustle to $731 million in trades: Bootstrapped crypto startup Obiex says it is now profitable
Obiex, a Nigerian crypto startup that allows users to speculate and trade digital assets, says it is now profitable. The bootstrapped startup has processed $731.5 million in annualised trade volume, serving more than 100,000 retail users. It claims that a significant portion of this activity comes from high-value retail customers who trade large volumes daily. Low retail transaction volumes and narrow spreads often push crypto startups to focus on institutional clients. Obiex, however, is building around high-volume retail traders as its core users, proving that the segment can still generate significant value and profitability. “We started making money from day one,” Ikechukwu Okeke, Obiex CEO, told TechCabal. “We bootstrapped Obiex and have reinvested everything back into the business to keep growing.” The startup’s total transaction volume (TTV)—the cumulative value of executed trades on its platform, excluding deposits and withdrawals—grew from $588 million in 2024 to $832 million so far in 2025. About 70% of its trading volume comes from retail users and 28% from business customers. Year-to-date in 2025, the platform’s active users traded an average of $211,000 each, according to internal data seen by TechCabal. While Obiex launched an over-the-counter (OTC) business in April to provide services to high-net-worth individuals and institutions that want to buy and sell digital assets in bulk, most of the startup’s revenue still comes from high-frequency retail crypto traders who speculate on price movements daily. Obiex operates primarily in Nigeria, runs a trading app in Cameroon, and is now planning an expansion into Ghana, a market that recently published a regulatory framework for virtual assets. A bootstrapped journey from payments to trading Obiex’s story starts almost a decade ago. In 2016, Okeke discovered Bitcoin while teaching private lessons as a university student. He soon abandoned tutoring to explore what he called a “game-changing” idea. His first product was a crypto payment gateway that allowed merchants to accept Bitcoin and, later, stablecoins. Okeke describes it as “a Paystack for crypto.” But the product struggled to scale. Businesses saw crypto less as a payment tool and more as a store of value. By 2018, the founders—Okeke and Chidozie Ogbo, who serves as CTO—pivoted to what became the first version of Obiex: an off-ramp product that allows users to convert crypto to naira instantly through a “sell wallet.” It worked until the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) ban on crypto in February 2021, which blocked exchanges’ access to banks and payment partners. “When the CBN pulled the plug, we couldn’t process automated payouts anymore,” said Okeke. “We tried to run it manually, but it wasn’t scalable.” The ban cut Obiex off from the payment service providers and partner banks it used to automate transactions, making its off-ramp product impossible to sustain. The startup went back to the drawing board to rethink what traders actually needed and how it could keep serving them without direct banking access. In June 2021, the crisis forced another reinvention. Obiex rebuilt itself as a retail trading platform that solved one of the hardest problems for local traders: volatility and confirmation delays. Okeke said most crypto startups now enable fiat deposits and withdrawals through payment service providers. Making crypto trading faster and less risky Before Obiex’s trading platform emerged, Nigerian crypto traders often had to wait for multiple confirmations before seeing Bitcoin deposits reflect on exchanges, exposing them to sudden price swings. Obiex built a system that allows traders to lock in value instantly, removing that risk. It turned out to be a simple change with an outsized impact. Traders could now buy and sell in seconds, even during volatile market conditions. “We helped create trading volume in the market,” said Okeke. “People started trading more because they could manage their risk better. For many traders, Obiex isn’t just a wallet. It’s part of their trading journey.” Since its last pivot in 2021, Obiex has processed $2.93 billion in total swaps, and is on track to cross $3 billion by the end of 2025. It currently employs 40 people and continues to operate without venture funding. Running a profitable business Obiex’s founders say they’ve collectively invested about $150,000 in operational funding and provided liquidity themselves in the early days to keep trades flowing. The startup sources its liquidity in-house, allowing it to control spreads and keep execution fast. While Okeke declined to share specific revenue figures, he claims Obiex is capital-efficient and ranks among the top retail crypto platforms in revenue per active user. After establishing itself in Nigeria and Cameroon, Obiex now has its sights set on Ghana, South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, and Rwanda. The startup says Ghana is its immediate priority, partly because of the Bank of Ghana’s (BoG) new policy paper on virtual assets, released on November 5. The paper outlines a path for regulating crypto trading and wallets, noting that over 3 million Ghanaians already use digital assets. The regulatory clarity forming in the country is enticing for players like Obiex, said Okeke. Tanzania and South Africa are also attractive, he adds, because of their growing adoption and “openness to digital assets.” In a market where African digital asset operators, such as Yellow Card, are pivoting toward institutional-grade clients, Obiex is doubling down on the retail trading opportunity. The startup believes there’s still value in serving the high-frequency, high-value crypto users who trade daily and treat digital assets as speculative instruments rather than payment tools.
