Speaking during an exclusive fireside chat titled ‘Beyond the Hype: What it really takes to build technology that scales in Africa,’ the serial entrepreneur and investor dismantled some of the most popular assumptions in African tech, challenging founders to rethink almost everything they believe about building technology on the continent, including the belief that scale begins with funding.

Aboyeji said that raising money is not the hardest part of building a technology company in Africa, and it may be the most overrated.

“When you want to build beyond the hype in the world that we live in today, you also have to build beyond Africa. So when you say what it takes to build technology companies that scale in Africa, that’s a very limiting title, because you should be thinking beyond Africa.”

For Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, who has co-founded Andela, Flutterwave, Moove and investment firm Future Africa, scale does not start with geography, pitch decks or capital. It starts with the biggest perspective most founders avoid. Companies that last are not built for locations. They are built for people.

“The most important thing any business needs is a unique understanding of its customers. Technology transcends more than geography, and it’s more adaptive to psychographics than it is to geography.”

This misunderstanding, he said, is why many founders begin by copying Silicon Valley playbooks rather than defining what technology can truly do for their customers.

“A lot of people start off trying to figure out what Silicon Valley is doing, and I’m going to just build the Nigerian version.”

That approach, he said, usually leads to companies that look successful on the surface and raise money, but it rarely builds companies that reach scale and serve millions.

“You can have a successful company, depending on how you measure success, by copying Silicon Valley, but in terms of scale, in terms of a product that goes deep into serving billions of customers, I’ve just never seen it work.”

The myth in African tech

Iyinoluwa Aboyeji repeatedly returned to what he described as the most damaging belief in the ecosystem. “The big myth that a lot of people have is that the most important thing you need for a startup is investment.”

Capital, he said, is not the foundation of scale. Customers are. “The most important thing any business needs is a unique understanding of their customer that is sufficiently differentiated from others, but comes from a place of real depth.”

He illustrated this with the origin of Moove, the mobility fintech he co-founded. The company started by addressing what seemed to be a Lagos problem, where drivers needed cars but could not afford to buy them.

“What we didn’t realise was psychographic about that was that the problem of drivers without cars is a global problem.”

The insight became clear once the team stopped viewing the issue as local. “You go to London, all those drivers don’t own the cars they’re driving. You go to Dubai, Germany. When you break out of your geographic and demographic barrier, and you start going into the psychographic world, you’re going to unlock products that are global by nature.”

Why product–market fit is rare

Asked how founders should think about product–market fit, Aboyeji dismissed the way the term is usually used. “You have to have an obsession with your customers. When I say obsession, I don’t mean it lightly.”

As an investor, he said his firm reviews thousands of pitch decks but stops only when something genuinely unfamiliar appears. “We only stop to look when we see something that we’ve not seen before.”

He used a portfolio company, Filmmaker Smart, as an example, whose founding idea went against the dominant thinking in Africa’s creative economy.

“Their core thesis was that nobody needs a movie studio. It’s too expensive and it doesn’t fit the way film is made in Africa.”

At the time, the idea sounded unreasonable. Today, the company is backed by IFC and Sony, generates six- and seven-figure revenues annually, and is used by major studios.

“Somebody who understands a customer understands how to reimagine a world that they need to live in.”

Teams fail before products do

On building teams, Aboyeji spoke about where many founders go wrong. “I see a lot of people spend a lot of equity and money hiring engineers that don’t actually know anything about their markets.”

Skill alone, he said, is not enough.

“If the person who’s actually going to be touching the product and building the product doesn’t have insight, you’re actually better off just using a contracting agency.”

What matters most, especially for co-founders, is commitment. “Passion is actually a Greek word that means something you’re willing to suffer for.”

He warned founders against carrying unwilling partners or begging co-founders to work. “If the moment you’re working with somebody who doesn’t feel a need to sacrifice, just know you’re alone.”

The cost of taking bold steps

Reflecting on his own “big bold step,” Iyinoluwa Aboyeji pointed to his decision to leave Andela at a time when the startup had Mark Zuckerberg as an investor and was already a large, successful business.

