The customers wanted to avoid the queue. Eddie Sembatya wanted to build a business that would spare them the wait. In 2009, he entered a partnership around a utility-payment service: customers could have their bills settled without standing in line themselves. The proposition was straightforward. The exchange of trust was considerably more complicated.
Customers were reluctant to hand over their money. The business was reluctant to pay the bills first and collect afterwards. Soon, his partner wanted to leave and recover her contribution. Sembatya later told the story himself, including the uncomfortable parts. A service could solve an obvious inconvenience and still struggle to persuade people to use it.
It is a useful place to begin with the founder and Group CEO of Finding XY. His work now spans business advice, investment preparation and programmes supporting enterprises in East Africa. The language has grown more institutional. The underlying question remains disarmingly familiar: what needs to happen around a business before other people will place their confidence in it?
An idea, a friend, a small experiment
Sembatya’s public writing occasionally lets the aspiring entrepreneur interrupt the investment professional. In December 2019, he described a holiday conversation with two friends. One friend, whom he called James, had previously shared a project concept. Sembatya had a related idea, with different priorities, and had begun trying it with a small group.
James thought his idea had been borrowed. They laughed about the overlap, but their different approaches interested Sembatya. His friend planned to spend years researching. Sembatya was already experimenting. He acknowledged his tendency to act immediately, along with the shortcomings that could bring. His advice was to assess the need, consider the available skills and resources, and try the idea with a few people.
This makes him an engaging guide to entrepreneurship: he includes himself among the people who need guidance. The quick mover is willing to examine his own pace. The discussion of partnerships is similarly candid. His recollection of the utility-payment venture leads into an argument for patience, mutual contribution and a willingness to do the work. “Good things don’t just happen, they take time,” he wrote.
Before Finding XY, he held corporate positions and operated businesses across agriculture, property, financial services and distribution. Those experiences give his later coaching a practical frame. He has occupied the entrepreneur’s side of the conversation, where a promising service can encounter difficulties before it has had much chance to establish itself.
A business made of drinking straws
In 2017, Sembatya turned his attention to Benedicta Nanyonga, a retired Bank of Uganda employee whose Kinawataka Women Initiative made accessories from used plastic straws. There were bags, wallets, hats and earrings. It was an enterprise with a material that most people had finished thinking about by the end of a drink.
Sembatya admired the products and the environmental purpose. Then he got to the operational details. The women needed a pressing machine to straighten the straws; they were using knives. Management skills, growth finance and a dependable market were further challenges. The account gives business advice something more substantial to work with than a photograph of a finished handbag.
Here was a product, a production constraint and a customer problem. Finding XY was trying to help the initiative grow. Sembatya’s attention moved between what the enterprise made and the arrangements that would allow it to keep making and selling it. A pressing machine is a wonderfully concrete detail in a field so fond of abstract nouns.
That same year, he reflected on helping organize the SEED East African Symposium. He wanted better communication between enterprises and the organizations supporting them. He questioned programmes so generic that entrepreneurs could leave with their original difficulties intact. Support had to fit the enterprise; the enterprise, in turn, had to address a meaningful need.
His work with SEED also took him to Dar es Salaam, where training covered biomass briquettes and plastic upcycling. He described participants’ ambition with evident affection. The method was replication: helping new entrepreneurs adapt business models that others had already tested. The appeal was practical. A business could learn from an existing example while responding to the circumstances of its own community.
- 01Understand the needWho is the customer, and what problem is being solved?
- 02Build the businessWork on operations, governance and financial planning.
- 03Prepare for capitalMake the enterprise ready for assessment and investment.
An editorial illustration of the activities in Finding XY’s business-support approach. This is a process diagram, not a measured conversion funnel.
What a dryer needs around it
Another episode shows what catches his attention when he is assessing other people’s proposals. Sembatya chaired the external review committee for a Dutch Relief Alliance innovation call in Uganda. Fifty-five proposals entered the process, eighteen reached the shortlist and six were selected. The winning projects were implemented in 2021.