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The AI helping African companies automate work while humans stay in control
Last week, I started a conversation with Pheneas Munene, a passionate Nairobi-based builder. His company, Phindor, which he launched alongside his co-founder, John Maina, in 2018, is working within the part of the African business that has been getting attention over the last few months; the daily work conducted through WhatsApp chats, phone calls, SMS, and small internal task lists. These repetitive workflows are admittedly complex to manage at scale. Teams answer the same questions multiple times daily and follow up on leads, confirm orders, and escalate issues only when necessary. One person can do this easily, but when a company grows, the work becomes cumbersome. Phindor built JuaFlow (“Jua” is Swahili for “know”) to solve this problem. The product enables companies to create AI agents that handle repetitive tasks, such as lead qualification messages, delivery confirmations, basic HR requests, and product lookups. When the situation requires judgment, the agent hands it off to a human, Munene said, because this helps keep everything in context. The aim is not to replace people but to keep work moving, reduce back-and-forth, and prevent tasks from stalling. Why this matters Munene and Maina spent seven years building automation for medium-sized organisations. The work was similar across clients, but always built differently. That made every deployment slow and expensive, and with only a few organisations that could justify that cost, scaling across many clients was hard. The shift occurred when a retail company sought a more cost-effective way to manage high-volume WhatsApp and Instagram conversations. The founders wanted quick replies, simple lead qualification, and a human handoff for cases that required judgment. That solution evolved into Lisa, an artificial intelligence (AI) business assistant that was launched in July 2024. According to Munene, Lisa gained adoption because teams could use it without changing their existing workflows. As more teams used Lisa, new requests appeared. Some wanted internal task handling while others wanted logistics updates. The idea expanded from messaging automation to general work support. Lisa was re-worked and renamed JuaFlow to reflect this broader use. “Our client wanted a cheaper way to handle repetitive inquiries automatically without compromising customer experience, like identifying valuable leads and responding instantly,” Munene said. “That project became Lisa, the Intel-l-igent S-tore A-ssistant, which eventually evolved into JuaFlow, a platform that allows teams to build governed AI agents that streamline and speed up customer/employee-facing tasks while under human oversight.” 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 TC Scoop Subscribe How the JuaFlow idea formed The core lesson Phindor drew from consulting work was that AI agents need some kind of structure. If an agent takes actions without checks, minor errors spread through teams. If an agent cannot explain why it acted, no one can adjust it. At the same time, if the agent cannot hand off at the right time, staff lose trust in it. To avoid these problems, JuaFlow treats each task as a sequence of steps. Before running any action or tool call, the system checks two things: whether the action has the right data, and whether it follows the organisation’s rules. If either check fails, the agent stops and hands the task to a human to avoid silent failures. According to Munene, this approach is not complex, but it enables companies to integrate agents into real workflows without the risk of runaway actions. How does JuaFlow work? Most teams use the Studio, a control room where the team sets up agents. They define identity and tone, add documents and references, and build workflows in a graphical editor. Just like other platforms, like WayaWaya’s conversation AI tool, no code is required to get a working agent. Each conversation maintains a small “state” record, which tracks the workflow step, the agent’s confidence, and the applicable policies. Short-term memory stays with the active task, while long-term memory is stored separately and retrieved when needed to keep the operations light. Grounded answers come from a knowledge base that the team maintains. Say, if the agent is confident, it responds. If confidence is low, it asks a clarifying question or hands the query to a human. Munene added that the AI agent allows a company to add a chat widget to its website, connect to Slack, or integrate the system with internal tools through an API. The system also supports multiple workspaces, so departments or partner accounts can be separated while sharing only what they choose. What comes next Despite Lisa launching in July 2024, the company’s first enterprise customer came three months later. Munene claims that from February to July 2025, usage rose from about 15,000 interactions to over 700,000. When JuaFlow launched in July 2025, it went live with 15 companies and about one million recorded interactions. Munene said pricing for the service is credit-based, where these credits cover messages, knowledge access, and workflow steps. Credits do not expire as long as the account remains active. Enterprise customers, as expected, can negotiate terms. Many people across the region communicate through voice notes and calls, and many use local languages in daily work. Phindor is working on supporting these patterns as part of its plans. “Our main focus is rebuilding parts of our LLM layer to support local languages and voice. Africa is multilingual, and AI should adapt to that,” Munene said. 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Buying Starlink in Nigeria? Here’s the current cost and where to get it
