Vodacom’s $548 billion mobile money business shows fintech is driving its future
Vodacom, a pan-African technology group, processed nearly $548 billion in mobile money transactions over the past year, signalling that the telecom giant’s future lies beyond phone calls and data bundles. In a trading update for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, released on Monday, the company said its mobile money platforms, including Safaricom’s M-PESA, processed nearly $548 billion in transactions over the 12 months to June 30, 2026. The milestone comes weeks after Vodacom completed its acquisition of an effective 20% stake in Safaricom, increasing its shareholding to 55% and giving it controlling ownership of East Africa’s largest telecom operator. While the South African-headquartered operator built its business on voice and data, its future growth strategy is now firmly centred on digital financial services across the continent. Vodacom’s latest quarterly trading update reveals a company undergoing a profound transformation. The Safaricom transaction not only expands its geographic footprint but also accelerates its ambition to become a leading pan-African fintech player. According to the trading update, financial services now contribute more than 22% of Group service revenue, up from 13% before the transaction, while mobile money platforms processed nearly $548 billion over the past year. Those figures signal that fintech, not traditional telecoms, is becoming the company’s primary growth engine. “This quarter marked a defining moment for Vodacom with the completion of our acquisition of a controlling stake in Safaricom,” said Shameel Joosub, Vodacom Group chief executive officer (CEO). “This strategically important transaction represents a major milestone in our Vision 2030 journey, significantly enhancing the Group’s scale, diversification and long-term growth prospects.” The acquisition strengthens Vodacom’s position in Kenya through Safaricom while broadening its exposure to fast-growing digital finance markets across Ethiopia, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique and Lesotho, alongside its established operations in South Africa and Egypt. The deal also gives Vodacom greater access to M-PESA, Africa’s largest mobile money platform, at a time when digital payments, remittances and financial inclusion are reshaping the continent’s financial services landscape. Joosub said the stronger financial services business had prompted the company to raise its long-term ambitions. “Reflecting this stronger growth profile, we have upgraded our medium-term Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) and operating free cash flow growth targets from double-digit to early-teens growth,” he said. The company also increased its Vision 2030 revenue ambition from more than R200 billion ($12 billion) to more than R300 billion ($18 billion), reflecting confidence that fintech, digital services and higher-growth African markets will become increasingly important contributors to future earnings. While South Africa remains Vodacom’s largest and most cash-generative market, the latest results illustrate why the operator is looking across Africa for growth. Joosub said South African service revenue grew 2% during the quarter, supported by an improvement in prepaid performance. Egypt delivered one of the strongest performances across the group, with service revenue increasing 32.8% in local currency, while financial services revenue surged 73%. Vodacom’s International business, which includes Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho and Mozambique, recorded 14% normalised service revenue growth. Beyond mobile connectivity, digital services generated R7.8 billion ($467 million), representing almost 23% of Group service revenue. Financial services remain the largest component of that business. Vodacom is also expanding the role of financial technology across its markets. During the quarter, its Tanzanian operation launched what it described as Africa’s first mobile money tap-to-pay solution, allowing more than 22 million M-PESA customers to make contactless payments directly from their mobile wallets. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the company used anonymised mobile data analytics to support Ebola preparedness and public health planning, demonstrating how its digital platforms are extending beyond financial services. The Vodacom trading update noted that the acquisition of Safaricom represents more than a larger telecom footprint. It cements the company’s transition from a connectivity provider into a diversified technology business spanning mobile networks, digital platforms and financial services. True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks. Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.
