Grace Ashiru
Africa’s tech ecosystem is having a quiet but consequential rethink about what actually counts as progress. Rather than chasing another record-breaking funding round, founders and ecosystem leaders are now pointing to less flashy metrics, stable foreign investment, working cross-border payment rails, and deeper regional trade ties, as the real markers of a maturing market.
That shift in emphasis came through clearly at a recent Founders Conversation media briefing that pulled together executives from startups like Termii, Bani, Lendsqr, E-doc Online, Scandium, and Emergency Response Africa.
Folarin Aiyegbusi, Google’s Regional Lead for the Startup Developer Ecosystem in Sub-Saharan Africa, told the room that the more than $1.3 billion raised collectively by companies in Google’s African accelerator and funding programs doesn’t tell the whole story on its own. Big numbers like that, he said, tend to lose meaning. What matters is translating them into something people can actually feel economically.
His argument: capital flowing into African tech should be understood less as venture speculation and more as a form of durable foreign direct investment, the kind that builds real digital infrastructure and creates ripple effects across local job markets. A single funded startup, he noted, might only directly employ 20 to 50 people, but the knock-on effects touch a much wider web of vendors, service providers, and dependent businesses.
Payments infrastructure came up as the sharpest pain point. Bani co-founder and CEO Rodney Jackson-Cole, who has spent roughly a decade building digital banking products across Kenya, Ghana, Senegal, and Nigeria, laid out a frustrating paradox: domestic payment rails within individual African countries are genuinely world-class, but moving money between neighboring African markets remains a mess of regulatory and technical friction.
His example was simple. A merchant in Lagos trying to get paid by a customer in Accra or Dakar still runs into major obstacles, largely because most existing payment infrastructure was built around cards and bank accounts, when the reality on the ground is mobile money and digital wallets.
Bani’s answer has been to build a single API layer that sits on top of the patchwork of local banking systems, mobile money networks, and regulatory regimes across West, East, and Central Africa, giving companies one integration point instead of dozens. The company has already landed integrations with major global retail names, including Levi’s, Nike, and Adidas, and is now looking to extend its settlement rails into Asian manufacturing hubs, with China as an early priority. Jackson-Cole was careful to note that the harder problem isn’t the software, it’s navigating the compliance maze market by market. Even so, Bani’s stated ambition is bold: handling up to 80% of Africa’s commercial trade flows within 15 years.
Termii’s Nigeria GM, Olajuwon Abayomi, brought the conversation back down to something more immediate and familiar to everyday users, the OTP codes and transaction alerts that pop up seconds after a bank transfer. That near-instant delivery, often clocking in under 10 seconds, has quietly been Termii’s core business for nearly a decade, and Abayomi used it as a reminder that infrastructure wins in African tech don’t always look dramatic. Sometimes they’re just things working reliably in the background.