Table of contents Official Starlink pricing in Nigeria Current Starlink availability status in Nigeria Getting Starlink now when your area is on the waitlist Starlink reseller prices in Nigeria Should you import Starlink to Nigeria? Starlink, which officially launched in Nigeria in January 2023, is now available across much of the country including major cities such as Lagos, Abuja, Kano, Ibadan, Port Harcourt, and Enugu. However, in high-demand zones, it currently asks potential customers to join a waitlist. You can still order the kit online and have it delivered (with warranty and support), but availability in some urban areas has been temporarily paused while capacity is expanded. What has been less stable is the price. The hardware and monthly subscription have undergone several changes, mainly due to fluctuations in the exchange rate. The current official subscription rate is ₦57,000 monthly, and the hardware price reflects the current importation cost. If the Naira shifts again, these prices may move too. Here is what Starlink currently costs in Nigeria, and the safest ways to purchase it. Official Starlink pricing in Nigeria If you want to get Starlink in Nigeria, the costs fall into two categories: hardware (one-time payment) and monthly subscription. Hardware costs The main Starlink Standard Kit in Nigeria costs about ₦590,000 when you buy directly from the official Starlink website. The box comes with the dish, router, mount, and cables. You can install it yourself without hiring a technician. Starlink also offers the Starlink Mini Kit for about ₦318,000. It is smaller and easier to carry around if you frequently move or need to stay connected while travelling. Both kits bought from the official Nigerian website usually include shipping and support. Monthly subscription costs The Residential Plan is the most common plan for homes and small offices. The current monthly price is ₦57,000. If you run a business with higher data needs, the Business or Priority Plan costs about ₦159,000 monthly. This plan is designed for multiple users, offices, and sites that require increased capacity. There are also Roam Plans for users who move around. The Roam plan costs ₦38,000 monthly, while advanced roaming or global roaming plans can be significantly higher, depending on usage and region. Some people try to use the cheaper Roam plan at home as a workaround, often leading to service restrictions later, so it is safer to choose the plan designed for your type of use. Current Starlink availability status in Nigeria In some parts of Nigeria, particularly high-demand locations such as Victoria Island, Ikoyi, Lagos Island, Surulere, Lekki, and specific areas of Abuja, Starlink has temporarily paused new Residential Plan orders due to network congestion and capacity limitations. When you try to place an order from these areas, Starlink now displays a message stating that service is at capacity. Instead of being able to purchase the hardware immediately, new customers are asked to pay a refundable deposit and join a waitlist. You will only receive the kit once additional capacity is made available. Starlink has not provided a confirmed timeline for when these areas will open again. The company states that it is actively adding more satellite capacity and expanding coverage, but this depends on infrastructure upgrades and, in some cases, regulatory clearances. After joining the waitlist, customers are required to submit identification details that must match the name used during the order process. Orders are not fulfilled unless this verification is completed. This is not the first time Starlink has paused new activations in Nigeria. In late 2024, nationwide orders were halted for several months due to bandwidth limits and regulatory adjustments. Orders resumed again after upgrades in mid-2025, but demand in major cities quickly reached capacity. Starlink engineers have explained that limiting new sign-ups in congested areas helps maintain stable speeds and service quality for existing users. For now, existing Starlink users in Lagos and Abuja remain unaffected and continue to receive service. The pause only affects new customers trying to register in high-demand zones. Suppose you are located in one of these areas and need Starlink urgently. In that case, you may either join the waitlist or check whether nearby towns or neighbourhoods without capacity issues still allow direct orders. Getting Starlink now when your area is on the waitlist Starlink is not immediately available in some parts of Lagos and Abuja. As a result, people have developed various ways to stay connected while they wait. Many of these approaches came from people we spoke to, who shared what has worked for them and what to avoid. “We just cannot sit and wait without the internet,” said Chinedu, who works remotely from Orchid. “People are sharing information everywhere. Twitter, Nairaland, Telegram groups. Everyone is just trying to figure out how to stay online.” Buying a used Starlink kit Since new kits in these high-demand areas require a waitlist, many people attempt to purchase used Starlink kits from individuals who already have an active Residential plan. The idea is simple. If the kit is already tied to a Residential plan, you will continue to pay the normal ₦57,000 monthly fee and avoid being forced into the higher ₦159,000 Business or Roam plan. As a result, used kits are now selling for more than the official price. While a new kit from Starlink costs approximately ₦590,000, used kits can range from ₦700,000 to ₦1,000,000, depending on the seller and the current plan the kit is on. You are essentially paying extra upfront to maintain a lower monthly fee in the long run. “There is a risk when buying used,” said Aisha, who bought hers through a referral group. “The seller has to remove the kit from their account first. If they do not do it properly, you are stuck. You have to trust the person you are buying from.” Activating the kit in another location Another approach is to order a kit and activate it in a state where Starlink is still accepting new customers. People often use addresses in places like
