The episode features an interview with Kennedy Kamau, a startup veteran who is now managing director of Kune Food, a food-tech startup in Nairobi that has a unique business model, using its own cloud kitchen and a fully owned and operated distribution network.

The company raised a $1M pre-seed round this year. This event sparked a brief controversy over supposed preferential treatment for ex-pat startup founders in Africa. Kune's founder is a French national.

This episode is sponsored by MatchCraft, a global martech firm with partners on six continents. Please visit them at matchcraft.com.

This episode features Martin Majlund, co-founder and CEO of Sky.Garden, an eCommerce that offers a Shopify-like solution to small businesses in East Africa. The company recently raised $4 million to grow and expand internationally.

This episode is sponsored by Matchcraft.

This episode features a conversation about earned wage access with SmartWave CEO Simon Ellis. EWA is an increasingly common tool that gives employees access to wages before payday, usually for a small fee. EWA platforms are popping up all across Africa, where the need is acute. By some measures, nearly 80% of lower-wage workers in South Africa run out of money before payday, leaving them vulnerable to payday lenders. Simon walks us through the business model, detailing both its challenges and opportunities.

Mohamed Al Fayed is co-founder and CEO of grubtech company that is emerging as a key infrastructure player in the UAE’s exploding ghost kitchen scene.Grubtech has built an operating system to address the friction points arising from running a high-volume food delivery business.

Tori Samples is co-founder and CTO of Leaf Global Fintech, a company based in East Africa that offers a blockchain-based digital wallet for refugees and migrant workers.

The podcast focuses on whether a mission-driven business can also be a scalable fintech. And why blockchain can transform the African small business fintech space.

Note: The interview with Tori begins at the 6:45 mark.

This episode features Firas Ahmad, /CEO of AxamPay, an East African fintech that is a division of Azam Group, the East African conglomerate.

Firas is a thought leader on African fintech in addition to running a payments platform. His view that mobile money is not sufficiently innovative forms the nucleus of our conversation.

Katharine Budd and her business partner Ian Dillon spotted a huge underserved community in the Gulf Region. The millions of lower-wage migrant workers are largely unbanked and send billions of dollars back to their families in their countries of origin. NOW Money has created a digital banking solution, including remittances. for this population. The TAM is huge, but so are the challenges facing this business model.

We engage Zapper CEO Brett White on the stage of small business in South Africa one year into the pandemic. We also discuss innovation, fintechs vs banks, and the technologies that will drive the payments space in the years to come.

Lauren Kagori works with Pezesha, a financial inclusion platform in East Africa that is trying to solve to problem of poor access to capital for small businesses through crowdfunding.

Flutterwave's head of global partnerships chats with the BIG5D Podcast about her company's meteoric rise to become of just a few tech unicorns in Africa. Among the topics covered include Flutterwave's $170 million Series C round, its new deal with PayPal, and the complexities of simplifying payments in Africa.