“I could have just stayed there, but I wouldn’t be a three-time founder if I didn’t make that move.”

The move to Flutterwave came with no safety net. “That entire first year there was no salary. I was borrowing money from my wife. That was my girlfriend.”

He described weekly flights between Lagos and San Francisco, sleeping on planes, and working across continents simply to keep the company alive.

Starting again, he said, has since become second nature.

On failure

Iyinoluwa Aboyeji addressed failure without trying to soften it. “The definite outcome of every startup is death.” What separates founders, he argued, is how they treat that reality. “There was a business that failed. It wasn’t you.”

He shared stories of early ventures that collapsed, near expulsion from university, and pivots that only worked after initial ideas failed. “Every company you see failed its way to becoming successful.”

The one thing founders must stop doing

During the rapid-fire round at the Conference, Aboyeji was asked what founders must stop doing if they want to succeed.

“Raising money.”

He explained why. “Because customers are how you get money. Capital is customers.” 

Partaining the future, his outlook was: “African talent will dominate artificial intelligence.”

“Stop copying, stop chasing investors, understand customers deeply, and accept failure as part of the work.”

This was revealed on Monday by Co-founder and Chief Executive Femi Aluko, who described the company’s rise as a clear sign that the on-demand model can succeed at scale in Africa. 

In a LinkedIn post, he said: “Chowdeck just hit 2 million users!” He recalled the company’s early days, noting: “It feels like just yesterday that we started with three riders and two restaurant partners. We now have more than 20k riders across 14 cities in Nigeria and Ghana.”

Chowdeck’s recent drive shows how quickly it has moved from a small experiment to a major logistics company. Founded in 2021, the company has expanded into urban markets including Lagos, Abuja, Accra, and Kumasi.

Its network of over 20,000 riders now supports a growing mix of restaurant deliveries, groceries, and everyday essentials.

The latest achievement comes months after Chowdeck secured $9 million in Series A funding, an investment led by Novastar Ventures with participation from Y Combinator, AAIC Investment, Rebel Fund, GFR Fund, Kaleo, HoaQ, and a series of angel investors, including Paystack founders Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi. 

The company said the capital would support its expansion plans in both Nigeria and Ghana and speed up its move into quick commerce.

That strategy, built around dark stores and hyperlocal fulfilment hubs, is designed to cut delivery times. Chowdeck sees it as the backbone of a bigger vision to build what Aluko has previously described as “Africa’s number one super app.”

Africa’s food-delivery sector is expanding at double-digit rates each year, driven by smartphone growth, denser cities, and high demand for convenience. 

While larger global companies such as Jumia Food have struggled to maintain profit, Chowdeck’s locally tuned approach has helped it sidestep many of those challenges.

Aluko, in his message, credited users and partners for the company’s rise. “We are incredibly proud of the technology we’ve built and the logistics network we have established. But most importantly, we are proud of our ecosystem: our customers, our riders, and our vendor partners.” 

He added: “I am really grateful to our team, customers, riders and partners for coming on this journey with us. Thank you so much for coming on this journey with us. It’s still Day 1!”

Competition in Africa’s delivery market is far from settled, but Chowdeck is highly focused on enlarging its lead and testing how far its model can stretch across the continent.

Across Africa, 78% of workers earn a living in the informal economy, while only 38% of the population was online by the end of 2024. 

So, while we see artificial intelligence changing businesses globally, have you ever wondered how it can serve those who are still offline?

Africa’s informal economy is ‘the economy’, not a fringe. We have artisans in Aba, farmers in Eldoret and other informal workers driving nearly 60% of the region’s GDP and employing most of its labour force. 

But then, these are the same entrepreneurs least likely to use digital tools. The irony is that the people who could gain the most from automation, insight, and market prediction are also those furthest from it.

The Gap: Connectivity, Literacy, and Trust

While conversations about AI are everywhere now, what’s actually on the ground is uneven. Even where there is connectivity, data is expensive and unreliable. 

According to the GSMA, fewer than 30% of micro-enterprises can use digital productivity tools effectively.

Digital literacy is another challenge. For a market woman in Kano or a tailor in Kigali, the vision of AI usually seems far or abstract. 