Read MoreChowdeck’s new ‘Bills’ feature and Mira migration show its super app ambitions
Chowdeck, the Nigerian on-demand delivery platform, is no longer just delivering meals. With a new feature that lets users pay bills, it’s now delivering financial services too. The new Bills tab allows users to buy airtime and data directly from the app, marking Chowdeck’s first consumer-facing fintech product. It comes one week after the company said it processed a record one million orders. At the same time, Chowdeck has completed the full technical migration of Mira, the point-of-sale (POS) startup it acquired in June 2025. A merchant email sent on Monday, November 10, confirmed the integration of Mira’s businesses and infrastructure onto Chowdeck’s system. With both moves unfolding within the same window, Chowdeck is executing a two-pronged rollout that extends its reach from consumers to merchants, each side of a growing marketplace now tied together by Chowdeck’s rails. This shift represents a clear evolution in strategy. Frequency creates habit, and habit creates the opportunity to layer financial services on top. Adding bill payments shows that Chowdeck is taking the first step to monetise its user base beyond delivery fees, turning transactional behaviour into financial engagement. On the merchant side, the Mira migration anchors the company’s position as a technology provider rather than merely a logistics partner, giving it control over both the consumer’s wallet and the merchant’s till. Chowdeck is building a closed-loop ecosystem where the money spent on food orders and bill payments can circulate within its own infrastructure. This transition moves it away from the thin margins of delivery into the higher-value territory of payments and financial flows. For users, it means a single app that handles everyday needs, from ordering meals to ordering groceries and topping up airtime and data. This will potentially make Chowdeck a daily-use utility rather than an occasional convenience. For merchants, the integration promises a unified tool for delivery, in-store payments, and settlement, reducing the operational complexity of juggling multiple providers. The timing is deliberate. Chowdeck announced a $9 million Series A in August 2025 and has since positioned itself as more than a logistics company. As competition intensifies in Nigeria’s crowded fintech market, where fintechs like OPay and PalmPay dominate consumer payments, Chowdeck’s advantage lies in its existing behaviour loop: thousands of users opening the app several times a week for food orders. Extending that loop to payments allows it to convert attention into financial activity. Still, the road to becoming a super app is fraught with challenges. Integrations add technical complexity and can expose companies to regulatory scrutiny under KYC and anti-money laundering rules. On the merchant side, retention will depend on the reliability of Chowdeck’s POS system: its uptime, settlement speed, and reconciliation accuracy. Each of these details will determine whether Chowdeck can sustain the seamless experience that made its delivery product successful. Nigeria’s platform wars are accelerating, with nearly every major platform fighting to become the country’s default digital lifestyle app. Chowdeck’s bet is that the road to that future runs through food, where daily frequency becomes financial dominance. Whether it can translate delivery efficiency into financial trust will decide if it can truly bridge the gap between the wallet and the till.
Read MoreNigeria unveils strategy to turn creativity and skills into a $10 billion export engine
The Federal Executive Council (FEC), Nigeria’s cabinet of ministers, on November 6, approved three policies that together form a cohesive economic strategy designed to build a multi-billion-dollar export model. The plan is to create a new economic engine projected to inject $10 billion annually into Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2030 and create one million high-paying jobs, according to the FEC. The initiatives, presented by the Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, Dr Jumoke Oduwole, include the National Intellectual Property Policy and Strategy (NIPPS), the ratification of the AfCFTA Protocol on Digital Trade, and the establishment of a national coordination mechanism for services exports, to be led by the National Talent Export Programme (NATEP). Each policy tackles a different layer of that ambition to protect the products and services originally created by Nigerians, open the channels and markets through which those ideas could be exported, and aid in training and scaling the workforce that produces them. Secure the idea The new National Intellectual Property Policy and Strategy (NIPPS), a unified framework to secure, commercialise, and enforce intellectual property rights, is the first of its kind. Creators, tech founders, researchers, and designers have always been productive, but their original ideas don’t often yield economic returns due to unclear IP ownership and weak enforcement of IP laws. Without strong IP frameworks, ideas are a currency you can’t take to the bank. NIPPS establishes a coordinated IP system that links copyright, patents, trademarks, and creative works under one strategic framework, streamlining the registration process. The process of developing this initiative began in 2020, led by the Ministry of Industry, Trade, and Investment, the Ministry of Justice, and the Ministry of Arts, Culture, Tourism, and the Creative Economy, according to the FEC. Its core aim is to establish a coherent ecosystem that connects innovators, creators, researchers, and financial institutions and turns intellectual assets into tradable and bankable capital. 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 TC Scoop Subscribe Open the marketplace With ideas secured, the next step is building a marketplace. