africa
(25)
BuyPower
BuyPower is a Nigerian bill-payment platform that lets people buy prepaid and postpaid electricity tokens - plus airtime, data and TV subscriptions - online and through its mobile app, 24/7. Founded in 2016 in Abuja after its founders grew tired of queueing at utility offices, it integrates directly with Nigeria's electricity distribution companies (DisCos) and has grown into a cash-flow-positive business reporting roughly $20.6M in revenue by the end of 2024. It was the first company from Northern Nigeria backed by Y Combinator (W17).
Cleva
Cleva is a USD banking platform that lets freelancers, remote workers and businesses in Africa - starting with Nigeria - open U.S. dollar accounts in their own name, receive international payments via ACH, wire, or stablecoins (USDC/USDT), and spend through a virtual dollar card. Founded in 2023 by Stripe and AWS alumni Tolu Alabi and Philip Abel, and backed by Y Combinator (W24), Cleva helps users get paid in dollars and hedge against local currency volatility.
Curacel
Curacel is an AI-powered insurance infrastructure company building the rails for insurance in emerging markets. Its cloud APIs let insurers automate claims processing and catch fraud, waste and abuse, while its Grow product lets banks, fintechs and e-commerce platforms embed insurance into their own apps. A Y Combinator Winter 2022 company founded in Nigeria, Curacel works with insurers such as AXA Mansard, Old Mutual and Jubilee across roughly ten African markets.
Dojah
Dojah is a Lagos-based identity verification and anti-fraud infrastructure company that helps digital businesses onboard users, verify identities, and stay compliant through a single API and no-code tools. It aggregates KYC, KYB, AML, biometric, document and address checks across Africa and beyond, letting fintechs, banks, and marketplaces confirm who they are dealing with in seconds. A Y Combinator W22 company, Dojah serves customers including OPay, FCMB, Cowrywise and Fincra.
Eazipay
Eazipay is a Lagos-based payroll and payment automation platform that lets African businesses run payroll, remit taxes and statutory contributions, and pay their teams in about five minutes. Founded in 2021 and backed by Y Combinator (W22), it also offers payroll APIs for banks and neobanks and financial-wellness tools such as early wage access for workers.
Eden Care Medical
Eden Care Medical is a licensed digital health insurer building the claims and distribution infrastructure that modernizes health insurance in Africa. Starting in Rwanda and expanding into Kenya, it sells group health cover to employers and their staff, then runs the whole value chain - HR admin portal, an employee app for navigating care and wellness, and digital tools for hospitals and clinics - to cut the cost of insurance in a market where operating costs run 2.2x the global average and penetration sits near 0.2%.
FoodCourt
FoodCourt (legally CoKitchen) is a Lagos-based cloud-kitchen company that owns and operates a portfolio of virtual restaurant brands, cooks the food itself, and delivers through its own app. By ditching the aggregator model that simply connects restaurants to eaters, FoodCourt controls the menu, the kitchen, and the logistics end-to-end, letting it sell quality meals at scale across Lagos and Abuja. Backed by Y Combinator (S22), it reached profitability in 2024 and has delivered millions of meals.
Miden
Miden is a Nigerian fintech building payments infrastructure for businesses across Sub-Saharan Africa. Through a single API, companies can issue virtual and physical cards in USD, NGN and multi-currency formats, run banking-as-a-service programs, open business accounts, and handle bill payments - the plumbing that lets other companies launch financial products without building banking rails from scratch. Founded in 2022 and part of Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch, Miden has issued over a million cards and processes billions in transaction volume.
Pylon
Pylon is a Cairo-based smart infrastructure platform that sells electricity and water utilities a subscription-based Smart Metering as a Service (SMaaS). Its software layers on top of any meter - old or new - to cut losses, improve revenue collection and give operators real-time visibility, all at zero upfront cost. Founded in 2017 and backed by Y Combinator (S21), Pylon runs across more than a million metering endpoints in Egypt and the Philippines.