Without local-language interfaces, voice-first technology, or tools designed for low-data environments, innovation are at risk of increasing exclusion rather than reducing it.

Who’s Benefiting So Far?

AI adoption in Africa is growing, but mostly at the top. Recent surveys show that over half of medium and large enterprises are testing or deploying AI-driven solutions, while 61% of companies now use cloud technology to automate customer service, logistics, or risk management.

Banks, health providers, and telcos are using algorithms to score credit, detect fraud, or personalise services. 

But the majority of businesses in Africa, including the micro-traders, street vendors, and informal manufacturers, still operate without digital records, electricity, or broadband. The danger is that a new “AI divide” may replace the old digital divide.

Local Innovation That Works

The challenges have not limited some African innovators from closing the gap with practical, inclusive models:

• Twiga Foods (Kenya) uses data analytics to match small farmers with urban vendors, cutting waste and improving incomes.
• M-KOPA turns micropayments from solar and smartphone purchases into credit histories, giving low-income users access to financial services for the first time.
• Moove Africa applies income data from drivers to assess creditworthiness, financing vehicles for those without formal banking history.

These examples show that inclusion is possible and can be profitable. The key is building for constraint, not against it.

Policy and Public Action

Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa have introduced national AI strategy frameworks that emphasise ethics, skills, and localisation. 

The African Union’s AI Blueprint (2025) calls for responsible AI that aligns with local realities, promotes open data sharing, and ensures small enterprises and the informal economy are not left behind.

But frameworks alone won’t bridge the divide. Affordable data, rural connectivity, and digital education are the foundation stones. Without these, policy stays on paper while the informal sector stays offline.

The Opportunity

If designed inclusively, AI could become the continent’s most affordable employee, a virtual assistant that speaks local languages, works offline, and learns from community trade patterns. 

Imagine a market trader in Ibadan using voice commands to check prices or restock inventory; or a mechanic in Accra predicting demand for spare parts from simple text messages.

That’s not a far-off dream but a design challenge.

The actual measure of progress shouod not be limited to how many AI startups Africa produces, but how many businesses in the informal economy find those tools useful. 

When the tomato seller in Onitsha can plan her stock using a feature phone or the boda rider in Kampala can access fair credit through automated scoring, we can say the technology is working.

Until then, the digital revolution is unfinished, the vision is commendable, but limited in reach.

The competition recognises some of the continent’s most innovative startups in financial technology and other high-impact solutions that address Africa’s financial sector.

Now in its seventh edition, the challenge centres on the theme, “You Build, We Scale,” and seeks to empower founders ensuring access to finance across Absa’s eight key markets which include Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Seychelles, Uganda, and Zambia.

The selected startups are developing solutions that cut across payments, credit access, cross-border trade, agri-fintech, and financial literacy, all aimed at rethinking how money moves and works for Africans.

Ashwin Ravichandran, portfolio advisor at MEST Africa and MAC Lead, described the semi-finalists as visionary entrepreneurs whose ideas merge technology with community-focused problem-solving. 

“Each of these founders represents a unique path toward reimagining how finance works for Africans,” he said. “Their ideas pair technology with empathy, proving that lasting change comes from solving real problems within their own communities. We’re proud to provide a platform that connects them with investors, mentors, and global opportunities.”

Absa’s collaboration with MEST emphasises its focus on driving digital inclusion and innovation across Africa’s financial ecosystem. 

Speaking on the announcement, Tawanda Chatikobo, head of Digital for Absa Regional Operations (ARO), Retail and Business Banking, said: “Congratulations to the top 20 finalists and to all applicants. The quality of submissions has been exceptional, showcasing the depth of innovation and entrepreneurial drive across Africa. These startups are not only solving real challenges; they’re building the foundation for inclusive growth and lasting impact. 

“Our partnership with MEST and our active participation in the MEST Africa Challenge 2025 reflect our commitment to open collaboration within the FinTech ecosystem. At Absa, we see ourselves as partners in this journey, guided by a purpose to make banking simpler, more accessible, and more relevant for our customers.”