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is a free trade area that establishes protocols on trade in goods, services, investment, and competition policy. AfCFTA aims at accelerating intra-African trade and boosting Africa’s trading position in the global market. The AfCFTA Protocol on Digital Trade is a framework tasked with defining the desired digital environment for digital trade within Africa. Ratifying this protocol enables Nigeria to influence the rules governing cross-border data flows, taxation, and digital services trade. The move is designed to lower the barrier for Nigerian fintechs, creative-tech companies, or startups across all sectors to operate seamlessly across all African countries and ensure Nigeria leads the efforts in the continent’s digital transformation. Create an army of talent to export The final piece of the strategy is the National Coordination Mechanism for Services Exports, led by the National Talent Export Programme (NATEP) under the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment. Services already contribute more than half of Nigeria’s GDP, yet, along with other non-oil exports, they represent less than 10% of the country’s export income. Recognising this, the initiative takes direct aim at building, funding, and formalising Nigeria’s growing services workforce. This initiative aims to completely re-engineer Nigeria’s workforce by training 10 million Nigerians specifically for the global services market to create a certified, world-class talent pool ready for export. This trained workforce becomes the new product with an economic target to generate $10 billion in sustainable revenue annually. The framework is also designed to attract over $15 billion in new investments into the digital and creative industries as capital, which will be used to build the tech hubs and creative studios that will employ this new generation of talent. This structure positions Nigeria as a global outsourcing destination and Africa’s hub for service exports that is anchored on talent and technology. These three approvals are an integrated architecture that forms the government’s official blueprint for a new economic model. It is a clear bet that the future of Nigeria’s wealth lies beyond the export of oil, in the skill and creativity of its people.
Read More“Africa doesn’t have a talent problem, it has a discovery problem” – Day 1-1000 of ProDevs
William Nwogbo still remembers the phone call. One of the talents ProDevs had placed with a foreign company, a developer from somewhere outside Lagos, rang him with news. He’d built a house in his village. And he was building another in Lagos. “I was like, wow,” Nwogbo recalls. “Even I myself have not started building, but you’re building.” It’s the kind of impact that might catch some founders off guard because it inverts the typical startup success story where founders cash out and employees get leftovers. Here, the mission—making invisible talent visible and creating pathways to prosperity—is working exactly as intended, even if it means the wealth gets distributed before it concentrates at the top. This is not the story ProDevs tells on its homepage. But it’s the story that defines what the company has become: a bridge between Nigeria’s hidden technical talent and the global companies desperate to hire them, built on a thesis that Africa’s real problem isn’t a talent shortage, it’s a discovery problem. Day 1: The friend who changed everything The spark that became ProDevs came in 2014, but not in the way Nwogbo expected. Fresh out of university, he was doing what thousands of Nigerian graduates do every year: applying to jobs on every platform, sending CVs into the void and hearing nothing back until a friend intervened. “A friend of mine introduced me to a company called Andela,” Nwogbo says. The friend vouched for him, told the company Nwogbo was worth a shot. Nwogbo was given a test to complete in 48hours. He finished it in four, and got the job. “For me, the theme behind it was a friend had to introduce me to that company, telling them that this person is a good engineer and it’s worth giving him a chance at least to see if he’s good enough,” Nwogbo reflects. “And it made me think: there are many people out there that are looking for positions, and they don’t necessarily have someone who is speaking for them.” That insight that talent exists, but access is gatekept, would become the entire foundation of ProDevs. But first, Nwogbo had to spend years working in the industry, watching the problem play out at scale. By 2018, Nwogbo had co-founded a software development consultancy called Fluturetech with his co-founder, Faith Dike. They were building products for clients, doing well enough, but they kept noticing something strange in the market: Nigerian companies weren’t hiring. They were poaching. “Access Bank would poach from GT Bank, this bank would poach from the other bank,” Nwogbo says. “And we’re not talking about senior positions here. We’re talking about mid-level, junior positions.” Nobody was spending time discovering talent. Everyone assumed the best people were already employed somewhere else, so they’d just steal them. Meanwhile, exceptional developers in Jos, Enugu, Imo—outside the Lagos-Abuja axis—were invisible. Cheaper, too. “These guys were not seeing access to those opportunities, and they were not as expensive as developers in major cities like Lagos and Abuja,” Nwogbo notes. By 2020, Fluturetech had pivoted entirely. The consultancy became ProDevs, a talent marketplace designed to solve one problem: help companies discover the people who’ve been there all along. “And it made me think: there are many people out there that are looking for positions, and they don’t necessarily have someone who is speaking for them.” — William Nwogbo, Founder and CEO, ProDevs The grind: Bootstrapped in a boom Launching a recruitment platform in 2020 was either perfect or terrible timing, depending on how you looked at it. The pandemic had just hit. Remote work was suddenly viable. Every other founder with a laptop was promising to connect Nigerian