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AI is making it harder to hide income from South Africa’s taxman
For millions of South Africans, tax season still feels like an annual ritual of gathering documents, checking deductions and submitting returns. Inside the South African Revenue Service (SARS), the country’s revenue authority, however, tax season looks very different. Long before many taxpayers log into eFiling, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and advanced data analytics have already assessed risk, matched third-party information and helped determine which returns deserve closer scrutiny. What was once a labour-intensive process driven largely by manual audits is becoming a technology-powered operation fuelled by data. The shift marks one of Africa’s most significant examples of AI being deployed at scale in government. Beyond improving tax collection, it offers a glimpse into how algorithmic decision-making is reshaping public institutions and the relationship between citizens and the state. SARS has quietly become one of the continent’s most sophisticated users of AI, embedding data science across virtually every stage of tax administration, from auto-assessments and fraud detection to compliance verification and audit selection. The approach reflects a broader trend of African governments using AI not only to improve efficiency but to close revenue gaps in digital economies. “SARS uses data science, machine learning and AI as part of its broader modernisation programme to continuously innovate and improve tax compliance processes,” Siphithi Sibeko, Head of Communication and Media at SARS, told TechCabal in an interview on Monday. “The SARS strategy focuses on the customer experience and applying these capabilities to ensure that ‘tax just happens’.” The scale of the technology’s impact is already becoming visible. According to Sibeko, the SARS compliance programme contributed R304 billion ($18.2 billion) during the 2024/25 financial year. AI-assisted fraud detection and verification prevented more than R417 billion ($25 billion) in impermissible refund outflows over the past five years. Sibeko further stated that 100% of verification cases and 88.41% of complex audit cases are now selected using automated risk-assessment functionality, illustrating how algorithms have become central to identifying compliance risks. Rather than relying solely on information submitted through tax returns, SARS built a comprehensive digital picture of taxpayers by integrating data received under its statutory mandate from employers, financial institutions, medical schemes, retirement funds, insurers, investment managers and other reporting entities. It also receives information from domestic government registers, foreign tax authorities and cryptocurrency reporting frameworks. In a July 1 statement, SARS said the enhancements are designed to make tax compliance “simpler, faster and more secure” for millions of taxpayers, adding that as of 1 July 2026, more than 1.9 million taxpayers had been auto-assessed, with about R8 billion ($479 million) in refunds paid out within 72 hours. That expanding data ecosystem has become particularly important as South Africa’s e-commerce market expands. Online retail sales are projected to reach R130 billion ($7.8 billion), representing nearly 10% of total retail sales, reflecting the growing volume of digital transactions that generate taxable income and data trails. Income generated through freelancing platforms, remote work, e-commerce businesses and crypto assets often leaves digital trails that traditional tax systems struggle to follow. AI now enables SARS to analyse these complex datasets at a scale that would be impossible through manual investigation. “The focus is not on any single technology, but on a platform approach that integrates data, analytics, AI and modern compliance capabilities to make compliance easier for honest taxpayers and harder to evade for those who choose not to comply,” Sibeko told TechCabal. “We are seeing increased participation in the digital economy, which reinforces the importance of ensuring that all taxable income is declared, regardless of how or where income is earned.” SARS insists that technology is designed to support, not replace, human judgement despite the growing reliance on AI. Despite its growing reliance on AI, Sibeko noted that technology supports rather than replaces human decision-making. Risk indicators generated by its AI systems are reviewed through governance processes and human oversight, with the models continuously refined to improve accuracy and minimise false positives before any enforcement action is taken. He believes that the human-in-the-loop approach will become important as governments worldwide grapple with questions around AI accountability, transparency and citizens’ rights when automated systems influence public decisions. For South Africa, the implications extend well beyond tax collection. SARS’ Modernisation 3.0 strategy aims to create a smart, digital and data-driven revenue authority built around digital identities, unified taxpayer records and AI-powered compliance systems. As governments across Africa search for ways to improve revenue collection without increasing tax rates, SARS is demonstrating that AI may become one of the most powerful fiscal tools available. True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks. Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.
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African venture capital is backing fewer founders than ever
This is Follow the Money, our weekly series that unpacks the earnings, business, and scaling strategies of African fintechs, financial institutions, companies, and governments. A new edition drops every Monday. Africa’s startup ecosystem raised roughly the same amount of venture capital in the first half of 2026 as it did a year earlier. Startups across the continent raised about $1.4 billion in the first six months of the year, broadly matching H1 2025 despite a global venture capital market that remains cautious, according to Africa: The Big Deal, a monthly funding tracker. But a closer look at where the money went tells a different story. The question is no longer whether capital is flowing into African startups, but where it is going. Rather than being spread across hundreds of young companies, venture capital is increasingly concentrating in a small group of mature businesses with proven business models and established revenues. The startups raising the largest rounds are attracting more money than ever before, while founders seeking their first institutional backing are finding fewer investors willing to take the risk. The 30 most-funded startups absorbed 84% of all disclosed capital raised during the first half of the year, according to data from TechCabal Insights. The remainder was shared among more than 100 other ventures. Stability is the new order According to TechCabal Insights, startups secured $1.44 billion across 146 disclosed transactions during the first half of the year. Yet the number of deals fell 42% year on year, suggesting investors are writing fewer but significantly larger cheques. Mid-sized rounds between $10 million and $99 million accounted for 66% of total funding, while early-stage rounds below $500,000 represented just 19% of all deals, underscoring investors’ retreat from riskier bets. The shift has been years in the making. In 2020, African startups closed 454 early-stage deals, 38% more than the 282 recorded in 2021, according to TechCabal Insights. Since the first half of 2021, rounds below $500,000 have fallen from 52% of deals to just 19% in H1 