Shuttlers brings bus routes to Google Maps after hitting 10 million trips
Shuttlers, the Nigerian shared mobility startup, has integrated its bus routes into Google Maps Transit, bringing its services to the navigation platform after completing more than 10 million trips since launching in 2016. The integration brings Shuttlers’ scheduled routes into Google Maps’ transit layer, allowing commuters to discover routes and book seats directly within Google Maps while navigating Nigeria’s major cities. The move reflects how private mobility operators are increasingly filling gaps left by overstretched public transport systems in African cities. According to the World Bank, African cities are about 29% more expensive overall than cities at similar income levels, with residents paying roughly double the global average for transport. In Lagos, a study by the Danne Institute for Research found that the average commuter spends about 2.21 hours in transit daily, equivalent to roughly 11 hours in a five-day workweek. Private mobility operators have emerged as structured alternatives to informal buses and increasingly expensive ride-hailing services. “For millions of professionals, commuting is still unpredictable, exhausting and expensive,” said Damilola Olokesusi, CEO and co-founder of Shuttlers. “We have spent the last 10 years building technology and operational infrastructure that makes daily transportation more dependable for commuters, businesses that employ them, and the fleet operators who power our network.” Shuttlers said it integrated its route data, scheduling systems, and real-time operations with Google’s technical requirements to join Google Transit. Founded in 2016, Shuttlers operates a scheduled bus service for professionals and corporate employees across Nigeria’s major cities. The company said it currently serves 30,000 active users across more than 1,000 itineraries and runs a fleet of more than 430 buses daily across Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt. Shuttlers said it has completed more than 10 million trips since launch, maintains a 99% trip completion rate and a 99.94% incident-free record, and operates both a Business-to-Business-to-Consumer (B2B2C) model, allowing companies to fully or partially subsidise employee transport, and a direct-to-consumer option for individual commuters. “Reliable transit information helps people navigate cities more confidently and efficiently,” Olumide Balogun, Director for West Africa at Google, said. “As more Nigerians adopt digital tools for everyday mobility, integrations like these help make trusted transportation easier to discover and access.” As it expands its mobility offering, Shuttlers said it is integrating compressed natural gas (CNG) and electric buses into its fleet as part of efforts to reduce emissions from urban transport operations, with the company estimating emissions reductions of up to 60% compared to diesel alternatives. In April 2025, the company announced that it had introduced 20 CNG buses to its fleet. In 2023, Shuttlers raised a $4 million equity round led by Verod-Kepple Africa Ventures, following a previous $1.6 million seed round in 2021, led by VestedWorld, which also participated in the raise alongside SheEquity, CMC 21, Alsa, EchoVC, and VestedWorld.
Read MoreAions Ventures backs South Africa’s climate-tech ambition with $6 million fund
Aions Ventures, a South African venture capital firm, believes the country’s next billion-dollar startup will emerge from climate, energy or water innovation rather than fintech. The firm has backed that conviction with a new R100 million ($6 million) seed fund. Aions Ventures CEO Kerryn Campion told TechCabal that the Johannesburg-based company has launched Aions Seed Fund I to support early-stage startups developing solutions in climate technology, energy innovation, water sustainability and the broader digital economy. For years, African venture capital has been dominated by fintech. But a growing group of investors believes the continent’s next breakout company will emerge from climate, energy or water technology. As South Africa battles energy insecurity, water shortages and ageing infrastructure, Aions Ventures is betting that solving these challenges could create startups capable of scaling across Africa and other emerging markets. The fund includes R60 million ($ 3 million) allocated through the High Impact Seed Fund of Funds (HISFoF), a R300 million (R18 million) initiative managed by the SA SME Fund and backed by the Technology Innovation Agency (TIA). TIA has committed a further R40 million ($2.5million), bringing the fund’s total capital to R100 million ($6 million). As software and fintech markets mature, Aions sees growing investment potential in sectors such as climate technology, energy innovation and water sustainability. “South Africa’s biggest constraints are now becoming our biggest markets,” said Campion, arguing that challenges such as energy insecurity and water scarcity have become major cost centres for households and businesses, creating opportunities for technology-driven solutions. The investment reflects a broader shift as investors increasingly channel capital into climate-tech and energy-transition businesses. According to Campion, startups that make energy more reliable, reduce water losses and help businesses adapt to climate pressures are becoming more attractive investment targets. For South Africa, years of load shedding and growing concerns over water security have created an opportunity to develop solutions with export potential. “If a solution can work here, where there are infrastructure constraints, affordability challenges, municipal complexity and grid limitations, it can definitely work across Africa and other emerging markets,” she said. Campion believes the next South African unicorn is unlikely to emerge from another payments app or digital wallet. “It will likely come from a company solving a major infrastructure challenge in a way that can be replicated across the continent,” she stated. The fund also aims to address a persistent weakness in South Africa’s startup ecosystem: the shortage of capital available between seed stage and institutional growth funding. “Too many promising South African startups stall before they reach scale,” Campion said. “This fund backs founders earlier and gives them the support they need to build businesses ready for follow-on investment.” Aions has already backed startups including Delivery Ka Speed, a logistics and delivery company, and SpaceSalad Studios, a gaming startup. For founders, the value extends beyond funding. “Aions Ventures encouraged us to think beyond immediate opportunities and focus on building a scalable business,” said Thabo Tsolo, Managing Director of SpaceSalad Studios. “Their support has helped us become more disciplined as we prepare for the next stage of growth.” The launch aligns with broader efforts by institutions such as the Technology Innovation Agency and SA SME Fund to close South Africa’s commercialisation gap and expand access to early-stage funding.
