Built Tough

In 2017, Miishe Addy moved to Accra, Ghana to teach at a technology incubator. She also pursued a side hustle exporting coconut oil and byproducts. Miishe wanted to ship her products to Lagos, Nigeria, but she abandoned her plans after running into logistical challenges.

Facing the complexity and fragmentation of African supply chains, Miishe sought the guidance of an advisor, Solomon Torgbor, who worked for Maersk. They found that the supply chain problem was not unique to her venture but affected all businesses across Africa. In 2018, they founded Jetstream to simplify supply chains. Their mission? To support African businesses with their exports and promote trade in Africa.

Today Jetstream Africa provides tech-enabled freight forwarding, trade financing, and cargo tracking tools for businesses in Africa. It is present in 29 countries, 12 in Africa, and has disbursed $9 million in loans to date. Default rates are low at 2%.

In this episode, Miishe talks about the lightbulb moment when she reached product market fit, her fundraising advice for early-stage African founders, the impact of COVID on Jetstream, and why she pivoted the business.

Yemi Lalude’s journey is driven by his two greatest passions: Africa and technology. It is no exaggeration to say that Yemi is an early mover in African tech. In 2008, he founded Adlevo Capital, the first private equity firm investing in African tech companies. Under Yemi's guidance, the firm made early bets on (now) household names, like Interswitch and Paga.

After Adlevo, Yemi joined TPG as Partner & Head of Africa. TPG is one of the world’s largest PE firms with $135BN assets under management. In 2021, TPG’s Rise Fund invested $200M in Airtel’s mobile money unit. To date, it is still one of the largest deals in African tech.

In this episode, Yemi talks about his ‘strange pitch’ that helped him move into VC, why joining VC after the dot-com crash was a blessing in disguise, how he drew parallels from China to start investing in African tech, the back story to his Interswitch investment and common missteps made by African growth businesses.

Mark Straub kicked off his tech career in venture capital.  During his 10+ years at Khosla Impact, Mark led investments in startups that would become leading names in the African tech ecosystem, such as Flutterwave, Branch, and Kopo Kopo.

As he shuttled between Mumbai and Nairobi, he started to learn the immense problem of identity verification in emerging markets. Globally, an estimated one billion people lack proof of identity — 50% of whom live in Sub-Saharan Africa.  In India, Mark witnessed the impact of the ‘India Stack’, a comprehensive system that revolutionized identification and authentication processes through APIs.

In 2017, he and William Bares co-founded Smile ID (formerly known as Smile Identity). Their vision was to create the ‘African Stack’, an identification and know-your-customer (KYC) technology solution that would remain free from government influence. To date, Smile ID has successfully checked 60 million identities across Africa and is growing fast.

In this episode, Mark talks about his career in investment banking and microfinance and how it inspired him to build Smile ID. He also highlights the importance of first-mover advantage in Africa and Smile ID's rapid growth over the past two years.

Originally from Canada, Jesse Moore knew early on that he wanted to spend his life building a business that had a radically positive impact on underbanked customers in East Africa. In 2011, he moved to Nairobi, Kenya to launch M-KOPA, a connected asset financing platform that pioneered the pay-as-you-go (PAYG) model in Africa. With more than 12 years at the helm of M-KOPA, Jesse has led the company through major milestones, including raising more than $500M in investment.

 In this episode, Jesse speaks about his entrepreneurial journey from wanting to be a humanitarian worker to becoming a social entrepreneur, M-KOPA’s pivot from solar energy, and how his team successfully scaled from a few thousand to 3 million customers.

In 2014, he co-founded Metro Africa Xpress, or MAX, alongside Chinedu Azodoh, to offer mobility services  to disrupt Africa’s largely informal $100B transportation industry. Tayo credits the growth of e-commerce in Africa in the 2010s for the birth of MAX: “If these e-commerce companies are growing very quickly on the continent, they're going to need very robust last mile fulfillment infrastructure in place, and that's where the MAX idea was born.”

A MIT Fellow, Bamiduro has been awarded the Alibaba eFounders Fellowship, the World Economic Forum’s Inclusive Growth Award.

In this episode, Tayo shares how MAX is helping young Africans to build dignified lives for themselves and their families, why the MAX co-founders embrace being renegades, and how the company pivoted from ride-hailing to financial services and EV manufacturing after Lagos State banned motorcycles taxis.