2026. Africa: The Big Deal also found that the number of ventures raising more than $100,000 fell to 190 startups, the lowest tally since at least 2021. The sharpest decline came among companies raising between $100,000 and $1 million, which dropped from 179 startups in H2 2025 to just 100 in H1 2026. The trend extends well beyond Africa. The data tracker firm notes that globally, venture capital is becoming concentrated into fewer companies, particularly in markets such as the United States where artificial intelligence continues to attract outsized investment. Even grants are slowing For a time, grants helped cushion the retreat in venture capital. Development finance institutions (DFIs) and philanthropic organisations increasingly financed experimentation that private investors had become reluctant to support. According to Africa: The Big Deal, 2025 recorded the highest number of disclosed grants above $100,000 since 2021, with 160 grants awarded to 154 ventures. So far, however, 2026 is running well behind that pace. During the first quarter, only 15 disclosed grants worth more than $100,000 were announced, totalling roughly $4 million, compared to 27 grants worth about $20 million during the same period a year earlier. DFIs remain critical to the ecosystem. Between 2022 and 2024, DFIs accounted for roughly 45% of commitments into Africa-focused venture funds. That figure fell to 27% in 2025 as global venture fundraising entered a third consecutive year of contraction. “If grants are meant to help de-risk innovation and keep the early-stage engine running, those Q1 numbers should worry us a bit,” Africa: The Big Deal wrote. “So, yes: totals are holding up. But the ecosystem’s future is written in the base. And right now, the base is thinning, in small equity cheques, and (so far this year) in grants too. If this trend continues, Africa might still be producing big rounds in 2026, while silently starving the pipeline that produces the next generation of breakout companies.” Those early-stage rounds rarely dominate headlines because they account for only a small share of total capital deployed. Yet they finance product development, customer acquisition, and market validation, the investments that eventually produce tomorrow’s Series A companies and unicorns. Some investors are deliberately swimming against the tide. Launch Africa Ventures, whose portfolio includes more than 180 companies across 25 African countries, completed 15 new investments in 2026, focusing on precisely the early-stage cheque sizes many investors have abandoned. “If nobody writes that cheque in 2026, there’s no Series A class in 2029,” Uwem Uwemakpan, Head of Investments at Launch Africa Ventures, told TechCabal in July. “We’d rather own that pipeline than inherit someone else’s gap in three years.” The companies carrying the ecosystem After a sluggish start to the year, June rescued the funding market. Electric mobility company Spiro announced a $327 million financing round, Flutterwave reportedly secured about $100 million, while MNT-Halan completed another major raise, according to Africa: The Big Deal. Those transactions transformed what would otherwise have been a disappointing first half into one that appeared broadly flat year-on-year. Spiro’s financing alone accounted for nearly one-quarter of all startup funding raised during the first half of the year. Debt becomes part of the growth story While equity remained the largest source of startup capital at $818 million during the first half, debt financing climbed to $614 million across a record 36 transactions, according to TechCabal Insights. The research outfit argued that founders are increasingly using non-dilutive, asset-backed financing to expand while avoiding further equity dilution. The rise of debt reflects the changing profile of companies attracting investment. Businesses operating electric vehicle fleets, logistics networks, and energy infrastructure possess tangible assets and predictable revenues that lenders are comfortable financing. Egypt leads, but concentration remains Egypt attracted the most funding during H1 2026, raising $327 million, followed by Nigeria with $254 million, Kenya with $126 million, and South Africa with $83 million, according to Africa: The Big Deal. Together, the traditional “Big Four” accounted for 58% of total funding. Looking only at equity investments, however, Nigeria led
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Airtel Money Kenya chief exits months before planned London listing
Anne Kinuthia Otieno has stepped down as managing director of Airtel Money Kenya after nearly five years, leaving the mobile money business just months before parent company Airtel Africa plans to list the unit in London. Her departure comes weeks after Airtel Kenya appointed a new managing director and days after Safaricom announced the exit of its top financial services executive, extending a wave of leadership changes at Kenya’s two largest mobile money providers. Kinuthia Otieno announced her departure in a LinkedIn post on Saturday, saying she would soon begin a new chapter but did not disclose her next role. “Together with an incredible team, we strengthened Airtel Money’s position in the market,” she wrote, citing an expansion of its merchant and agent network, new partnerships and an overhaul of its core mobile money platform. She joined Airtel in August 2021 after more than a decade in banking, including senior roles in governance and sales distribution at Absa Group and more than seven years at Barclays. During her tenure, Airtel Money significantly narrowed the gap with market leader M-PESA, albeit from a low base. Airtel Money held just 3.1% of Kenya’s mobile money subscriptions in September 2021, shortly after she took over, compared with M-PESA’s 96.8%, according to Communications Authority of Kenya data. By March 2026, Airtel Money’s share had climbed to 10.9%, while M-PESA’s had fallen to 89.1%. Kenya had 53.4 million active mobile money subscriptions at the end of the period, up 3.9% from the previous quarter, bringing the penetration rate to 100.1%. The leadership change comes at a pivotal moment for Airtel Africa. On July 23, the company confirmed London as its preferred venue for the initial public offering (IPO) of its mobile money business, targeting a listing in the second half of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and market conditions. Airtel Money had 56.5 million customers across Africa at the end of June, up 23.3% from a year earlier, while annualised transaction value exceeded $245 billion, according to Airtel Africa’s first-quarter results. Kinuthia Otieno’s exit follows a leadership change at Airtel Kenya’s telecommunications business. On July 1, Djibril Tobe succeeded Ashish Malhotra as managing director of Airtel Kenya after previously leading the company’s operations in Congo Brazzaville and Chad. Malhotra moved to head Indus Towers’ African operations. Airtel Money Kenya has operated independently from Airtel Kenya since 2022, when the group transferred its mobile money operations to a standalone company regulated by the Central Bank of Kenya. Her departure coincides with leadership changes at rival Safaricom. Esther Waititu, the company’s chief financial services officer, is due to leave on July 31 after nearly three years in the role. Safaricom announced on July 20 that Boniface Mungania would serve as interim chief financial services officer. The move follows the earlier departure of Sitoyo Lopokoiyit, former managing director of M-PESA Africa, who has since joined Absa Group. True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks. Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.
