kenya
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GRIFFIN Global makes the handoff work
A software firm built between the United States and East Africa has a practical pitch: better delivery starts with how you organize the people doing it.
George Odenyo and the business of making room
From telecom finance to the CEO’s office at ATC Kenya, George Odenyo has built a career around giving people more room to work, learn and connect.
Sama puts people inside the machine
Before AI can recognize a shoe, a tomato, or a dangerous mistake, someone has to teach it what to see. Sama built a business around those people - and a promise that their work could change their lives.
Kenya’s next startup should not need a Nairobi postcode
The Association of Countrywide Innovation Hubs connects Kenya’s regional hubs to training, partners and opportunity. Its most useful innovation may be making distance matter less.
Green Generation Initiative: A forest you can eat
A shortage of seedlings helped Elizabeth Wathuti start GGI. Now the Kenyan nonprofit connects tree growing, school meals and community livelihoods - with a chicken coop making a surprisingly persuasive argument.
Rose Muturi and the art of making banking smaller
At Chase Bank, simplifying a crowded product portfolio earned Rose Muturi an unlikely nickname: “The Undertaker.” Her route to leading Moniepoint in Kenya runs through a more useful question: what can a customer actually do with all this technology?
iHUB Nairobi: The business of making luck
A foosball table could introduce two founders. Keeping the doors open required a business model. Inside the Nairobi hub that learned to put a price, a partner and a pilot behind a promising idea.
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.
LakeHub is building a tech career that starts in Kisumu
It began with Saturday meetups and discounted tea. Now LakeHub connects young Kenyans to software training, employers and a new set of problems out on the farm.
Sidney Rema
Sidney Rema is the co-founder and CEO of Sanifu (YC S22), a Nairobi-based startup that uses AI to pull sales orders out of emails, WhatsApp messages, PDFs and even handwritten notes and drops them straight into ERP systems. A University of Nairobi medical student who kept building companies instead of finishing his degree, Rema spent years in small-business banking and payments before co-founding Sanifu with Phelix Juma and Bernard Momanyi. The company grew out of Patika, a marketplace the team started as a food-ordering app called MealTime, and now works with African manufacturers and distributors to cut order processing from minutes to seconds.
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%.
Karsa
Karsa is a stablecoin neobank that gives people in emerging markets a global dollar account. Users can deposit local currency, save in dollar-denominated stablecoins, receive international payments, cash out to local banks, and spend abroad with a card - without needing a traditional US bank or any crypto knowledge. The product hides the complexity of self-custody wallets and a peer-to-peer stablecoin network behind a familiar banking interface, targeting the roughly one billion people who live under high inflation and capital controls.
Sanifu
Sanifu (formerly Patika, YC S22) is a Nairobi-based company whose AI reads sales orders arriving by email, WhatsApp, PDF and even handwritten notes, then enters them straight into a manufacturer's ERP system. It cuts order-processing time from 5-10 minutes to under 30 seconds and targets the roughly 180,000 manufacturers and distributors across Africa still keying orders in by hand.
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.
Untold
Untold, formerly CARE for AIDS, is an Atlanta-based faith-driven nonprofit that runs a nine-month, church-based program helping HIV-positive men and women across East and Southern Africa build a life beyond AIDS. Working through local churches with indigenous staff, its integrated model addresses physical, spiritual, emotional, and economic health at once - producing 97% viral suppression among clients and more than 50,000 program graduates.
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.
Mwalimu Karisa
Mwalimu Karisa is an executive at Kong Inc., the San Francisco-based API connectivity company behind the Kong Gateway and Konnect platform. Originally from Kilifi County on Kenya's coast, Karisa's path ran through an exchange program in Iowa and onto the front lines of global API and AI infrastructure. Kong serves enterprises managing critical API traffic across cloud, hybrid, and on-premise environments, with over $424 million raised and a $2 billion valuation. Before entering the technology sector, Karisa was publicly recognized for community development work in his home village, raising funds for clean water access and healthcare infrastructure in coastal Kenya.
Meg Whitman
Margaret Cushing 'Meg' Whitman is a billionaire business executive and diplomat who transformed eBay from a 30-person startup into an $8 billion e-commerce giant, later restructured Hewlett-Packard, and served as U.S. Ambassador to Kenya. With a net worth of $4 billion, she's navigated roles from Procter & Gamble brand manager to failed California gubernatorial candidate to diplomatic envoy, making her one of the most prominent women in American business and politics.
Jalak Jobanputra
Jalak Jobanputra is the founder and managing partner of Future\Perfect Ventures, one of the world's first VC funds dedicated to blockchain technology, launched in 2014. Born in Nairobi, Kenya to parents of Indian descent and raised in rural New Jersey, she brings a rare global lens to venture investing - from backing Bitcoin infrastructure at seed stage (Blockchain.com, Blockstream) to building microfinance programs in Tanzania. A Wharton and Kellogg alumna, she started investing in Bitcoin in 2013 before it was remotely fashionable, and has since built a portfolio of 50+ companies at the intersection of decentralized technology, AI, and financial inclusion. Her blog 'The Barefoot VC' has run since 2009 and was named a top 10 investor blog by Business Insider.
Claire Diaz-Ortiz
Claire Diaz-Ortiz is a venture capitalist, angel investor, bestselling author of 10 books, executive coach, and former Twitter Corporate Social Innovation Director - the early employee Wired dubbed 'The Woman Who Got the Pope on Twitter.' A Stanford and Oxford-educated polymath who co-founded a nonprofit in Kenya, live-tweeted the birth of her child, holds the prized @claire Twitter handle, and now runs The Angel Collective to fund female founders across Latin America while coaching Fortune 500 executives through 100 Coaches Agency.