developers to dollar-paying jobs abroad. The space was crowded. “There were a lot of companies promising they would put people in dollar jobs,” Nwogbo says. “The space was saturated.” But Nwogbo and Dike had advantages that others didn’t. They were engineers themselves—Dike was a product manager, so they could spot good talent from bad. They’d spent years in the trenches, so they understood what companies actually needed versus what they said they needed. And most importantly, they understood the economics of recruitment. “We took our time to study the market,” Nwogbo explains. “We learned really early that in recruitment, different clients are different strokes.” But then there was outsourcing, the monthly revenue stream that kept the lights on. “Outsourcing is typically monthly,” Nwogbo says. “You’re generally making money on a monthly basis.” Their first client was INITS. Their first placement was a developer from Imo or Owerri, Nwogbo’s memory is hazy on the exact city, who got relocated to Lagos to work with Interswitch. That developer became proof of concept. If they could find one person and change their life, they could find more. By the end of 2020, ProDevs had generated ₦20 million in revenue, which was not bad for a bootstrapped startup. But the real test wasn’t revenue; it was trust. Day 500: The trust tax Building a recruitment platform in Nigeria, the founders soon found, comes at a cost. “When we started going into the international space, one of the things people would ask is: why should I trust anything coming out of Africa?” Nwogbo says. “The whole Nigerian fraud thing was in the news, and people are like, why should I trust that you would get me talent that will not jeopardize my code or do something dubious in my business?” It’s the invisible barrier African startups pay at the border: every deal starts from a deficit of trust, and you have to earn your way back to zero before you can even begin to sell. ProDevs handled it the only way you can, by being obsessive about quality. They built a multi-stage vetting process that was, by Nwogbo’s own admission, almost painfully thorough. “When a talent comes into our platform and fills out all the information, we have a team that vets,” Nwogbo explains. “We check their CVs, LinkedIn profiles, GitHub profiles. For designers,
Read MoreDigital Nomads: Mark Irozuru left Nigeria to chase stability. Now he’s building it into Bitcoin
Every digital product we use, from mobile banking to newer emerging technologies like blockchain, depends on a quiet layer of work we rarely see. Servers hum, code runs, networks talk to each other, and everything stays alive because someone makes sure it does. In Slough, a town west of London, UK, one of those people is Mark Irozuru, who leads the DevOps team at Botanix Labs, a blockchain research company building a new network on top of Bitcoin. “DevOps is about keeping things stable,” said Irozuru. “You only notice us when something breaks.” Irozuru spends his days making sure the systems that move money and data stay reliable. He and his team maintain the invisible infrastructure that powers Botanix’s Layer 2 blockchain—a network that allows people to send Bitcoin faster and use it for more than storing value. At first, his work sounds abstract; he’s plumbing data and optimising code pipelines, completing blockchain and validator audits, and ensuring uptime. But underneath it is a craft built on discipline, precision, and patience, to build a highly technical product he believes will “change the game” for millions of users. 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 TC Scoop Subscribe Finding a path in Web3 Irozuru relocated to the UK in 2022 through the study route. Before then, he lived in Nigeria and worked remotely as a DevOps engineer at a crypto startup. Life was predictable: morning workouts, long hours of code, power cuts, and calls across time zones. He liked the rhythm, but over time, a mix of safety worries and a sense that he had reached a ceiling in his career nudged him to look abroad. He chose the UK, where he studied cybersecurity at Bournemouth University. The move gave him a window into how global tech teams operate. “London’s tech community is one of the best in the world,” said Irozuru. “The structure, the network, the speed. It forces you to grow.” His path into blockchain had begun a few years earlier, through mentorship. He reached out to a senior engineer on LinkedIn, asking for guidance. That connection led him to a DevOps-as-a-Service company that supplied engineers to startups across the world. One of those clients was a Web3 company experimenting with smart contracts and decentralised finance (DeFi). “I was one of the first engineers to work directly under the CTO,” he said. “That project opened my eyes to how much the internet was changing.” It was his first taste of blockchain infrastructure, a field that blends finance, cryptography, and engineering, where, as he puts it, the next frontier of tech is to build trust. As a DevOps engineer, his mission-critical task is to ensure Botanix, the layer 2 blockchain network being built by Botanix Labs, never has downtime. If it does, trust evaporates, especially at its early stages of development. Building systems that never sleep At Botanix Labs, Irozuru helps build a Layer 2 blockchain network on Bitcoin, which is designed to make transactions faster and to allow developers to build decentralised financial tools. To understand how it works, imagine Bitcoin as a highway. It’s secure, but slow. Botanix’s Layer 2 is like an express lane built above it, one that moves faster but still connects back to the main road when needed. The network runs on a system of independent computers called validators, said Irozuru. Each validator keeps a copy of the blockchain and checks that every transaction is legitimate. Together, they maintain a shared, unbreakable record of truth. “Validators are like referees,” said Irozuru. “They make sure no one cheats