“We’ve probably lent more money than any startup in Africa. I don't think there's any lending company in Africa that is bigger than us in terms of what we do. And we do it with almost the most difficult people—drivers—on a day-to-day basis. ” Obi Ozor, Kobo360 CEO and Co-Founder.

The last of eight children, Obi was studying to become a Catholic priest in Nigeria when a protracted kidney disease cut short his priestly ambitions. After working in finance and for Uber Nigeria, Obi launched Kobo360 in 2016 to make Africa’s $300B logistics supply chains more efficient.

In this episode, Obi shares lessons he has learned building a company to fix logistics across Africa. 

“If you are running an asset-light business, you're running an asset-light business on top of lack of infrastructure. And then what ends up happening is that there will be no efficiency. And when there is no efficiency, you will end up just plowing through a pile of capital and end up with a business that's really not sustainable,” Peter Njonjo Twiga Foods CEO and Co-Founder.

In 2019, after 18 years, Peter left his high-powered job at Coca-Cola, where he led operations in 33 African countries, to become CEO of Twiga Foods, the B2B food and consumer goods company that he co-founded with Grant Brooke.

In sub-Saharan Africa, a region where more than 250 million people suffer from hunger, food losses are estimated to be worth $4B a year. For context, wiping out extreme hunger in Africa could cost just $5B. Twiga is a pioneer in fixing this problem: organizing the entire food and consumer goods chains, from collection to storage to distribution, and aggregating demand at the roadside.

In this episode, Peter shares about why he had to redefine his vision and broaden his addressable market, the real objective of meetings, and the best advice he ever received.

“There's a general kind of acknowledgment that there is an excellent layer of female operators in Africa in general. But it's really interesting when it then comes to allocating capital as investors, for whatever reason, we don't translate that operational capacity, that managerial excellence, into effectively trust around ownership.” Eloho Omame, FirstCheck Africa Partner and Co-Founder. 

Eloho Omame is an early-stage investor and a strong advocate for gender and inclusion in VC in Africa. She's a Partner at TLcom Capital, a seed-to-growth stage VC firm, and a Co-Founder & General Partner at FirstCheck Africa, an early-stage VC firm investing in tech startups founded or co-founded by women.

Eloho is an experienced operator herself. She worked in investment banking early on in her career and then launched and operated the Nigeria chapter of Endeavor Global in 2018. 

In this episode, Eloho discusses the nuances of investing in ambitious female founders and debunks the myth that they have to be impact-focused when building technology businesses.

“We interviewed patients across Ghana and we asked them, ‘Between a pharmacy, a doctor clinic, and a traditional healer, who do you visit most often? And 55% of people picked a pharmacy.” Greg Rockson, mPharma CEO and Co-Founder. 

Greg Rockson once arranged face-to-face meetings between top Israeli and Palestinian diplomats, created a mentorship program for refugee children from the Middle East and Somalia, and interned for Keith Wright, a former member of the New York State Assembly. These days the recipient of the 2019 Skoll Award and a 2022 Bloomberg New Economy Catalyst is focused on building what he has described as a “scalable version of CVS Health in Africa.”

Founded in 2013 and now present in nine African countries, mPharma is supporting pharmacies so that they can deliver primary healthcare services to build “an Africa that’s in good health.”

In this episode, we dive into Greg’s vision of healthcare delivery for Africa.

“I feel that fintech [companies] take a view that they're competing with the banking industry. We are of the view that we are partners to the banking industry. There are certain values or benefits that the banking system creates and there are certain advantages that we as an innovative fintech business bring to the table. You combine these two things and it's a very powerful customer and customer proposition." Akshay Grover, Cellulant CEO.

In 2021, Ken Njoroge, CEO and Co-Founder of Cellulant, a Kenyan fintech company, stepped down to make way for an “enterprise runner” to lead the company into a new stage of growth. Who was that operator? Akshay Grover, a 20-year technology and finance veteran who started his career at Ernst & Young in India.

With Akshay at the helm, Cellulant has set ambitious new targets and doubled down on its B2B strategy.

In this episode, Akshay shares his biggest learnings for building a pan-African tech company and why African fintech has barely scratched the surface.