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The Next Wave: Why $215 million went to Spiro
Cet article est aussi disponible en français <!– In partnership with –> First published 07 June, 2026 African electric mobility has entered an interesting and quite frankly, a different phase. For years, investors funded the sector like a technology market. The focus was on founders, vehicle design, battery chemistry and the expectation that electric motorcycles would eventually replace petrol bikes. Today, capital is flowing according to a different logic. Investors are no longer asking who builds the best motorcycle. They are asking who owns the infrastructure that every motorcycle needs to operate. Spiro’s latest $215 million equity raise, led by Impact Fund Denmark and Equitane, captures that shift. The round is the largest ever secured by an African two-wheeled EV company and brings the company’s total funding to over $500 million. It follows a $50 million debt facility from Afreximbank and another $100 million funding round in late 2025. At the same time, several technically capable EV startups continue to struggle to secure even $5 million in seed funding. The contrast reveals how investors view the market now. Capital is not concentrated around superior engineering but on infrastructure ownership. In this case, the economics start with the rider since the most important figure in African electric mobility is not the investor or the manufacturer but a boda boda (two-wheeler taxi) rider. In Kenya, Uganda and other markets, commercial riders typically earn between $10 and $15 a day. Fuel often absorbs 40% to 60% of that income. Any company that wants to scale must solve that problem before anything else. Many EV startups approached the market by selling electric motorcycles directly to riders. The challenge was that the economics never worked particularly well. A lithium-ion battery accounts for roughly 40% to 50% of the cost of an electric motorcycle. Passing that cost to riders makes the upfront purchase price difficult to justify. Get smarter about Francophone Africa with our newsletter, Francophone Weekly—the startups, tech policies, and institutions building the pipelines for ecosystem growth. Subscribe Charging presents a second problem considering a commercial rider earns money only when moving. Waiting one to four hours for a battery to recharge means lost trips and lost income. A charging station may work for a private vehicle owner, but is a tougher proposition for someone whose motorcycle serves as a daily business vehicle. Spiro’s answer was to separate the battery from the motorcycle. Under its battery-as-a-service model, riders purchase the motorcycle while subscribing to the battery network. The company says this reduces the motorcycle’s price to roughly 40% below that of a comparable petrol bike. When power runs low, riders exchange depleted batteries for fully charged ones in under 2 minutes. Daily operating costs can fall below $2, producing savings of up to $2 per day and reducing mobility costs by around 40%. This shows that the appeal is not really that difficult to understand. The model works because what saves riders money also creates predictable demand and turns each motorcycle into a recurring customer rather than a one time sale. Spiro looks less like a EV company and more like a utility This distinction sits at the centre of the funding story. Look at it this way: a conventional motorcycle manufacturer earns revenue when a vehicle is sold. The relationship with the customer largely ends at the point of purchase. Spiro’s model extends far beyond the initial sale because every motorcycle added to the network becomes a long-term consumer of battery swaps. Revenue is generated not only when the bike enters service but also every time the rider returns for energy. That difference may sound subtle but in practice, it changes the type of capital a company can attract. The investors behind Spiro are not typical venture capital firms chasing software-style growth. Impact Fund Denmark, for example, deploys capital on behalf of Danish pension savers. These investors spend their time assessing ports, power projects, transport assets and utilities. They are accustomed to businesses that require large upfront investments and produce steady cash flows over many years. A battery swapping network fits comfortably within that framework. Spiro claims it has deployed 100,000 electric vehicles, built 2,500 smart battery swapping stations, and completed more than 30 million battery swaps. Those figures are notable not simply because of their scale, but because they resemble the operating metrics of infrastructure networks rather than those of a typical startup. Next Wave continues after this ad. We’re thrilled to announce the official theme for Moonshot 2026: “Courage & Conviction: Building for a New World.” This year, we’re calling on the African tech scene to back bold ideas and dig deep to build an ecosystem that solves African problems on a global scale. The continent’s most ambitious founders, investors, LPs, operators, creatives, and policymakers will converge at Moonshot 2026 to chart Africa’s next era. You don’t want to be left out. Secure Your Spot! The real asset is the network The easiest way to understand Spiro’s position is to stop thinking about motorcycles and start thinking about telecom towers. A telecom operator with the largest tower network enjoys advantages that go far beyond handset quality. Coverage becomes the product. Battery swapping networks operate similarly. Once thousands of swap stations are distributed across major cities, convenience becomes difficult to replicate. Riders naturally gravitate towards the network with the greatest coverage because access to energy determines how much income they can generate each day. A competitor cannot solve that problem by producing a slightly lighter motorcycle or a more efficient motor. It must first spend tens of millions of dollars building an alternative network of physical stations. This is the central logic of infrastructure investing: scale makes competition more expensive. As networks grow, the cost of replicating them rises, which is why investors often prefer backing a company that has already achieved scale over one that is still proving its model. Governments have reasons to support the model Large funding rounds rarely happen without some degree of political alignment. Across Sub-Saharan Africa,