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Zedcrest Group acquires cross-border payments startup Leatherback in global fintech push
Zedcrest Group, a Nigerian financial services group with businesses spanning investment banking, asset management, and fintech, has acquired UK-founded cross-border payments startup Leatherback for an undisclosed amount. Leatherback will continue to operate as an independent subsidiary within the Zedcrest Group, retaining its brand and current management team, the companies said in a statement. The acquisition formalises a relationship that began in 2021 when Zedcrest invested in Leatherback’s $10 million pre-seed funding. It also aligns with Zedcrest’s strategy of building an integrated financial services business, following its 2024 acquisition of RMB Nigeria Stockbrokers, a brokerage firm. “Leatherback has built an impressive platform that addresses real challenges in cross-border payments, and we see significant opportunities to accelerate that journey through the strength of the Zedcrest ecosystem,” said Adedayo Amzat, group managing director of Zedcrest Group. Zedcrest said the acquisition will give Leatherback greater financial backing to pursue expansion into new markets, obtain regulatory licences, deepen banking partnerships and hire senior compliance and risk professionals while maintaining its existing operations. Leatherback has developed its own core banking system and payments ledger, technology its management previously said helped the company control transaction costs while supporting enterprise payment services. The deal also strengthens Zedcrest’s push to build an integrated financial services group spanning investment banking, asset management, securities, financing and financial technology, giving it greater exposure to Africa’s fast-growing cross-border payments market, projected to be worth $1 trillion by 2035. “We believe the opportunity in borderless financial services remains significantly underpenetrated, and this acquisition aligns with Zedcrest’s strategy of building a portfolio of trusted, scalable, and globally relevant businesses,” Amzat said. The deal comes less than a year after Leatherback completed a leadership overhaul following one of the most turbulent periods in its history. In 2023, Nigerian authorities investigated transactions linked to an external entity that had passed through a Leatherback account. Although a court ordered the forfeiture of the funds, former chief executive and co-founder Ibrahim Toyeeb Ibitade was cleared of wrongdoing before leaving the company in October 2024. By August 2025, Leatherback appointed former Cellulant executive Ochebhoya Ekpete as chief executive alongside a new product and technology leadership team. The company also shifted its strategy toward enterprise and infrastructure-led cross-border payments, positioning itself as the financial rails powering businesses rather than competing primarily for retail remittance customers. It told TechCabal at the time that enterprise clients would become its primary growth engine while retail products would remain part of its offering. Since then, Leatherback has expanded its regional footprint, opening a West African hub in Nigeria. It plans to establish regional hubs in Canada and Kenya to support its North American and East African operations, according to the statement. “This marks an exciting new chapter for Leatherback,” said Ochebhoya Ekpete, chief executive officer, Leatherback. “We have built a business focused on solving real challenges in global payments, and this transaction positions us to build on that foundation with even greater scale, capability, and long-term vision.” True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks. Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.