The 20 startups, selected from hundreds of applications, include:

Botswana:

• mystock.africa – A retail investing platform offering Africans access to stocks, ETFs, and alternative assets.

Ghana:

• Brydge – Simplifying cross-border trade for African businesses.
• Kutana Technologies Limited – Enabling B2B payments and trade using stablecoins and AI-powered credit scoring.

Kenya:

• Logistify AI – Optimising procurement and supply chains for SMEs and cooperatives.
• Farmsky Ventures – Providing digital lending and crop insurance for smallholder farmers.
• Investa Farm – Offering voucher-backed loans for climate-resilient farm inputs.

Mauritius:

• Black Swan – Building credit scores for Africa’s unbanked using AI and alternative data.

Mozambique:

• Simulador Bancário – A platform for financial planning and loan simulations.

Uganda:

• Paytota – Simplifying fragmented digital payments through a unified payment gateway.
• Xzerra – Facilitating cashless transactions with biometric fingerprint technology.
• Kanzu Finance Limited – Providing digital banking solutions for cooperatives and microfinance institutions.
• Axiom Zorn – Enabling smallholder farmers’ access to finance and markets through data innovation.
• Credify Africa, Inc. – Bridging Africa’s SME finance gap with trade finance and logistics solutions.
• eMaisha Pay – Promoting financial inclusion for agro-traders and small businesses.

Zambia:

• Ebusaka Green Technology Limited – Turning waste to value through digitised recycling incentives.
• KreativBox Technology – Offering salary-backed loans to civil servants.
• Mighty Finance Solution Inc – Providing embedded digital loans for SMEs and women entrepreneurs.
• Devdraft AI – Supporting freelancers with cross-border payments using stablecoin wallets.
• Homer Price Agency Solutions Limited – Operating a digital banking network of over 550 agents nationwide.

Seychelles:

• Fusepay – A licensed Payment Service Provider building a digital finance hub for frontier markets.

The semi-finalists will present their pitches virtually in the week of October 27, 2025. Only 10 startups will proceed to the final round in Cape Town, South Africa, scheduled for 26 November 2025. 

The overall winner will secure a $50,000 equity investment, gain access to MEST Africa’s global mentorship network, and explore pilot opportunities with Absa’s business divisions.

Tamu Dutuma, head of Strategy and Transformation for ARO Technology, said the competition unearths ideas capable of accelerating digital transformation across the continent. 

“Through this challenge, we’re seeing solutions that are not only innovative but strategically aligned with Africa’s evolving technology landscape. Some of these ideas have the potential to accelerate digital transformation and unlock new value for our customers,” she said.

Since its founding in 2008, MEST Africa has supported more than 2,000 entrepreneurs and invested in over 90 startups. The MEST Africa Challenge is a key platform for identifying, nurturing, and scaling promising technology-driven ventures that are building Africa’s economy sustainably.

Even with a rebound of nearly 25% in the second half, the continent still couldn’t meet up, largely because digital access is tangled in complexity and misaligned systems that don’t always reflect how Africans live and work.

Consider that 61% of sub-Saharan Africans live within broadband coverage but do not use it. Not because the internet is absent, but because access is limited by poor localisation affordability, digital illiteracy, friction-filled user journeys and at times, poor design.

That’s the battlefield where Jecinta Fabiyi has pitched her tent. For her, design is about ensuring access, trust, and opportunity in a region where the gap between technology and people can feel like a canyon. She has built her career around one core conviction, which is: technology must be human before it can be powerful.

So, when Fabiyi was named a Global Tech Hero by The Connected Awards, it was not a polite nod to another rising designer. It was a recognition of impact that is both statistical and human. The Awards, known for immortalising professionals who embody craft, impact, and legacy, singled her out as someone who consistently changes complexity into clarity.

The Making of a Hero

At Youverify, a Lagos-and San Francisco–based identity verification startup, Jecinta Fabiyi designed YouverifyOS (YVOS), a compliance and verification platform now powering over 5 million identity verification processes. 

Through the simplification of KYC, KYB, and AML compliance into intuitive digital flows, she directly contributed to Youverify’s scale from 400 million to over 2 billion identities verified.