Schoolable
Schoolable is a Lagos-based fintech (Y Combinator W'19) building financial infrastructure for African education. Through a web platform for schools and a mobile app for parents, it helps private K-12 schools collect fees on time, reconcile payments, run payroll and manage expenses, while letting families plan, save, borrow and pay school fees in installments. Founded by Henry Chibuzo and Angela Essien, it operates on the premise that access to affordable finance is the biggest barrier to quality education in Africa.
Topship
Topship is a Lagos-based digital freight forwarder that lets African businesses and individuals ship parcels, cargo and freight to and from more than 150 countries. Founded in 2020 and part of Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch, it functions as an asset-light shipping layer - booking, tracking, insurance and, increasingly, an AI shipping assistant - aimed at the merchants who move goods across borders but were previously stuck with informal agents and opaque pricing.
Vendy
Vendy is a Lagos-founded payment infrastructure company that lets businesses accept payments inside the places people already chat - WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram and AI assistants. Sellers spin up a shop in minutes with a catalog, cart, automated invoicing and checkout, and buyers pay without downloading an app or signing up. Started in Y Combinator's W22 batch, Vendy now positions itself as 'agentic payments infrastructure,' offering a single API across cards, bank transfers, mobile money and USSD, and reports more than 20 million transactions processed for around 2,000 merchants.
Workpay
Workpay is a Nairobi-based HR and payroll software company that helps local and global businesses hire, pay, and manage employees and contractors across Africa. Its cloud platform combines payroll processing, time and attendance, leave, expenses, benefits, and Employer of Record (EOR) services so companies can run compliant payroll in local currency without setting up a legal entity in each country. Founded in 2019 out of an earlier product called TozzaPlus, the Y Combinator-backed startup serves more than 1,000 companies and processes over $200 million in payroll value a year.
Inclusivity Solutions
Inclusivity Solutions is a Cape Town-based inclusive insurtech that designs and delivers embedded, affordable digital insurance for emerging consumers across Africa. Through its open-API platform ASPin, it partners with banks, telcos, insurers and fintechs to build, sell and administer low-cost products - life, accident, hospital cash, device and crop cover - distributed via mobile channels people already use. The company operates in roughly ten African markets and has served over two million customers.
Outsized
Outsized is a curated talent-on-demand platform that connects large enterprises and consulting firms with vetted independent consultants, subject-matter experts, interims and fractional professionals across Asia-Pacific, Africa and the Middle East. Founded in 2016 and focused on financial services, it pairs management-consulting rigor with deep industry domain expertise, handling matching, contracting, invoicing and payments so clients can staff transformation, risk, data and digital projects in days rather than months.
Yango
Yango is a Dubai-headquartered technology company that started as a ride-hailing brand from the Yandex Taxi team in 2018 and has grown into a global everyday-services ecosystem. Operating in more than 30 countries across Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Europe, and Latin America, Yango bundles mobility, food and grocery delivery, mapping, fintech, advertising, entertainment, and AI into locally adapted apps. Rather than owning fleets, it partners with local taxi companies and businesses, using a 'hyperlocal' playbook to tailor each product to regional cultures, currencies, and infrastructure.
Pastel
Pastel builds agentic AI for banking operations, aimed at the regional, mid-tier, and community banks that most fintech innovation skips over. Its flagship platform, Sigma, deploys AI agents across customer onboarding, due diligence, fraud detection, anti-money laundering, screening, and executive reporting - trained on local data and regulations rather than retrofitted Western systems. Founded by Stanford graduate students and rooted in African markets, Pastel started as a small-business bookkeeping tool called Sabi before pivoting into compliance infrastructure for financial institutions.
