east-africa
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SHONA Wants Better Businesses, Not Better Pitches
In East Africa's crowded accelerator market, SHONA has built its case around an unfashionable idea: make the company work before polishing the pitch. Its wager combines long-horizon coaching, local networks, and loans designed for the awkward middle between microcredit and venture capital.
ASSEK backs the people behind Kenya’s startups
Kenya has incubators, accelerators and business coaches. ASSEK’s bet is that helping them work better together can reach further than another startup programme.
HIVE COLAB and the business of getting past the prototype
A shared workspace in Kampala grew into a proving ground for Ugandan entrepreneurs. Its real work happens between a promising idea and a business that can pay its bills.
Kevin Rudahinduka Learned to Speak Business. Then the Systems Started Moving.
The Eden Care Rwanda CEO built his career by translating between engineers, executives and customers. His useful lesson is simple: technical fluency gets systems built; business fluency gets them used.
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%.
Molly Heacock
Molly Heacock is the incoming CEO of Untold (formerly CARE for AIDS), an Atlanta-headquartered global nonprofit helping people living with HIV move toward a life beyond AIDS through holistic, community-based, faith-integrated care. A public health practitioner who spent a decade as COO and Managing Director before stepping up to lead, she has helped scale a model that pairs medical adherence with economic, emotional, and spiritual support across dozens of communities in Kenya, Tanzania, and beyond. She relocated from Atlanta to Nairobi in 2019 and built her career on the conviction that local, indigenous-led staff and dignity-first care change long-term outcomes.
Iain Usiri
Iain Usiri is the co-founder and CEO of Ramani, a Tanzanian fintech building financial infrastructure for Africa's consumer-packaged-goods supply chains. A Stanford computer science graduate and former Salesforce product manager, he gave up his US immigration status and flew home one-way in 2019 to start the company with his brother Calvin and friend Martin Kibet. Ramani gives micro distribution centers free point-of-sale and inventory software, then monetizes through lending - and in 2022 raised a $32M Series A led by Flexcap Ventures after passing through Y Combinator's W20 batch.
Wendy Gonzalez
Wendy Gonzalez is the CEO of Sama, a mission-driven AI data annotation and model evaluation company that employs thousands of workers in East Africa. She joined Sama in 2015, rose through the ranks as COO and President, and assumed the CEO role in 2020 following the passing of founder Leila Janah. Under her leadership, Sama closed a $70M Series B - at the time the largest funding round for a woman-led AI infrastructure company - achieved Forbes AI 50 recognition, and scaled to over 3,000 employees while maintaining its B Corp certification and social mission of lifting people out of poverty through dignified work in the AI economy.
Lesley Marincola
Lesley Silverthorn Marincola is the founder and CEO of Angaza, a San Francisco-based B2B software company that powers pay-as-you-go financing for solar home systems and other off-grid products across emerging markets. A Stanford-trained product designer and mechanical engineer, she launched Angaza in 2010 after a course called 'Designing for Extreme Poverty' lit a fire she hasn't put out since. Today, Angaza's platform reaches over 5 million people across 50 countries, enabling low-income households to pay for life-changing energy products through weekly micropayments via mobile money — replacing kerosene lamps one $1 payment at a time. Her work earned Angaza the 2018 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship and a TED stage appearance. She is a Forbes '30 Under 30' alum, Echoing Green Fellow, and World Economic Forum Young Global Shaper.