Read MoreWhat to expect at Apple’s WWDC 2026 keynote on Monday
Table of contents When and how to watch the Apple WWDC 2026 What to expect at the Apple WWDC 2026 When will you actually get these features? One more thing: Tim Cook’s farewell Apple’s WWDC 2026 keynote will be held on Monday, June 8, at 10 a.m. PT (6:00 p.m. WAT). If you have ever skipped an Apple software event because it felt like a routine update show, this is the year to pay attention. Two things make this year’s Apple WWDC different from any keynote in the past decade. One, it is Tim Cook’s last keynote as Apple CEO. He announced in April that he would step down on September 1, with John Ternus taking the top job. Second, Apple has a lot to prove in AI. The company promised a smarter, more personal Siri back in 2024, advertised it heavily alongside the iPhone 16, and then repeatedly delayed it, resulting in a $250 million settlement. WWDC 2026 is where Apple has to show the rebuild is done. Here is everything you can expect to see. When and how to watch the Apple WWDC 2026 The keynote starts Monday, June 8, at 10 a.m. PT (6:00 p.m. WAT). Here is what that looks like in your time zone: 1 pm ET (US East Coast) 6 pm BST (UK) 6 pm WAT (Nigeria and West Africa) 7 pm CEST (Central Europe) You can watch it live on Apple.com, the Apple TV app, or Apple’s YouTube channel. Apple pre-records its WWDC keynotes, so there is no live Q&A. The Platforms State of the Union, which is more developer-focused, follows at 1 p.m. PT on the same day. WWDC runs from June 8 through June 12. What to expect at the Apple WWDC 2026 1. The new Siri: This is the centrepiece of the whole event. Apple is overhauling Siri from the ground up, and for the first time, it will work like a proper AI chatbot. Powered by Google Gemini Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported in November 2025 that Apple licenced a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter Gemini model from Google at roughly $1 billion per year. Apple and Google confirmed the partnership in a joint statement in January 2026. The deal means Apple’s new Siri runs on a model that is eight times larger than the one Apple built on its own. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian confirmed the arrangement publicly at Google Cloud Next in April 2026, saying the companies are building “the next generation of Apple Foundation Models based on Gemini technology.” The financial terms and model size figures come from Bloomberg reporting, not from either company officially. A dedicated Siri app Siri is getting its own standalone app across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It works like ChatGPT or Gemini: text and voice input, back-and-forth conversation, and saved chat history that syncs via iCloud. You can set history to expire after 30 days, a year, or never. The interface defaults to a dark theme and includes a button for uploading images and documents. The Dynamic Island glow When you activate Siri on your iPhone, the Dynamic Island will expand and glow. Swiping down from the top centre of the screen pulls up a “Search or Ask” bar that replaces Spotlight search. You can swipe down further to open a full conversation, which looks similar to an iMessage thread, with mini cards for weather, calendar entries, and notes appearing inline. Context awareness and app actions This is what Apple actually promised in 2024 and never shipped. The new Siri is expected to: Read what is on your screen and respond to it Access your emails, messages, calendar, contacts, and photos to give you personalised answers Take actions inside and across apps, such as booking a calendar event or sending a message, based on a single request Handle multi-step instructions in one sentence You choose your AI model A new Extensions system will let you pick which AI handles Apple Intelligence features. The options are ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude. Each can have its own voice, so you know which model answered. This ends OpenAI’s exclusivity on the iPhone. If you never change your settings, you will be routed to Gemini by default. Important: This is a preview, not a full launch Gurman has reported Apple is still labelling the new Siri a “beta” internally. Developer builds include a toggle to switch back to the old Siri. Apple may put some features behind a waitlist when iOS 27 ships in September. In February 2026, Apple engineers working on the iOS 26.5 test build reported that not all features were working reliably. Set your expectations accordingly. 2. iOS 27: Think of iOS 27 as a clean-up release. In the same way Apple released Mac OS X Snow Leopard in 2009, mostly to fix things rather than add features, iOS 27 is focused on making your iPhone faster and more reliable. iOS 26 shipped with complaints about overheating, battery drain, keyboard failures, UI glitches, and slow animations. iOS 27 is built to address that. Liquid Glass gets refined Apple is not removing its Liquid Glass design from iOS 27. The look introduced in iOS 26 remains, but Apple is adjusting the transparency and contrast to improve readability. There will reportedly be a system-wide slider you can use to dial back the effect. Tab bars in apps like Music, Podcasts, and Apple TV will also get updated. AI features are spreading across apps Apple Intelligence is expanding into more built-in apps: Camera: Visual Intelligence now appears in the Camera app as its own mode. You will be able to scan a nutrition label straight into the Health app or scan a phone number into Contacts. Photos: New generative editing tools called Extend, Enhance, and Reframe are coming, though Gurman says some may not make the final cut if testing stays inconsistent. Shortcuts: You will be able to create shortcuts by describing what you want in plain language. Safari: A new feature called Organise Tabs will
Read MoreEric Asuma on childhood, ambition, and refusing to sell Kenyan Wall Street