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“The problem was much bigger than we anticipated it to be”: Day 1-1000 of Mida
Before Mida had a name, it existed as three separate ideas inside Renmoney, a Nigerian digital microfinance bank, where its three founders worked as colleagues, each unknowingly trying to solve the same problem. Mayowa Anibaba, Okeroghene Egbi, and Adija Uzodinma held senior leadership roles at the lender. Anibaba led engineering, Egbi headed product and marketing, and Uzodinma oversaw IT and operations. They called themselves “the trio.” From their respective roles, they saw the same weakness in digital lending. A lender could streamline the onboarding process, automate credit checks, and approve loans within minutes. But unless borrowers repaid those loans, none of those efficiencies mattered. As they spoke with lenders beyond Renmoney, they realised the problem extended well beyond a single institution. Anibaba, who had begun consulting for other lending businesses, found that many were grappling with the same challenge: recovering overdue loans. The trio officially left Renmoney within months of one another in 2023. In November that year, they launched Mida, a startup that builds software and recovery services for lenders, including debt collection, borrower onboarding and loan recovery tools. The opportunity was significant. Nigeria’s digital lending market is estimated to be worth $2.1 billion, while the number of licensed digital lenders grew from 173 in April 2023 to 461 by August 2025. However, as more Nigerians borrowed through digital platforms, defaults also increased. The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN)’s Q2 2025 Credit Conditions Survey reported rising default rates across both secured and unsecured lending. For Mida, the gap between issuing loans and recovering them represented a business opportunity. Day 1: An experiment becomes a company Around July 2023, four months before Mida formally launched, Anibaba began building what would become the company’s minimum viable product (MVP) as a side project. He wanted to test whether the low recovery rates he had observed could be tackled differently. “I had been helping some other organisations that were trying to solve the same problem,” he said. “Apart from the fact that we’ve been working internally to solve this problem, this problem was much bigger than we anticipated it to be.” Months later, while discussing a startup idea with Uzodinma, Egbi realised Anibaba had already begun building almost the same solution. Rather than pursue three separate ideas, they combined their strengths. Anibaba brought the product he had already developed, while Egbi and Uzodinma contributed commercial, product and operational experience from their years in lending. In November 2023, users of Anibaba’s MVP migrated to Mida Collect, the company’s first commercial product. According to the founders, Mida officially launched after raising $50,000 from family and friends. Its first customer was Sofri, the digital lender platform operated by Links Microfinance Bank. The company says Sofri used Mida’s platform to improve collections, reduce missed repayments, and integrate collection workflows directly into its lending operations. Mida’s launch was, in Egbi’s words, equal excitement and apprehension. “But we were very excited because we had a vision and a path that we were going to get there,” she said. Day 500: Software wasn’t enough Mida’s original assumption was that lenders primarily wanted better tools to approve and disburse loans. Customer conversations quickly challenged that view. “When we started, we weren’t planning on doing recovery,” Anibaba said. “But we realised that the biggest voices in the market at the time were saying, ‘I have so much bad debt. How do I recover this?’ That accelerated our recovery roadmap.” This forced Mida to rethink what it was building. In March 2024, the startup launched Mida Omni, an enterprise platform that combined digital collections, call-centre operations, portfolio segmentation, and reporting into a single system. The company launched MidaX two months later to help recovery agents plan visits, locate borrowers through digital skip tracing, record field activity, and feed those updates back into lenders’ recovery operations. “That’s how we evolved from thinking as a pure technology startup to realising we also had to offer services,” Anibaba said. The founders explained that the evolution and growth of Mida exposed a weakness. Mida’s customer base kept expanding, but the business remained heavily dependent on people-intensive recovery operations. “Revenue was unpredictable, while payroll, technology infrastructure and operating costs had to be paid every month,” the company noted. “The hardest question was whether Mida could become a scalable technology company rather than simply a larger collections agency.” Still, less than a year after launching, the startup stated that it signed on OxygenX, Access Holdings’ digital lending arm, as a customer. In July 2024, the company raised a $400,000 pre-seed round from Founders Factory Africa to expand its products and operations. Day 1000: Becoming infrastructure In the third quarter of 2025, Mida completed the MVP of Mida Forms, allowing lenders to configure customer onboarding, KYC checks, credit scoring, loan applications, offer letters and approval workflows without lengthy technical integrations. By then, Mida began weaving AI throughout its credit infrastructure. The company noted that it first used AI to enrich borrower data and improve lending decisions before introducing an autonomous AI telecollector capable of calling borrowers and following up on overdue accounts. Over time, the company said it wants AI to predict which borrowers are likely to default, recommend the best recovery strategy for each account, personalise customer engagement, and give lenders real-time recommendations across their portfolios. As enterprise technology revenue began to grow, Mida’s economics started to change. Collections and recoveries increased without a matching rise in headcount, gross margins improved, and in the first quarter of 2026, the startup became EBITDA positive, according to the company. Three years after an experiment became a company, Mida said it has managed more than ₦100 billion ($73 million) in debt portfolios and recovered over ₦1 billion ($731,000) in bad loans. It is now targeting a $1 million to $3 million seed round to deepen its AI capabilities and expand its API and embedded credit infrastructure. The company added that conversations are underway to establish a presence in Ghana and Kenya. True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered
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Digital Nomads: Eseandre Otomiewor built a $100,000 business. Then started over in the US.
