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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?
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.
Paul Kimani Bet the Company on the Boring Part
A profitable consultancy had customers, staff and momentum. Paul Kimani closed it anyway, kept five people, and built Workpay around the overlooked machinery that makes payday feel ordinary across Africa.
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.
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.
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.