There is a type of entrepreneurs who start a company because they have seen a gap in the market. Then there is the kind who start one because they are trying to make sense of the world around them. When I met Eric Asuma, founder of The Kenyan Wall Street, he struck me as belonging to the second group. He grew up watching his parents run small businesses, where every shilling mattered, and every decision carried far-reaching consequences. Long before he became a founder, he had a front-row seat to the realities of building a company from scratch. He credits his parents with instilling the discipline and resilience that would later shape his own entrepreneurial journey. In 2014, while working at the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE), he started The Kenyan Wall Street as a side project. At first, it was little more than a hobby—a platform to explain markets and provide investors with information that was often difficult to find or understand. More than a decade later, that hobby has evolved into Wall Street Africa, a financial intelligence business spanning media, data, and events, serving a growing community of investors across the continent. Over a video call, we talked about growing up around entrepreneurs, the early days of building a financial media company when few believed there was a market for it, the evolution from content to intelligence, and why he believes Africa’s investment ecosystem still suffers from an information problem. We also discussed legacy. Asuma says he wants to be remembered not simply as the founder of a company, but as someone who built critical infrastructure that helped investors better understand markets. The future, he says, looks promising. But like many founders, he seems less interested in the destination than in the work of building. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. What experiences from your childhood shaped the way you think about money, opportunity, and economic mobility today? It mostly comes down to upbringing. I grew up in a household where entrepreneurship wasn’t an abstract idea; it was daily life. My parents ran small businesses, and I watched closely how those businesses were started, sustained, and sometimes rebuilt after setbacks. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was formative. That environment shapes your thinking. You learn early that resources are limited, but imagination is not. You also learn that effort compounds slowly, often invisibly, before it produces any meaningful outcome. My parents didn’t frame this as a philosophy; it was simply how they lived. You start something small, you keep going, you adjust, you try again. What stayed with me most was the discipline behind entrepreneurship. Nothing was wasted—not time, not opportunity, not effort. That mindset creates a respect for work itself, regardless of scale. We came from a very humble background, so economic mobility was never assumed. It was something you had to actively work toward. But my parents instilled a belief: if you put in the work and stay persistent, opportunities eventually show up. Not always in predictable ways, but they do arrive. That belief has influenced how I think about building businesses and approaching setbacks. Even today, I return to that early conditioning: start small, stay consistent, and trust that compounding will eventually do its work. Before the Kenyan Wall Street existed, what did you believe was missing from Africa’s financial and business information ecosystem? It was less a grand idea and more an observation that accumulated over time. I was working at the stock exchange, with a front-row seat to how information moved—or didn’t move—through the system. What struck me was how fragmented and manual it all was. Africa’s markets had returns, activity, and real economic significance, but the information infrastructure lagged far behind more developed markets. Data wasn’t always accessible in real time. Sometimes it wasn’t structured at all. Even basic market functions—bond pricing, yields, calculations—were often handled through separate spreadsheets maintained by different institutions. There was no unified system of truth. Yet fixed income dominates African capital markets, accounting for more than 70% of activity in some markets. While global attention often gravitates toward equities, the real engine of the system was happening in a relatively opaque corner of finance. Institutions were making multi-million-dollar decisions with limited automation and inconsistent data pipelines. It was not a lack of intelligence; it was a lack of infrastructure. This shaped the direction of what we eventually built at the intersection of capital markets intelligence, financial media, and institutional tools. The thinking evolved from a media-first approach into something broader: you cannot build effective markets without first building the information layer that supports them. What problem were you trying to solve when you launched The Kenyan Wall Street, and how has that vision evolved into Wall Street Africa? When I started what later became The Kenyan Wall Street around 2014, it wasn’t originally a business idea, more a side project. I was working at the stock exchange, and friends constantly asked how they could access market information. That question kept coming up, and it exposed a gap I had taken for granted while inside the system. Inside the exchange, I also noticed something unusual: information flow was not automated. In more developed markets, announcements move through tightly integrated systems; everyone receives them simultaneously. In our case, information could physically arrive at the exchange and sit at reception for hours or even days before reaching the broader market. That delay, in finance, is not just inefficient; it is material. I started casually sharing snippets of information online. At first, it was curiosity-driven. I didn’t think of it as a product. But something interesting happened: the audience expanded quickly. I began receiving messages from investors—some in Dubai, others in Europe—asking for deeper insights into specific companies. These were not casual readers; they were institutional actors making real allocation decisions. I resisted the idea that this could become a formal business. I wasn’t trained as an analyst. But demand kept growing, and the feedback became consistent: build a
Read MoreNigeria licenced 46 telecom challengers to rival MTN and Airtel. Few have taken off.