Somewhere in Eseandre Otomiewor’s memory is an alternate version of his life in which he is, by his own joking estimate, a billionaire. It began years ago when a client on Fiverr offered to pay him in Bitcoin instead of cash. Otomiewor declined. He wanted dollars, not a volatile cryptocurrency that, at the time, most of his family, friends, and clients barely understood. It was not an isolated offer. He said other clients proposed the same arrangement, and he turned each of them down. “I think [my] story should be [about] the man who should have been a billionaire [and] accepted Bitcoin; I said no,” he told TechCabal, laughing at his own expense. “In hindsight, maybe I would have a lot of money by now. But you know, we’re still good. When you’re where you are right now, it’s easy to look back—but it’s never easy.” By his own admission, it remains his biggest regret. It is also, in an unexpected way, the quickest route to understanding him: someone who has spent the past decade making uncomfortable bets on himself—underpricing his work as a freelance writer to build a reputation, walking away from a company he built from a single tweet, and leaving a comfortable life in Lagos, Nigeria, for the United States (US)—and, more often that not, seeing those bets pay off. Today, Otomiewor is far removed from his early days as a freelancer. After securing a fully funded scholarship, he moved to the US in 2025, where he is pursuing a dual master’s degree. His career had crossed borders long before he did. From Nigeria, he built a client base spanning China and the US without ever setting foot in either country. Now, he is building the next chapter of his career from the latter. Long before the passport, there was a market in Lagos Otomiewor graduated from Delta State University in Abraka, southern Nigeria, in 2014 with a degree in international studies after his original ambition, to study law, “did not pan out.” Although international studies was not his first choice, he said the discipline gave him “a much broader perspective to life, creating, and writing,” a foundation that helped him build a freelance writing career that afforded him a comfortable life in Lagos, Nigeria, before eventually taking him abroad. His first job after university was at WuraTV, a US-based streaming platform owned by a Nigerian entrepreneur that distributed Nigerian and African content to audiences in the diaspora. Otomiewor recalls that the company saw itself as the leading competitor to Jason Njoku’s IrokoTV at the time. From there, he moved into a business strategy role at Maliyo Games, a Nigerian independent game studio. The job occasionally took him beyond the office. To promote Maliyo’s mobile game “Aboki Run”, Otomiewor said he visited Computer Village and Alaba International Market in Lagos—two of the city’s largest electronics and phone-repair hubs—and persuaded phone vendors to pre-install the game on customers’ devices before they left with newly purchased or repaired phones. According to Otomiewor, his manager at Maliyo Games doubted the idea and declined to allocate a budget for it. But the strategy proved successful enough that, he says, the company’s founder eventually drove him to Alaba to watch the pitches himself before later attempting to recruit him to another company. “I’m not someone to just sit down and watch things happen,” Otomiewor said. “Sometimes you’ve got to try things that are not conventional to make a change.” By December 2017, he had moved again, this time to Digital Raves, a company that helped businesses expand into diaspora and Middle Eastern markets. That same month, almost as an afterthought, he created an account on Fiverr, the global freelancing platform. A tweet, fifty replies, and an agency he never planned to start Otomiewor had been writing since university, mostly producing academic papers for other students, and Fiverr felt like a natural way to turn that skill into income. What he did not anticipate was how quickly demand would outgrow his capacity. Client requests began arriving faster than he could handle. One day, he posted what he describes as an “innocent” message on X, asking whether anyone wanted to take some of the overflow. He expected two or three replies. According to him, more than 50 people responded. A direct message sent to Otomiewor on X (formerly Twitter). Image source: Eseandre Otomiewor “It wasn’t pre-planned,” he said. “It was something that just happened and became very big.” He named the business “JDI,” short for “Just Do It,” a phrase loosely inspired by Nike. What started as a way to outsource a handful of articles became a content agency that, over eight years, trained and paid more than 8,000 African writers, according to Otomiewor. He said many alumni went on to work at Nigerian and international media organisations, while others secured roles at global companies, including Amazon. Having helped Nigerian writers access overseas clients also exposed what he believes was the industry’s biggest obstacle. “It was not a skill thing,” he said. “Nigerians here in the US, globally, have the same skill set. [But] we have to work ten times as hard as another person just to get the same opportunity.” According to Otomiewor, Nigerian freelancers on platforms such as Fiverr were sometimes overlooked in favour of equally qualified Western writers for reasons unrelated to the quality of their work. Even competing internationally required significant upfront investment: a virtual private network (VPN) to bypass geographical restrictions, an international payment solution and a reliable laptop—costs that many aspiring freelancers could not afford. Rather than compete on prevailing Western rates from the outset, Otomiewor deliberately charged less to establish credibility. “If [it’s a gig] an American would charge $20 for, I’d charge $5,” he said. “Do not look at what someone in America or the UK earns. Ask yourself how you can build a reputation to scale.” He said the strategy worked. Repeat business became common, new clients continued to arrive through referrals, and the
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Kenya finalises crypto licencing framework for exchanges, digital asset firms