Her design of vFORM, a drag-and-drop onboarding tool, went further. What could have been another clunky enterprise form-builder became a seamless experience for businesses onboarding customers. The results?

• 300% increase in Youverify’s customer base, spreading across more than 400 banks and startups in Africa.
• 1,000% surge in application volumes, making identity verification almost routine for financial services and ride-hailing companies.
• A direct link to Youverify’s $1M seed extension funding, proving that design can, quite literally, drive investment.

These reveal how Fabiyi’s work answers one of Africa’s biggest problems: the trust deficit in digital finance and identity. In a continent where over 30 countries now enforce KYC/AML regulations, her designs are helping businesses keep pace without losing customers to bureaucracy.

Beyond Compliance: Human Impact

But Fabiyi’s influence isn’t limited to compliance dashboards. At Sidekick Health, she helped redesign the Zanadio obesity treatment platform, where patients were abandoning onboarding before accessing therapy. 

Her work simplified the funnel and reduced friction, leading to a 10% increase in visitor-to-signup conversions and a 12% growth in signups-to-activation. These numbers translate into something no spreadsheet can fully capture, more patients accessing life-changing treatment.

At Wunder Mobility, she shaped fleet management dashboards and rider experiences that made shared transport more reliable and scalable. In a continent struggling with urban congestion, such design work nudges cities closer to sustainable mobility.

Recognition Rooted in Impact

Her recognition as “Woman in Tech of the Week” by The Stack Journal and her feature in Daily Times Nigeria did not come from rhetoric but from measurable results. And now, with her new badge as a Global Tech Hero, she joins a circle of technologists celebrated for what they build and how their work ripples across communities.

The Connected Awards describe their honourees as “leaders whose work bridges the gap between complexity and clarity, between people and services, and between potential and lasting impact.” Jecinta Fabiyi fits that description without caveat. She has shown that design is not decoration, it is infrastructure. It determines whether millions of Africans can access services or remain excluded.

More than a Designer

Away from her corporate impact, Jecinta Fabiyi mentors junior designers, supports career switchers, and publishes free resources in the Figma Community, already used by 1,000+ designers. Her talks on accessibility, inclusivity, and design KPIs have equipped professionals to think beyond aesthetics and focus on outcomes. And on LinkedIn and Substack, she shares insights that demystify the tech industry for the next generation of creatives.

Why This is Important 

In African tech, funding is slowing, but adoption is growing. Emerging markets like Uganda (+304% growth in VC funding) and Tanzania (+108%) are proving that the future is not confined to Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, or South Africa. However, the continent still struggles with high digital drop-off rates, compliance barriers, and trust issues.

This is why Fabiyi’s story is important. She represents a new kind of African tech leader, one who sees design not as the finishing touch but as the foundation. One who treats every interface as a bridge between ambition and reality. And one who insists that technology must include everyone, or it has failed.

As she continues to build products across industries, the Global Tech Hero award can’t be limited in description as a career highlight, but more like a milestone in an ongoing mission, which is to make digital experiences simpler, safer, and more inclusive for millions.

Some don’t even give LinkedIn or blog post updates, nothing on timelines, founders disappear without a word. All we see is just a vanished website and a 404 error. No lessons, no accountability, no closure.

Over the past 18 months, Nigeria has seen a wave of shutdowns, layoffs, pivots, and slow-motion collapses. But you won’t find detailed founder threads for others to learn or open post-mortems. Instead, we’ve normalised disappearing acts.

This is about optics, investor perception, and the discomfort our ecosystem has with public failure. The cost of this silence is high, and growing.

A Winter in Full Swing: Mapping the Collapse

What we’re experiencing is a full-on tech winter, not cold snap.

Between July 2024 and July 2025, more than $100 million in investor capital was lost to shutdowns in Nigeria alone. Over 15 venture-backed startups folded. 

Okra, which raised over N16.5 million, returned a fraction of its capital. Edukoya, once celebrated for raising Africa’s largest edtech pre-seed ($3.5 million), exited with barely a whisper. Thepeer, Pivo, Lazerpay, Zazuu, Bundle Africa, Quizac, Joovlin, and even OkadaBooks — all gone.