Every morning before Ewoma Okweni logs in to work from her apartment in Ajah, a suburban neighbourhood in Lagos, she calculates how much internet bandwidth the day will cost her. An audit officer at PwC Nigeria, Okweni spends between eight and ten hours online daily on days she works from home, moving between cloud-hosted spreadsheets, PowerPoint files, video meetings, and Chrome windows that multiply endlessly across her screen. Twenty gigabytes of data disappear in three or four days. She buys a weekly ₦5,000 ($3.65) bundle because, for her, the monthly plans no longer make economic sense for the kind of work she does. “I have like thirty tabs open on Chrome, multiple PowerPoint files open,” she told TechCabal in a telephone conversation. And I work on the cloud. Whatever you do has to be saved on the cloud.” On weekends, the data drain continues with Netflix, Instagram, and YouTube. Yet despite rising costs and persistent frustrations, Okweni has never seriously considered leaving MTN for one of Nigeria’s new Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs)–telecom providers that offer voice, data, and messaging services by leasing network capacity from established operators. The prospect feels like more hassle than it is worth: SIM registration, identity verification, and uncertainty over whether the service will be reliable enough to justify the switch. “I don’t think I really need another one,” she said. “And I’ll be concerned if they can maintain the service over time.” That quiet hesitation may explain one of the strangest stories unfolding inside Nigeria’s telecom sector. In October 2025, Vitel Wireless became the first MVNO to officially launch operations in Nigeria, entering the market with the promise of innovation, flexibility, and new competition in an industry long dominated by MTN, Airtel, Globacom, and 9mobile. Between November 2025, when the NCC began tracking the company’s active subscriber base, and March 2026, when the latest industry data was released, the company recorded no active subscribers. The only measurable growth the NCC has recorded has come through mobile number portability. The number of subscribers porting into Vitel’s network rose from five in November 2025 to 17 in March, suggesting a broader struggle to attract users at scale. However, Vitel Wireless disputes the picture painted by the NCC’s subscriber figures. “Vitel Wireless currently has the fifth-largest mobile subscriber base in Nigeria, although it remains well behind long-established operators such as MTN, Airtel, and Glo, which have operated in the market for more than three decades,” Chudi Nwabueze, the company’s chief operating officer, told TechCabal in an emailed response. For Vitel, the experience since launch has reinforced both the opportunity and difficulty of operating as an MVNO in Nigeria. “One of the biggest lessons for Vitel Wireless has been that Nigeria’s telecom market still presents enormous opportunities for customer-focused MVNOs despite being largely dominated by established MNOs,” Nwabueze added. “The market is highly competitive, but there is still significant room for operators that can innovate around affordability, service delivery, and market penetration.” The gap between Vitel’s claims and the NCC’s subscriber data highlights a broader challenge in Nigeria’s nascent MVNO market: accurately measuring commercial traction. While MVNOs acquire customers and scale operations in real time, the NCC relies on quarterly or biannual compliance reports submitted by operators, creating a reporting lag. As a result, subscriber gains from aggressive customer-acquisition campaigns may not appear in official industry statistics until months later, making it difficult to assess an operator’s true market position at any given time. The promise of a telecom revolution When the NCC licenced 25 MVNOs in June 2023, it envisioned a more competitive telecom market where smaller, agile operators could challenge the dominance of the big networks, expand connectivity in underserved areas, and build tailored services for niche customer segments. Interest in the model grew quickly, with the number of licenced MVNOs rising to 46 by January 2024. But before the sector had a chance to gain traction, the NCC hit the brakes. On May 17, 2024, the regulator placed a temporary freeze on new MVNO licences alongside Interconnect Exchange and VAS Aggregator licences to avoid overcrowding a market still in its infancy. The ambition was not without precedent. Nigeria’s MVNO framework drew inspiration from the United Kingdom, widely regarded as the birthplace of the modern MVNO industry. What began in 1999, when Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group, launched Virgin Mobile on the One2One network, has since evolved into a mature market worth more than $5.23 billion, with over 110 MVNO brands competing across a wide range of customer segments. As of 2025, about 20.19 million UK subscribers use MVNOs such as giffgaff, Lyca Mobile, Tesco Mobile, Lebara, and VOXI—often without realising that these