Kenya has gazetted the Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASP) Regulations, 2026, finalising the country’s legal framework for licencing and supervising cryptocurrency exchanges, wallet providers, stablecoin issuers, and other digital asset businesses. The regulations were published in Kenya Gazette Supplement No. 185 under Legal Notice No. 134 on Friday, completing implementation of the Virtual Asset Service Providers Act, which President William Ruto assented to in October 2025. The regulations mark the final step in Kenya’s effort to bring cryptocurrency businesses under formal regulatory oversight. They create, for the first time, a licencing framework that allows Kenya’s regulators to approve and supervise firms operating in the sector. Kenya is one of East Africa’s largest cryptocurrency markets, recording about $19 billion in crypto inflows between July 2024 and June 2025, according to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis. It ranked second in the region by transaction value, behind Ethiopia. The rules require firms serving Kenyan customers, including those without a physical presence in the country, to obtain licences, meet governance and capital requirements, implement anti-money laundering and cybersecurity controls, safeguard customer assets, and comply with ongoing reporting and consumer protection obligations. It is Kenya’s most consequential provision for all virtual asset service providers operating in, or from, the country. The regulations follow a four-month public consultation process launched in March, during which the National Treasury invited comments from industry participants, consumers, and other stakeholders. During the consultation, crypto firms argued that some proposed capital and compliance requirements risked pricing smaller operators out of the regulated market. Government officials continued engaging crypto firms through industry consultations before finalising the regulations. The framework also sets rules for stablecoins, initial coin offerings, tokenised real-world assets, digital wallets, advertising, market conduct, and enforcement. It also extends to foreign providers that actively target Kenyan customers or derive economic benefit from the country, even without a physical presence. Under the framework, licenced firms must maintain governance frameworks, conduct customer due diligence, retain transaction records for at least seven years, submit regular regulatory reports, and implement cybersecurity and business continuity measures. Oversight is split between Kenya’s financial regulators. The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) will supervise virtual asset-to-fiat conversion services and stablecoin issuers, while the Capital Markets Authority (CMA) will regulate exchanges, token issuance platforms, initial coin offerings, and tokenisation activities under the VASP Act and accompanying regulations. The CBK had already begun preparing for the new regime in April, when it advertised vacancies for roles covering licencing, product approval and compliance for virtual asset service providers. With the regulations now gazetted, crypto firms can begin the process of seeking approval to operate under the new regime. True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks. Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.
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Why Vodacom is taking its AI talent search back to university
The battle for artificial intelligence (AI) talent has reached South Africa’s universities. Facing a shortage of engineers and researchers, Vodacom Group, an African telecoms operator, the University of Johannesburg (UJ), and Amazon Web Services (AWS), the global cloud provider, launched the Vodacom AI Lab to train postgraduate students by placing them on practical AI projects drawn from the telecommunications industry. The initiative reflects a growing recognition that Africa’s AI challenge is not only about access to technology but also about building the workforce capable of using it. Rather than confining AI education to lecture halls, the partners said students will work alongside researchers and industry experts on problems using commercial applications, from network optimisation to customer service and data-driven decision-making. For Vodacom, the investment addresses a business challenge as much as an education one. Telecommunications companies are adopting AI across their operations, including network management, fraud detection, predictive maintenance and customer support. Those systems require engineers, data scientists and machine learning specialists who remain in short supply across South Africa and the continent. “The future of AI in Africa depends on developing local talent that understands the continent’s unique challenges,” Shameel Joosub, Vodacom group chief executive officer (CEO), said during the launch. He described the lab as a platform for responsible and practical AI innovation. AWS said it will provide the cloud infrastructure and AI services underpinning the lab. “This partnership is designed to create the next generation of AI talent for South Africa, and by extension, for Africa, by giving postgraduate students access to the same AI tools used by enterprises,” stated Prabashni Naidoo, AWS South Africa director. The collaboration also aims to bring universities closer to the tech industry through giving postgraduate students experience on commercial AI projects before they graduate. “We can change that by putting real-life problems to the universities and develop the necessary muscle that we need,” said Joosub. The initiative builds on a broader push to strengthen AI skills through higher education. In March 2025, Google partnered with the Department of Higher Education and Training to provide 5,000 AI, cybersecurity and data analytics scholarships across selected public universities and colleges across South Africa. Vodacom’s model goes a step further by embedding postgraduate students in commercial AI projects as part of their training. Joosub stated that the mobile operator wants to recruit more AI talent directly from universities. “We are building a model for collaboration that connects education with industry, research with real applications, and innovation with opportunity,” he noted. Naidoo said AWS will ensure that students in the programme move beyond classroom learning to develop AI systems on enterprise-grade infrastructure. “Students will not study AI in theory. They will work on live Vodacom cases running on AWS infrastructure,” she said. “This is the bridge between learning and doing.” UJ believes the partnership will narrow the gap between academic research and commercial deployment. “This collaboration reinforces the bridge between theory and application,” said Prof. Tankiso Moloi, executive dean of UJ’s College of Business and Economics. “This is how we close the gap between qualification and application, between research and implementation, and between academia and transformative careers.” The partners said the model is intended to extend beyond a single university. Joosub described it as “a blueprint for AI capability development across Africa.” Naidoo said the lab was designed to be replicated, with the talent pipeline serving as “a blueprint for the continent” through future university-industry collaborations. True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks. Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.
