kenya
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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.
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?
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.
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.