providers operate without owning telecom towers or spectrum licences. Instead, they buy wholesale network capacity from infrastructure owners such as EE, O2, and Vodafone, allowing them to focus on pricing, customer service, and niche market offerings. Tesco Mobile is considered the largest MVNO in the UK with over 5.5 million subscribers. South Africa is the undisputed heavyweight of Africa’s MVNO market. The sector is a thriving $543 million (R8.6 billion) industry with over 23 active virtual operators serving roughly 4.5 million subscribers. The appeal of the MVNO model lies in its lower barriers to entry. Without the enormous cost of building towers or acquiring spectrum licences, operators can focus on pricing, customer service, branding, or niche offerings tailored to specific user groups. On paper, Nigeria appeared ready for a similar transformation. The country has a young and increasingly digital population, rising smartphone penetration, growing data consumption, and an economy becoming more dependent on remote work, fintech, cloud services, and streaming platforms. Consumers are already frustrated by poor service quality and rising data costs, creating what looks like a strong appetite for alternatives. The NCC tried to kick-start the MVNO market in 2022 by introducing a licencing framework that outlined who could operate as an MVNO, the fees they would pay, and the rules they would follow. One key rule was that
Read MoreNigeria’s Daya taps Aptos to power Africa-Middle East stablecoin payments
Daya, a Nigerian B2B stablecoin payments startup, has partnered with Aptos Foundation and Dubai-based crypto exchange HashKey MENA to launch a pilot stablecoin settlement corridor connecting businesses in Africa and the Middle East. The partnership will allow businesses to convert local currencies into stablecoins, settle transactions on the Aptos blockchain, and receive funds in local currencies at the destination. The move marks Aptos’ latest effort to push into Africa. The Layer 1 blockchain, originally built in 2021 to power decentralised finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and gaming, is now increasingly positioning itself around cross-border payments infrastructure in emerging markets. Under the pilot, HashKey MENA will provide regulated fiat on- and off-ramps in the Middle East, while Daya will facilitate payment flows across African markets, including the Nigerian Naira and other local currencies. The corridor will also support bank transfers, virtual local-currency accounts, and payment application programming interfaces (APIs) that businesses and fintechs can integrate into their operations. The pilot is part of HashKey’s Asia Connect network, which links payment corridors across Hong Kong, the Philippines, Vietnam, the UAE, and now Africa. “Africa is already a front-runner in stablecoin adoption. What’s been missing is the regulated infrastructure and scalable liquidity to connect that demand to the rest of the world,” Paul Joe, co-founder of Daya, said. “By joining HashKey’s Asia Connect network as the African node, with settlement on Aptos, we’re plugging into a network that already runs from Hong Kong to the Philippines to Vietnam to the United Arab Emirates (UAE).” In July 2025, Aptos partnered with pan-African stablecoin payments startup Yellow Card to power cross-border transactions in 20 African countries. For blockchain firms, these partnerships are distribution strategies. In October 2025, Flutterwave, Africa’s largest payments startup, partnered with Polygon; eight months later, it expanded its blockchain settlement strategy with Tempo. Separately, Nigerian fintech Paga partnered with Sui in May 2026 to build stablecoin infrastructure. By integrating with fintechs and payment providers that already serve businesses and consumers, networks such as Aptos gain access to real-world payment flows that can drive transaction volume, deepen liquidity, and strengthen network adoption. The Aptos payment push with Daya and Hashkey MENA targets a longstanding challenge in emerging markets, where cross-border payments often move through correspondent banking networks and foreign currencies before reaching their final destination, increasing costs and settlement times for businesses. Founded in October 2025 by Tomiwa “Aleph” Lasebikan, a former co-founder of Y Combinator-backed crypto startup Helicarrier, and Joe, Daya provides stablecoin-enabled cross-border payment infrastructure for African businesses. The company is backed by New York-based crypto accelerator Alliance DAO. The Aptos blockchain will serve as the settlement layer for the corridor, while Daya and HashKey MENA handle fiat connectivity and local payment distribution. Aptos has a market capitalisation of $568.7 million and has processed about 7.9 million stablecoin transactions in the last 30 days, according to US-based stablecoin analytics platform Artemis, far fewer than other native blockchains like Base, Binance Smart Chain (BNB), and Solana that have recorded over 100 million transactions in the same period.
