Asili Africa

Bitnob turned Bitcoin's lost retail argument into a profitable plumbing system by partnering with Strike to move Tether across borders. Founded in a Ghanaian hostel, it navigated r…

Weego Mobility Lab refuses the startup myth, proving endurance over hype as four co-founders—two from Senegal, two from Morocco—navigate a pandemic pivot in Kenitra. The story trac…

This is the story of OKO Finance. Simon Schwall, and two co-founders barely on the record — Raphael Haziza the actuary, Shehzad Lokhandwalla the CTO. A 2019 pilot in Mali with 450…

The battery grid, not the motorcycle maker - and when a competitor with three to four times the capital came for the motorcycle, Ampersand let it come.In the mid-2010s an engineer…

Be the wire, not the storefront — and seventeen years later, nobody outside the company can tell how well it is doing.In 2009 a man in Johannesburg registered a company on a convic…

They kept the business by giving up the company — and the one time they refused, it cost them Walmart. In 1990 a young man inherited a general store from his uncle. Today it is the…

This is the one where a company spends a hundred and eleven years never once being made to pay for anything it did, and then gets handed a bill for the only thing it got right. Let…

This is the story of the oldest supermarket chain in Kenya. A company that Kenyan industrial policy invented in nineteen seventy five, that Kenyan retail investors bought into on t…

This is the story of a Nakuru mattress shop that grew, in twenty five years, into the largest supermarket chain on the eastern side of the continent. And then, in the space of thir…

Two South African brothers built a payments and cash-management platform for the spaza shops, kiosks and micro-merchants that the country's retail banks and card networks quietly s…

This is the story of Fuzu. The company built from a single moment when fifteen hundred people applied for one Nairobi driver job. The company that outlasted a decade of African onl…

This is the story of Tugende. The company that bet everything on the credit of people banks refused to see, built an empire one daily payment at a time, lost its footing at the wor…

Two Swedish engineers — Filip Lövström and Mikael Gånge — walked away from Sweden in 2017 to build electric motorcycles from scratch inside Nairobi rather than importing kits from…

The company was called Metro Africa Xpress. Everyone called it MAX. Its two co-founders had built it out of a classroom at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology six years earli…

This is the story of Anka. The company that proved a hard business, and could not survive its own cap table.

This is the story of how they did it, how they nearly ran out of cash before it worked, and how, in the last twelve months, the founder they built the company around finally steppe…

Pesapal is the seventeen year old Nairobi payment company that was in market seven years before Flutterwave launched, that never left Nairobi as its head office, and that in mid 20…

This is the story of how a European style café at a Nairobi mall became one of the most structurally consequential casual dining chains on the continent. And how it survived the sp…

The story of Greenspoon, which is, in some ways, the smallest company we have ever put on Asili Africa. One warehouse. One country. Around one hundred to two hundred employees. Fou…

This is the story of how Kenya's collapsed supermarket sector was restarted, by a Nakuru family that walked away in time, and the patient capital that walked in behind them.