Business & founders stories across Africa
Section
Payments, savings and the companies rebuilding money across Africa.
Odunayo Eweniyi and her co-founders pivoted from a struggling job-matching startup after a social media post about a broken piggy bank. PiggyVest now counts millions of…
The Flutterwave chief executive left PayPal and Google to build payments infrastructure for a continent. Now he is buying open-banking startups and funding African AI.
A database trainee at Heineken became the founder of the payments company that Stripe bought in 2020. He has since turned his attention to football and…
Founded in 2015, JUMO connected mobile network operators and banks to people with no collateral, offering loans and savings over USSD codes on basic phones.
Founded in 2015 by two Nigerian software engineers, Paystack processed more than half of web payments in Nigeria by 2020, and is now part of Stripe.
Founded in 2016, Flutterwave grew from a payments start-up into a platform licensed in 34 African countries, and in 2026 acquired the open-banking company Mono.
A chartered accountant from Yaba College of Technology, Fola Adeola ran GTBank for twelve years, then turned to mentoring founders and building Nigeria’s internet cable.
Born from a consulting project and later acquired by African Rainbow Capital, the bank signed up customers at kiosks in Pick n Pay and Boxer stores,…
Formed in 1997 from micro-lending businesses and registered as a bank in 2001, Capitec went after the low-income market and grew from 5 million clients to…
A Lagos fintech serving merchants, Moniepoint won a central bank switching licence in 2019 and raised over 200 million dollars in its Series C.
Born in Agbor, Jim Ovia worked his way from a clerk’s desk in Lagos to founding Zenith Bank in 1990, and later a university and a…
Founded in 2002, Interswitch started as a transaction switch and grew to include Quickteller, a retail payments platform, and Verve, a home-grown card scheme.
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