Read MoreQuick Fire 🔥 with Somtochi Onyekwere
Somtochi Onyekwere is an open-source maintainer and a Senior Software Engineer with over five years of experience building reliable, scalable systems that help developers deploy applications at global technology companies. At Fly.io, she works on Corrosion, the open-source distributed system behind the networking layer. Before Fly, she was a Developer Experience Engineer and maintainer of FluxCD, an open-source project for GitOps on Kubernetes that powers enterprise developer platforms at companies like Microsoft and ControlPlane. Alongside her engineering work, Somtochi is passionate about building community, a thread that runs back to her time at the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, as a GitHub Campus Expert and Ingressive Campus Ambassador. Today, she co-organises Kubernetes Community Days Nigeria, whose third edition last year drew over 500 attendees from across Africa. Explain your job to a five-year-old. I work on the tools that let other people run their websites and apps, the ones you use on your phone every day. It’s a bit like building houses for people. Normally, if you wanted a house, you’d have to buy the land, gather the materials, and put it all together yourself. The companies I work with handle all of that for you. You just show up with your stuff and move in. What do you love about your job, and what frustrates you? What I love about my job is the kind of problems I get to solve and the people I get to solve them with. Fly.io has some of the most outstanding engineers I’ve had the opportunity to work with. On the problem side, I enjoy working on distributed systems and figuring out how to scale them while keeping them reliable. You start to encounter interesting problems when you take a programme from running on a single computer to running across multiple computers. It breaks many of the assumptions programmers are used to working with. I also like that we care about developer experience and make it easy for users to deploy and scale their applications. What both frustrates and excites me is Murphy’s Law: anything that can break will break. We work on systems that can fail but still need to be reliable enough to meet user needs. I remember sitting through my first incident and watching everyone move with urgency, fixing what was broken, and making sure things returned to normal. Now that I’ve had my own share of incidents, I’ve become better at debugging under pressure and learned to think about different failure modes from the start. What’s a ‘GOAT moment’ in your tech career so far? Tell us in a short story. When my previous company, Weaveworks, shut down, I decided to be intentional about the type of company I joined next. I made a list of companies doing interesting things in the infrastructure space—companies whose engineering blogs I’d been reading for fun—and started applying. Fly.io was at the top of that list, and the interview process was tough. But making it through wasn’t the end of the challenge. I wanted to bring that same intentionality to the work I did at Fly.io. I worked on two other projects before landing on Corrosion, but it was by far the toughest. To make things harder, it was written in a language I didn’t know. So I learned it quickly, and within a few months I was contributing meaningfully to the codebase. Eventually, I became the primary developer on it. Going from “I’ve never written this language” to “I own this system” in that span is something I’m quietly proud of, partly because of the technical leap, but also because it reminded me that being a great engineer means taking unknown or unclear problems, breaking them down, and finding solutions. You’ve spent years building community from student meetups during university days to co-organising Kubernetes Community Days Nigeria. Why does community work matter to you alongside engineering? Community and engineering have never been separate for me. They’ve always gone hand in hand. Open-source is where I honed my craft when I was starting out and learned how engineering works in the real world: people sharing what they know, working through ideas in public, and taking part in the conversations that shape what a project becomes. That belief has shaped how I show up. As a student, I organised tech meetups as a GitHub Campus Expert and Ingressive Campus Ambassador, helping about fifty students build the skills needed to get started in the industry. Later, I advocated for a dedicated space for Africans in the Kubernetes Slack community, a group that has grown to more than 450 members. Today, I co-organise Kubernetes Community Days Nigeria, whose most recent edition brought together over 500 attendees and speakers from across Africa to learn, share, and build together. I’ve gained a lot from the community: mentors, collaborators, friends, and opportunities. That’s exactly why I keep investing in the next generation of engineers. Whether it’s mentoring a student through their first pull request (PR) or helping someone prepare for their first conference talk, the goal is the same: leave the community stronger than I found it. Did your 16-year-old self ever imagine she’d end up in software engineering? Sixteen-year-old me had a lot of interests: maths, physics, engineering, writing, and teaching. A lot of paths seemed exciting and viable back then. I’d just finished secondary school and was watching movies to pass the time. I always found myself drawn to the ones with a hacker at a computer, typing furiously, solving impossible problems, and helping the rest of the crew pull off the mission. So the seeds were already there. I figured I’d at least give it a try. But sixteen-year-old me had no idea how far it could go, and I think she’d be pretty excited to see what I’m doing now. What else would you be doing if not software engineering? I’ll probably explore being a fiction writer. I don’t write as much these days, but I still love good storytelling and using words as
Read MoreSafaricom’s $6 fibre plan targets market dominated by estate internet providers
