emerging-markets
(67)
Branch International puts the bank in your pocket
A smartphone can reveal a borrower that a credit file cannot. Branch built a business on that idea, then learned how much banking still happens beyond the algorithm.
The IIF puts finance in the same room
Born in a debt crisis, the Institute of International Finance turned shared information into a membership business. Its enduring product is a place where banks, markets and policymakers can talk.
IFC makes the next investor say yes.
The World Bank Group’s private-sector arm builds deals that other investors can join. Zambia’s solar auctions show the promise. A coal plant in India shows the price of getting the risks wrong.
ZOLA iNTELLIGENCE puts the grid in the details
A solar panel can make electricity. ZOLA iNTELLIGENCE is betting that the harder job is running the business that keeps it flowing.
EBANX found growth at the checkout
The Brazilian payments company built a business around a detail global merchants kept missing: people want to pay with what they already use.
BFA Global’s big idea: let the shopkeeper sell first
A minibus ride, a rejected delivery, a freezer paid for by the day. BFA Global finds the small frictions that keep businesses small - then helps build a way around them.
United Green makes a business of the difficult bits
A family-controlled investor turns complicated markets into solar parks, food systems and joint ventures. Its Kazakhstan projects show why the financing can matter as much as the technology.
Seedstars took the long way to venture capital
Twenty non-refundable tickets helped launch a startup competition. Seedstars turned the journey into a business connecting emerging-market founders with capital, practical training and people who can open doors.
Jana made the advertiser pay for your internet
A failed blood-bank texting project supplied the idea: stop asking people to pay for the privilege of helping you. Jana turned that lesson into mobile data rewards, then bet on a browser.
The Video Game Company That Learned to Sell Everywhere
Live Gamer began by helping players buy imaginary goods. As Emergent Payments, it took the harder lesson into real commerce: the last mile of a global sale is stubbornly local.
The Computer That Worked Without the Internet Became a School for Making Games
Endless set out to put a useful computer in the hands of people with patchy internet. The harder lesson was that access to a machine is only the beginning.
The Company That Sells the Missing Ingredient in Global Health: Attention
Global Health Strategies does not make vaccines or run hospitals. It engineers the attention, alliances and political will that help health ideas travel - from village councils in Uttar Pradesh to a polio milestone watched around the world.
The Company That Builds the Room Where Power Meets
Richard Attias & Associates sells something harder to explain than an event and more valuable than a stage: a temporary center of gravity for people who rarely share a room.
Startup Wise Guys puts a price on learning to sell
The Estonia-born accelerator backs B2B founders before many investors will take the meeting. Its offer pairs capital with a demanding commercial education - and a bill worth reading.
Yunus Social Business wants your donation to work more than once
The Berlin-based organisation turns philanthropy into patient business loans and helps corporations buy from social enterprises. Its toughest lessons begin when the money stops moving.
VC4A does the work before the cheque
A startup profile can open a door. VC4A has built a business around what happens next: the mentoring, selection and unglamorous preparation that help founders meet investors on firmer ground.
Startup Réseau gets founders into the room where business happens
A Singapore delivery startup needed a foothold in Mumbai. Startup Réseau helped it test demand and make local connections - a revealing example of how this consulting company turns market access into practical work.
Saltside built the marketplaces. Then its rival came shopping.
The Swedish company behind ikman turned local classifieds into a business worth buying. Its journey through Bangladesh, Ghana and Nigeria shows what money can build - and what it cannot hurry.
Upstream Finds the Sale After the Click
The mobile marketing company turns operator channels, fraud checks and well-timed messages into customer acquisitions. Its most revealing work happens where an ordinary advertising campaign would stop.
Verto’s bet: the money has to arrive
A poker-table conversation became a payments business built around Africa’s awkward currency routes. Verto’s real product is what happens after the exchange rate looks good.
Tala Bet the Credit Score Was Wrong - Now 14 Million Borrowers Power Its AI
Shivani Siroya built a lender for people the credit bureaus could not see. A decade, 14 million customers and $8 billion in disbursements later, Tala wants to turn that hard-won repayment history into the credit layer for the global majority.
Cauris Is Turning Africa’s Messy Loan Data Into a $40 Million Credit Machine
African fintech does not only need more money. It needs credit that can see what is happening after the wire lands - and Cauris built its pitch around that unglamorous, valuable job.
The Firm That Turned One Man's Duty-Free Fortune Into a $118 Billion Growth Machine
It began as one billionaire's quiet family office. Today General Atlantic writes some of the biggest checks in private markets - and it still calls itself a partner, not a boss.
The Company Teaching Global Money to Speak 17 Local Languages
A single API, 17 Latin American countries, and 640-plus ways to move money. How a Buenos Aires payments company became the plumbing under global commerce - then got bought by an ad-tech giant.
The Logistics Giant That Sold Its Trucks and Kept the Map
Agility built a freight empire across the emerging world, sold it to a Danish rival for stock, and used the proceeds to buy airports' ground crews and fuel tankers instead. Here is how a Kuwaiti warehousing company became a holding company for the plumbing of global trade.
The checkout has 1,000 doors. Zota wants one key.
Cards are only one dialect in global commerce. Zota built a payment gateway for the hundreds of local wallets, bank transfers, QR systems and currencies that decide whether an international checkout succeeds.
Jumia's Real Product Is the Road Between a Click and a Front Door
The pan-African marketplace is learning that the hard part of online shopping is not the screen. It is everything that must happen after a customer taps buy.
The Company That Decides Which Markets Count
MSCI turns messy global markets into three-letter labels like EAFE and ACWI - and roughly $6.4 trillion in investor money follows where those labels point.
Exinity
Exinity grew out of online forex, then began placing the same market machinery inside an investing app, a prediction game and even Roblox. Its wager is that the next generation will learn finance in the digital spaces it already inhabits.
Abhi
Abhi is a MENAP embedded-finance company that started by letting salaried workers draw wages they have already earned before payday, and has grown into a full stack of employer-facing tools - earned wage access, payroll processing, payroll financing and invoice factoring - plus its own microfinance bank in Pakistan. Founded in 2021 by Omair Ansari and Ali Ladhubhai and backed by Y Combinator (S21), it now serves over a million people across thousands of companies in Pakistan, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Oman, and was the first MENAP fintech named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer.