Business & founders stories across Africa
Section
Company stories: how African start-ups began, scaled and raised money.
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.
After nine years running Checkers from 4 stores to 85, Raymond Ackerman bought the first four Pick n Pay stores and built them into a national…
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.
In January 2021 Odunayo Eweniyi and Eloho Oname launched FirstCheck, an angel platform for women-led and women-focused startups across Africa.
Born in Durban to Lebanese parents, Stephen Saad was a millionaire at 29, then co-founded Aspen Pharmacare in 1997.
An American start-up whose most visible work began in Africa: delivering blood, vaccines and medicines to rural clinics in Rwanda and Ghana.
Started in 2006 while at university, Yeigo won the first Enablis Business Plan competition and was bought by a South African operator in 2009.
After several failed ventures, the founder of iROKO started a YouTube channel for licensed Nigerian films. It led to 25 million dollars of investment and 5,000…
Launched in Nigeria and Pakistan in January 2013, the online marketplace expanded to 35 countries. The business lesson is about breadth, and what happens when a…
Imagine Worldwide delivers literacy and numeracy through tablet-based learning in Sub-Saharan Africa, and won the 2024 Klaus J. Jacobs Best Practice Prize.
In 1987 Fernando Duarte and Robert Brozin bought a small Portuguese-Mozambican chicken takeaway in Johannesburg, tried the peri-peri sauce and renamed it.
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