Safaricom, Kenya’s largest telecoms operator, is pushing deeper into the low-cost broadband market with internet plans starting at KES 800 ($6) a month, competing with smaller internet providers and estate Wi-Fi operators that have long served price-sensitive customers. The company is also testing a pay-as-you-go internet service called Wi-Fi Bamba in low income areass, including Kawangware, Kangemi and Kiambu Bus Park. The pilot has more than 800 active users, targeting budget-conscious customers and people in high-footfall areas such as markets and bus parks, Safaricom told TechCabal on Friday. The move pits Safaricom against operators like Vilcom, Ahadi Wireless and Poa! Internet that have built businesses serving price-sensitive households, one of the few parts of Kenya’s internet market where the telecom giant has not enjoyed the same dominance it holds in mobile services. “Wi-Fi Bamba is currently in the pilot phase within densely populated areas of Nairobi and Kiambu, specifically Kawangware, Kangemi, and Kiambu Bus Park,” Safaricom told TechCabal in a statement. “Subject to a successful and commercially viable pilot, we plan to scale the product to similar neighbourhoods across Kenya.” Safaricom said its entry-level products include Wi-Fi Bamba and Fibre Lite, offering speeds of between 10 megabits per second (Mbps) and 20 Mbps for KES 800 ($6) to KES 2,000 ($15) a month. The company doubled speeds across the packages in May without adjusting monthly prices. While Fibre Lite is available in selected affordable housing developments and lower-income estates, Wi-Fi Bamba remains limited to pilot zones in Nairobi and Kiambu. Safaricom said it plans to expand the service to similar neighbourhoods across the country if the pilot proves commercially viable. Unlike traditional home fibre products, Wi-Fi Bamba does not require installation, a router or a subscription. Customers within coverage areas can connect directly from their devices, select a browsing package, pay through M-PESA and begin using the service immediately. The service is delivered through wireless access points fed by fibre connections running through Safaricom’s base station network, according to the company. “Wi-Fi Bamba is delivered via radio technology, backhauled through fibre connectivity at Safaricom base stations and distributed through a network of access points,” the telco said. Unlike mobile services, where Safaricom controls 66.8% of mobile subscriptions, fixed broadband remains fragmented. According to data by the Communications Authority, the company held a 34.9% share of fixed internet subscriptions at the end of 2025, ahead of JTL’s 20.1%, Wananchi Group’s 11.1% and Poa! Internet’s 10.7%. In fixed broadband, smaller operators have carved out positions by focusing on specific neighbourhoods, customer segments and pricing tiers. The target market for Safaricom’s new products overlaps with the customer base served by Poa! Internet and tens of estate-based internet providers, many of which compete on affordability, flexible payments and localised service. Lower-income neighbourhoods have already produced sizeable broadband businesses. Poa! Internet had 263,305 subscribers at the end of 2025, while Ahadi Wireless and Vilcom served 222,060 and 133,316 customers respectively, according to Communications Authority data. Their growth has helped attract larger operators such as Safaricom to the segment. The low-cost plans also offer Safaricom a way to attract households that may still rely primarily on mobile data or informal neighbourhood internet networks. If the pilot expands beyond its current locations, Safaricom will be entering a market segment that smaller internet providers have spent years building, setting up a new contest for customers at the lower end of Kenya’s broadband market as demand for home internet continues to grow.
Read MoreInterswitch joins race for Africa’s banking technology market with Temenos deal
Interswitch, one of Africa’s leading integrated payments companies, has partnered with Geneva-headquartered banking software provider Temenos to offer managed banking services to financial institutions across the continent, deepening its push into banking technology. The partnership will see Interswitch adopt Temenos’ banking technology across core banking, digital banking, payments, wealth management, and financial crime management, enabling it to provide cloud-hosted and on-premises managed services to lenders on the continent. The deal signals Interswitch’s ambitions to become a broader banking technology provider and capture a larger share of banks’ technology spend at a time when lenders on the continent are modernising ageing technology systems. Six Nigerian banks spent ₦268.7 billion ($171.5 million) on IT infrastructure, including core banking system upgrades, in 2024. “This is a pivotal moment for Interswitch as we accelerate our expansion beyond payments and reimagine digital banking for Africa,” Jonah Adams, managing director for Digital Infrastructure and Managed Services at Interswitch, said in a statement on Thursday. The service will initially target Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, and other African markets. By combining Temenos’ software with its existing footprint across the continent, Interswitch is positioning itself as a technology partner that can help banks upgrade critical systems without having to manage the complexity of large-scale technology deployments. The banking-as-a-service market in the Middle East and Africa is projected to reach $27.10 billion in 2026, according to global market research firm Mordor Intelligence. “By adopting Temenos’ cloud-native, composable platform, Interswitch gains the flexibility and scalability to accelerate its next phase of growth and deliver banking services that meet the needs of African markets,” Adams said. Founded in 2002, Interswitch built its reputation as one of Africa’s largest payments companies through products such as Quickteller and Verve, its domestic card scheme that crossed 100 million payment cards issued in December 2025. The move to offer managed banking services pitches it against companies like CWG Plc, which has a partnership with Indian multinational financial company Infosys, to distribute the Finacle core banking application to top Nigerian banks, including First Bank and GTBank. For Temenos, the deal strengthens its presence in Africa through a partner with deep relationships across the banking sector. It lost one of its banking customers, Sterling Bank, in 2024 after the tier-2 Nigerian bank switched to SEABaaS, a new custom-built core banking application. “Interswitch is an important new customer and partner for Temenos in Africa,” said William Moroney, Chief Revenue Officer at Temenos. “Interswitch’s strong presence across the continent also extends our reach and further strengthens our ecosystem and partner network.”
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