and that every action is verified.” His daily routine, he describes, starts with the gym, then breakfast, and then a stretch of technical work that can last all day. His team is scattered across Europe, Asia, and the United States, so collaboration is constant. “I might be on a call at 3 a.m. with a validator in Singapore,” he said. “You learn to balance your energy because the system never stops. It has to keep running.” In July, he led the Botanix mainnet launch—the live rollout of the blockchain network to users. It took months of testing, security checks, and coordination with 16 global validator partners, including mining operators in China and Europe. “The auditing was intense,” he said. “We had to go through every partner’s security record, make sure their systems had never been compromised. It was weeks of sleepless nights.” The launch was flawless. The network has maintained 100% uptime, and Irozuru calls it his proudest achievement. “It’s beautiful when you see everything running perfectly,” he said. “You realise all the invisible hours mattered.” For him, DevOps is about anticipating them and preventing chaos before it starts. “People think DevOps is about firefighting,” he said. “It’s actually about engineering calmness. You design stability. You make things boring in a good way.” 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 TC Scoop Subscribe Competing in the global Web3 DevOps market Working in the UK
Read More7 African startups powering sales, sports, support, and settlements
Startups On Our Radar spotlights African startups solving African challenges with innovation. In our previous edition, we featured seven game-changing startups pioneering sustainability, artificial intelligence, health, and marketing. Expect the next dispatch on November 14, 2025. This week, we explore seven Nigerian startups in the sales management, sports, event management, and creative economy sectors and why they should be on your watchlist. Let’s dive into it: Laddar wants to be the all-in-one infrastructure for managing sales in Africa (SaaS, Nigeria) Laddar was created in 2022 to address the challenge of managing sales and sales agents in Africa, regardless of the size or industry of the business. The platform has an interface for managers and another for agents. With these interfaces, businesses can manage sales teams, track performance, collect customer data, and process transactions, both online and offline. Businesses can also create and run campaigns, which could be sales-related for physical or digital products or data-related for tasks such as account opening or retail audits. Each campaign can include product inventory, shipping requirements, agent groups, supervisor oversight, incentives that can be paid in cash, airtime, or data, attendance rules, and reporting dashboards. The platform has built-in Know Your Customer (KYC) validation for Bank Verification Number (BVN), National Identification Number (NIN), and selfie verification that is geo-tagged with the agent’s live location. The platform integrates directly with an organisation’s internal systems through APIs (Application Programming Interface). For sales agents, Laddar allows them to sell products in person or remotely through unique shareable links, QR codes or referral networks. Laddar’s embedded finance feature supports cash payments, which are debited from the agent’s wallet to settle the business, removing the risk of fraud. The platform also works offline in low-connectivity environments. Laddar’s revenue comes from a license-based model where companies pay for the number of agent seats they require. Additional revenue streams include recruitment fees for sourcing sales agents and charges for services, including SMS, email messaging, airtime, and data rewards. Why we’re watching: Laddar is positioning itself as a sales infrastructure. Its ability to handle onboarding, verification, payments, inventory, training, and performance analytics in one system, both online and offline, provides solutions to the realities of African field sales, where offline capability and trust-based selling remain critical. The agent wallet debit model for cash collection reduces fraud exposure. Laddar is building the operational backbone for organisations seeking to scale distributed sales teams across Africa. The company says it has registered over 25,000 sales agents who work for nearly 100 businesses using the platform. Sectors represented so far include banking, insurance, entertainment, FMCG, and e-commerce. Laddar plans to scale its agent network to 100,000 across Africa. 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 TC Scoop Subscribe Teeketing wants to power event management with its API-first infrastructure (Events, Nigeria) Founded by Madukaife Linus in May 2025, Teeketing is an API-first event management platform that allows event organisers and corporate organisations to plan, manage, host, and analyse insights from an event within a single system. The platform was created to solve a problem that many organisers face, juggling multiple tools for payments, reminders, feedback collection, and post-event certificates. On Teeketing, organisers can list events publicly or privately. They can schedule automated reminders, send event updates, including information like venue or time changes, to registered guests. They can issue certificates of attendance to event attendees, and also collect feedback on the event from attendees and non-attendees for reasons why they didn’t show up after getting a ticket, which can be converted to performance insights that show star ratings. Event pages can feature both flyers and promotional videos to attract attendees. Teeketing has a multifaceted revenue generation model. It charges a commission of up to 10% on paid ticket sales. For events that are free to attend, organisers discuss listing terms directly with the team. Additional revenue avenues include premium consulting services for large corporate or government