Qlay
Qlay is a San Francisco-based AI hiring company that sources, vets, and shortlists remote engineering talent - notably from Vietnam and Africa - and pairs it with an AI Proctor that catches AI-assisted cheating during interviews and coding tests. Using eye-gaze tracking, speech analysis, a phone-as-second-camera setup, and process monitoring, Qlay aims to make technical hiring both fast (shortlists in about a week) and trustworthy in an era when candidates can quietly lean on tools like ChatGPT.
Ramani.io
Ramani.io is a Tanzania-born, San Francisco-incorporated B2B fintech digitizing the micro-distribution layer of Africa's consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) supply chain. It hands point-of-sale, inventory and procurement software to thousands of micro-distribution centres (MDCs) that move products from brands like Coca-Cola, Diageo and AB InBev to corner shops, then uses the real-time sales and inventory data to underwrite working-capital financing. A Y Combinator alumnus that raised a $32M Series A in 2022 and holds a lending license from the Bank of Tanzania, Ramani is now evolving into a financial marketplace and B2B e-commerce platform connecting banks, brands and resellers.
Beacon Power Services
Beacon Power Services (BPS) is an energy-technology company building data and grid-management software for Africa's power sector. Its AI-enabled platforms - Adora for real-time grid monitoring, CAIMS for utility asset and customer data, and the Xepp consumer app - help electricity distributors cut losses, prevent outages and digitize networks. Founded by aerospace engineer turned investment banker Bimbola Adisa, BPS now serves utilities reaching more than 50 million people across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Zambia and beyond, processing over a billion grid data points a day.
Hassan Al Shouli
Hassan Al Shouli is a senior communications and strategic business executive at Microsoft's CEMA (Central Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa) President Office, based in the UAE. With nearly two decades of career experience, he has shaped Microsoft's presence across the Gulf, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and broader MEA region through executive communications, multi-channel campaigns, and leadership engagement. Before Microsoft, he spent years in the fast-moving MENA digital market at dubizzle and analytics consultancies. He holds an MBA from Cass Business School (now Bayes) and a BSc in Electronics, Engineering, and Communications from the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport.
Yassir
Yassir is the leading super app for French-speaking Africa, bundling ride-hailing, food and grocery delivery, and digital payments into a single platform serving more than eight million users across the Maghreb and beyond. Founded in 2017 by Stanford-trained engineer Noureddine Tayebi and El Mahdi Yettou, the company has raised over $193 million, including a record $150M Series B led by Bond.
Angaza
Angaza is a San Francisco- and Nairobi-based software company whose pay-as-you-go platform lets last-mile distributors sell solar home systems, water pumps, smartphones and other life-changing products to off-grid consumers on small, mobile-money installments. Its cloud platform powers more than 200 distributors across roughly 50 countries.
Teppei Tsutsui
Teppei Tsutsui is General Partner and co-founder of GFR Fund, a San Francisco-based early-stage venture capital firm focused on gaming, generative AI, creator economy, and consumer tech. Tokyo-raised and University of Chicago-educated, he co-founded GFR Fund in 2016 after a decade spanning Mitsubishi Corporation, Morgan Stanley M&A, and GREE - where he moved to San Francisco in 2014 to launch their seed investment program. GFR Fund III closed at $53.5M in 2023, and the firm's portfolio of over 100 companies includes three unicorns - VRChat, Animoca Brands, and Sky Mavis - with GFR's earliest and most famous bet being VRChat, invested when the platform had just 1,000 active users.
Josh Tetrick
Josh Tetrick is the co-founder and CEO of Eat Just, Inc., the San Francisco-based food technology company behind JUST Egg (a mung bean-based egg substitute) and GOOD Meat (the world's first commercially sold cultivated chicken). Starting with $37,000 of personal capital in 2011, he has raised over $456 million to build a company that simultaneously cracked the plant-based egg market and won the world's first regulatory approval for lab-grown meat in Singapore in 2020. A former Fulbright Scholar, UN initiative leader, and Cornell-educated lawyer turned food disruptor, Tetrick has made it his life's work to prove that removing animals from the food system doesn't mean sacrificing flavor or scale.