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Why Africa’s growth-stage companies need more than capital to scale sustainably
Africa’s startup ecosystem has mastered the art of the launch. Accelerators and incubators have achieved exactly what they were designed to: help founders bring ideas to life, find early traction, and secure that first institutional check. But design has limits. When those same companies are ready to scale, the support that carried them begins to thin. This is the messy middle—and it’s where too many promising companies quietly stall or die. As companies move from startup to scaleup, the challenge shifts to building systems that allow a business to grow beyond its founder: robust financial management, structured hiring, institutional governance, and distributed leadership. Scaling without this infrastructure is like accelerating without steering; growth may come, but it is difficult to control or sustain. Closing this gap means moving from instinct-led execution to structured, scalable growth. In practice, this means stronger financial health, decentralised leadership, good governance, and capital matched to strategy. Ensuring founders are ready to absorb capital Before looking to fundraise, founders must answer a fundamental question: who is actually driving revenue, and is it the right customer? Many growth-stage founders can tell you their total customer count. Fewer can articulate which segment is the most valuable: which generates the highest lifetime value, at an acquisition cost the business can sustain? Customer retention tells the real story: strong retention signals something worth scaling. Weakening retention is an early warning that growth is filling a leaking bucket. The risk is scaling before this picture is clear: pouring capital into the wrong customer. Getting this right reorients everything that follows. A company can also be growing, profitable on paper, and still die. Cash cycles—the gap between earning revenue and collecting cash—can pose an existential threat. Rapid scaling worsens this; without continuous working capital modeling, a company risks insolvency despite its growth. Currency fluctuations also add complexity for companies that often operate across multiple currencies. Founders must develop treasury discipline, mastering conversion timing, reserves, and hedging. They also need fluency in unit economics to ensure growth builds, rather than erodes, enterprise value. More importantly, on the organisational side of the business, founders need to learn how to delegate. Africa’s most resilient founders have survived on resourcefulness, navigating funding winters, currency crises, thinning talent pools, and unforgiving markets. That scrappiness is a genuine superpower, until it becomes the ceiling. Growth-stage founders are rarely taught organisational design or effective delegation. Many become the bottleneck, a key reason why 90% of African startups fail. Securing top talent requires unfamiliar skills: identifying exceptional candidates, selling the vision, and crafting creative compensation packages. Equity, deferred pay, part-time experts, and advisory boards can bridge talent gaps when the salary budget isn’t there yet. Governance is also a cornerstone for growth and one of the most underleveraged tools in the growth-stage founder’s kit. Early boards often consist of family, friends, and early believers – not through neglect, but because no one had shown them what a growth-stage board should look like or how to evolve it. The stakes compound with scale. A startup can operate informally early on, but at the growth stage, they face real contractual liability and closer regulatory scrutiny that require higher legal and compliance frameworks. A board can feel like oversight a founder didn’t ask for. But that framing undersells what good governance actually offers: accountability that sharpens the founder, plus expertise, connections, and counsel a founder couldn’t yet afford to hire. Aligning capital to strategy Africa’s funding ecosystem has defaulted to frameworks developed in Western markets – Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) notes and equity raises as the standard instruments of growth. But capital should be chosen with intention, matched to what the business actually needs. Debt funding hit a record $1.64 billion across the continent in 2025, up 63% year-on-year, suggesting founders are increasingly exploring a broader range of financing options. As more founders and lenders develop the track record and instruments to make debt work in African market conditions, equity should increasingly be reserved for what it is actually designed to fund: risk, not timing. Scaling requires evaluating the full capital stack: balancing equity dilution against debt covenants while exploring strategic partnerships, Development Finance Institutions (DFIs), and revenue-based structures. Catalytic or concessional capital can further bridge the gap to commercial readiness. An early-stage company with no revenue history, collateral, or track record may have no choice but equity, while a growth-stage company with recurring revenue can hold a fundamentally different credit proposition. The ecosystem must meet founders with capital matched to strategy. Africa’s founders have proven they can build. Helping them scale will shape far more than individual companies; it will shape African economies. Success will require an ecosystem designed to support founders beyond the early stage, with the same quality of guidance, resources, and institutional support they received at the start. It is time to build the infrastructure for scale. ___ Oyin Solebo is the COO at Cascador, an Africa-focused platform for growth-stage founders building businesses that make an impact. She also serves as Advisor at Cone Ventures Studio, co-founding and scaling Africa-focused ventures, and as Senior Advisor at Ventures 54. Previously, she was Managing Director of the ARM Labs Lagos Techstars Accelerator, Techstars’ flagship Africa-based programme. True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks. Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.
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