His favourite was CloudGreen. Its components addressed different obstacles facing women growing and selling agricultural produce. Drying equipment helped preserve products. E-bikes helped transport them. An online platform helped put them in front of customers. Financial advice accompanied the equipment and market access.
“My favourite project was definitely CloudGreen.”
Eddie Sembatya, on reviewing local innovation proposals
He was particularly impressed by the partnerships behind the proposal. Each part had a job, and the parts could work together. It is easy to see the attraction for someone whose own early venture had stalled between a useful proposition and the relationships required to deliver it.
CloudGreen makes the connective work visible. Preserving produce leaves a further question about getting it to market. Reaching the market leaves a question about finding buyers. Financial guidance sits alongside those practical services. Sembatya’s enthusiasm was for an arrangement capable of addressing several difficulties together.
Preparing both sides of the table
The institutional version of this work has brought Sembatya into contact with development agencies, investors and banks. He has represented SEED in Uganda, consulted with the United Nations Capital Development Fund and worked within the Private Financing Advisory Network. He also served as a senior programme manager with the Uganda Green Enterprise Finance Accelerator, known as UGEFA.
At a green-finance webinar in November 2020, he discussed how local financial institutions and tailored financing mechanisms could improve smaller businesses’ access to debt. That is a different task from simply urging a founder to find more money. It also requires attention to the institutions providing it and to the design of the financial relationship.
Finding XY’s enterprise programmes include due diligence and help preparing investor data rooms. Its workshops address financial strategy, governance and operations. These are the details an investor needs to inspect and an entrepreneur needs to manage. The approach puts practical preparation alongside introductions to potential capital providers.
The Women in Agriculture Impact Investment facility, or WAII, applies that attention to agribusiness and gender. Finding XY described its establishment in 2022, with a combination of financial instruments and support for enterprises along agricultural value chains. Its work brings investment preparation into the same conversation as financing for businesses led by women.
The July 2024 results give the effort some scale: the facility reported more than forty agribusinesses receiving structured advice. The organization described working with banks, including Stanbic and Equity, to help enterprises access investment. These are programme results across a team and its partners, rather than a personal tally for its founder.
Reported by Finding XY’s WAII facility in July 2024. Business preparation was part of the financing effort.
In 2022, Sembatya joined the fourth UNFCCC Capacity-building Talk on smaller enterprises and climate action. The discussion examined access to finance, practical training and the role of intermediaries. His later speaker biography also lists a board position at the Uganda Solar Energy Association, connecting his enterprise work with renewable-energy policy and market development.
The public conversations have continued. On 27 June 2025, he spoke about green finance at Uganda’s National ICT Innovation Hub. The audience was in a setting built around young technology businesses. His subject brought renewable energy and sustainable agriculture into that environment, linking the work of innovators with the financing of businesses in other sectors.
The work that carries on
By May 2026, the Africa Business Forum in Tallinn listed Sembatya as founder and CEO of Finding XY Group. Its account of his work covered climate technologies, agriculture and the circular economy. His professional reach crosses borders, while the recurring subject remains the smaller enterprise and the conditions under which it can grow.
In October 2026, he shared a discussion called Making Grants Work. The emphasis was on grants that help businesses become stronger and attract further investment. It extends the concern visible in his earlier writing: a useful intervention should leave an enterprise better able to manage the next stage.
His July 2024 ambitions for Finding XY were equally operational. He wanted greater use of technology in business-development services, more assets under management and more capacity to implement programmes. The organization had expanded beyond advice into designing and delivering projects. He wanted it to be able to do more of that work.
The utility-payment idea began with a queue. The difficulty lay in persuading people to rely on the proposed way around it. Years later, Sembatya’s work still turns on those relationships: between an entrepreneur and a customer, a business and a lender, a promising product and the services around it. There is plenty to do before everyone is ready to say yes.