Funding has dried up at a heavy rate. Nigeria raised $176 million in H1 2025, its lowest in five years. Compare that to the $2 billion raised just between July 2021 and June 2022. Nigeria, once the continent’s funding magnet, now sits fourth behind South Africa, Egypt, and Kenya.

Where the Bodies Are Buried

There’s a digital graveyard of startups that never got to scale or sustain.

Most of them didn’t go out with press releases; there were no “thank you for believing in our mission” farewells, no medium posts revealing what went wrong. Instead, shutdowns were quiet, websites went offline, Twitter accounts stopped posting, offices emptied, and teams shrank in silence.

Founders who once shared every milestone went dark. And in that darkness, valuable lessons are being buried with them.

Why Founders Stay Silent

The silence is not accidental, but calculated.

Founders are under pressure; from investors, from peers, from personal pride. Talking openly about failure in this market feels dangerous. It could threaten future fundraising, damage professional credibility, or unsettle the team.

There’s also a cultural undertone. In Nigeria, failure isn’t viewed as iteration; it’s seen as incompetence and weakness. That stigma keeps many from speaking up. Even honest exits, like Okra and Thepeer returning unused capital, weren’t accompanied by full explanations.

Startups are dying with their stories untold.

What Failure Teaches — But We’re Not Listening

When we bury failure, we bury data. We miss out on real feedback loops.

• Edukoya and Quizac struggled not because edtech is flawed, but because their users lacked basic tools: smartphones, stable data, or disposable income.
• Pivo’s shutdown wasn’t purely macroeconomic; it also came from co-founder conflict, a recurring issue in Nigeria’s startup sector.
• 54gene collapsed not because healthtech has no future, but because it grew too fast, mishandled governance, and ignored cash discipline.

These are beyond failed businesses; they’re case studies, and we’re throwing them away.

The “Always Up” Delusion

Startups aren’t always growing, but that’s not what our ecosystem wants to hear.

Every founder is “redefining finance” or “empowering Africa’s next billion.” No one’s talking about runway. About layoffs. About unpaid salaries. Or the fact that investors have stopped taking their calls.

This obsession with hyper-growth narratives means reality usually gets buried beneath PR. Even startups at the brink are announcing partnerships and celebrating metrics.

It’s a dangerous act, one that leads to founders burning in silence, employees blindsided by sudden shutdowns, and investors misled by curated optimism.

The Cost of Capital Destruction

Let’s not downplay the fallout.

Investors, local and foreign, have been burned. TLcom Capital, Base10 Partners, Susa Ventures, Target Global, were all hit. Even angel investors like Shola Akinlade (Paystack) and Babs Ogundeyi (Kuda) lost money backing ventures that no longer exist.

Over 1,500 tech workers lost jobs in 2023. Many have left the country or the industry altogether. Others are pivoting to contract work or relocating through the “Japa” route, further hollowing out the local talent pool.

Nigeria’s tech credibility is bruised, global investors are seeing this, and pulling back.

What Needs to Change

Some green shoots are emerging. Investors now care more about profitability than pitch decks. Corporate governance, once overlooked, is becoming a priority. The B2B pivot is accelerating. Domestic capital is slowly becoming more relevant. But there’s a long way to go.

• We need a cultural shift around failure.
• We need open post-mortems.
• We need founder support groups, not just demo days.
• We need regulators to move faster, and with clarity.

The Nigeria Startup Act and the $40 million Seed Fund backed by JICA and NSIA could help, if the bureaucracy doesn’t kill their impact first.

The Power of Telling the Truth

Dead startups don’t talk. But they should.

There’s power in naming what broke, there’s growth in sharing what went wrong and there’s maturity in admitting that not every idea works, not every team gels, and not every market is ready.

If the Nigerian tech sector wants to evolve, it must stop hiding its scars. The founders who failed, pivoted, or walked away; they carry the most important insights. But until we make space for them to speak, we’ll keep building on the same shaky foundations.

And one day, we might find the silence is what finally kills the ecosystem.