events, paid advertising to promote events on the platform, and paid issuance of certificates of attendance. The startup also intends to implement a tokenisation system where organisers buy tokens to use the platform’s features. Why we’re watching: Teeketing’s primary differentiator is its “API-first” strategy. Unlike competitors like Tix Africa, this strategy allows organisers to embed ticket registration directly on their own websites, thereby keeping web traffic and audience engagement within their ecosystem rather than redirecting to external platforms. The platform is also setting up a marketplace feature that allows users to find and book verified event vendors, like photographers, caterers, or event decorators. These artisans will be rated based on past performance. The platform is also considering a buy now, pay later option for attendees to take loans for tickets. Teeketing has issued more than 20,000 tickets and claims to have processed over ₦1.4 million ($9,732) in ticket sales. Martha AI says customer support can be African and empathetic (AI, Nigeria) Moore Dagogo Hart, also the founder of Zap, founded Martha AI as a support agent designed to help companies automate their customer support departments. The idea originated from Hart’s own challenges at Zap, where a surge in users overwhelmed the human support team, especially at night. After searching for automation tools in early 2024, Hart found that existing solutions felt neither African nor truly automated. For it to work, businesses integrate Martha AI, which is currently in private testing, into their existing customer touchpoints, like their websites or apps, through APIs or plug-and-play widgets. The system is built on top of GPT-5 but features
Read MoreWhat the National Fintech Regulatory Commission Bill means for innovation
Like many in Nigeria’s fintech ecosystem, I’ve been following the discussions around the proposed National Fintech Regulatory Commission Bill with great interest. The idea of a unified body overseeing all fintech activity in Nigeria is ambitious and could be transformative. Yet, as with any major policy change, the outcome will depend on careful design and implementation and on how well it builds on the systems that already work today. Nigeria already has strong regulatory institutions in place. The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has played a central role in nurturing fintech growth while overseeing critical areas like payments, open banking, and foreign exchange, while the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has contributed through oversight of crowdfunding, digital assets, and other emerging fintech activities. Given this strong foundation, my view is that the proposed National Fintech Regulatory Commission could be highly beneficial if designed as a single, harmonised authority consolidating existing oversight functions. A unified structure, similar to the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, could simplify licencing, improve coordination, and enhance transparency. However, if the commission simply adds another layer on top of these existing bodies without clear integration, it risks creating complexity and slowing market entry. In that case, reform efforts might be better focused on empowering the current institutions, clarifying their mandates, and strengthening collaboration, while ensuring fintechs can navigate compliance efficiently. This brings us to why compliance is so central to this discussion. When well-designed, it supports growth while protecting consumers, enhancing transparency, and building confidence among global partners and investors who value predictability and stability in emerging markets. The challenge lies in striking a balance: overly burdensome compliance risks slowing innovation, while adaptive regulation that evolves alongside technology can support growth and maintain Nigeria’s status as a leading fintech hub in Africa. One of the biggest opportunities a unified commission could unlock lies beyond Nigeria’s borders. Interoperability remains a major challenge across Africa, both between banks and between fintech platforms. Only around 16–20% of trade on the continent is intra-African, and cross-border payments remain expensive and slow. By enabling “regulatory passporting,” where a fintech licenced in Nigeria can operate seamlessly across other African markets under mutual recognition agreements, the country could facilitate trade, enhance liquidity, and establish itself as a regional fintech leader. Such a model could create a framework for cross-border collaboration that strengthens both local and regional financial systems. Finally, the success of any new regulatory framework depends on inclusive stakeholder engagement. Fintech founders, payment operators, investors, and other key participants must be involved early in the process through roundtables, workshops, and consultations. These conversations ensure that new regulations reflect operational realities, support both local and foreign investment, and identify potential challenges before legislation is enacted. Collaborative engagement will also foster trust between the government and the industry, ultimately resulting in a framework that strengthens oversight, promotes compliance, protects consumers, and encourages sustainable innovation. The path ahead for Nigeria’s fintech sector is promising, but it requires careful navigation. Done right, a unified regulator can streamline oversight, enhance compliance, and unlock new opportunities for innovation, trade, and investment, ensuring that Nigeria continues to lead the way as Africa’s fintech powerhouse. ________ Dr. Austin is a leader in the field of payment and FinTech services, boasting over a decade of industry experience. Currently serving as the Country Director for Verto in Nigeria, Austin is instrumental in driving strategic growth and ensuring operational excellence for the company.
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