The Grinders Table

A failing startup. A tweet he almost scrolled past. A cold email offering to work for free. Now Partner at Microtraction, one of Africa's earliest and most active pre-seed investment firms, he has been consequential in the growth of the startup ecosystem in Nigeria/Africa. In this episode, we talk about the following :  The tweet and the cold email that got him into Microtraction in three week...

Oluseun Onigbinde co-founded BudgIT at a Lagos hackathon in 2011 with one conviction: that the gap between what Nigeria's budget data showed and what citizens could understand was itself a governance failure. Fifteen years later, he runs Africa's most recognised fiscal transparency organisation across six countries — and he'll tell you the theory he built it on may need rewriting. In t...

Yvonne Johnson left investment banking in New York to join the transformation team at First Bank of Nigeria. She spent eight years there, rising to Head of Strategy and Corporate Development - restructuring the operating model and building the bank's first digital finance strategy. When she left in 2018, she didn't start a lender. She co-founded Indicina, the API-driven credit infrastructu...

Eunice Ajim graduated high school at 15, moved to the US from Cameroon with almost no financial support, and built a hairstyling business to pay for college. She quit Apple inside eighteen months, got wiped out building her first company, and slept in her car before she ever raised a dollar. Then she co-founded OpenTeams, exited it, and launched Ajim Capital, a pre-seed and seed fund backing Afric...

Opeyemi Awoyemi built WhoGoHost in his first year atuniversity before Nigerian tech had a template. He co-founded Jobberman from a dormitory, grew it into the largest online recruitment platform in sub-Saharan Africa, and watched it get acquired by Ringier One Africa Media. He didn't stop there; he went on to build a venture studio and now a startup - ola.cv  In this conversation, Ope breaks d...

After co-founding Blip (acquired by Disney), running Facebook's ads product through the chaos of the post-IPO years, serving as CPTO at Deliveroo, and CPO at Monzo, Mike left banking with one conviction: the technology to move money instantly and cheaply across borders already existed. Nobody had built a front end worthy of it. That conviction became Sling Money. This week, it became Morse, na...

What does it really take to build a digital bank for Africa’s green economy, and why might carbon credits become one of the continent’s most valuable exports? In this episode of The Grinders Table, Uwem sits down with Mélanie Keita, CEO and co‑founder of Melanin Kapital, a carbon neobank lending to agricultural, cleantech and carbon projects across 12 African markets. Mélanie shares her journey fr...

Florent "Flo" Nduwayezu is a Nairobi-based investor at FP Capital, and one of the most consistently honest voices in African tech. He's Burundian, he's been in Nairobi for 13 years, and he has very little patience for the narratives that keep African ecosystems stuck. In this episode, Flo sits down with Uwem to challenge some of the most comfortable assumptions in African VC, starting with SaaS. H...

Dr. Dotun Olowoporoku didn't take the typical route to venture capital. He started as a PhD researcher on air quality and climate change, stumbled into entrepreneurship with an online food delivery startup, became CCO at Moniepoint during its most critical growth years, and then became Managing Partner at Ventures Platform, one of Africa's most founder-supportive seed funds. In this episod...

Most fintech founders talk about financial inclusion. Stone Atwine actually started there, watching his grandmother get stressed at a Moneygram agent because she had no ID, carrying $200 in cash on a one-hour bus ride back to her farm. That frustration became the foundation of Eversend, now one of Africa's most ambitious cross-border payments and neobanking platforms. In this episode, Stone and Uw...

Ethel Cofie didn't plan to build Africa's largest Women in Tech network. She just wanted to create a place for women in tech to find each other in a male-dominated industry. Today, Women in Tech Africa has 5,000+ members across 30+ countries and won the UN EQUALS Award. But Ethel's work goes beyond WITA. As CEO of EDEL Technology Consulting, she sits on boards from insurance to fintech...

What happens when you tell a country demanding jobs to create them instead? Rym Baouendi did exactly that in post-revolution Tunisia, co-founding the country's first coworking space and fundamentally changing how a generation thought about opportunity. Now Director of Alumni Innovation & Engagement at Harvard Innovation Lab, Rym has lived across continents, building bridges between innovat...

What happens when you read the Bitcoin whitepaper to find loopholes and make quick money? For Brenton Naicker, Principal at CV VC Africa, those 8 pages completely changed his life trajectory. In this episode of The Grinders Table, Brenton shares his journey from aspiring Wall Street banker to one of Africa's most influential blockchain advocates. We dive deep into his philosophy on exceptional...

In this episode, we sit down with Wale Akanbi, one of the co-founders of Aella. Aella became the first African lending fintech admitted to Y Combinator in 2017 and has since served over 2 million users across Nigeria and the Philippines. Wale's journey, from teaching himself programming in Nigerian cyber cafes to building AI-powered financial inclusion tools, is a masterclass in persistence, v...

What do you do when you discover a $281 billion problem that global pharmaceutical companies can't solve? If you're Ayodeji Alaran, you leave your corporate job and build the solution from your house in Lagos. In this episode, Ayodeji shares the remarkable journey from pharmacy school to founding PBR Life Sciences, now building one of Africa's largest healthcare datasets. This isn'...

Bernard Laurendeau built Ethiopia's first licensed payment system operator, advised the Prime Minister's office on job creation, and now operates from Tokyo helping Japanese billions find their way into African markets. But he has a contrarian message: Africa needs to stop chasing sexy tech and focus on boring infrastructure first. In this conversation, we explore: Why he respects unknown...

Dr. Houda Ghozzi, founder of Open Startup (OST), shares her journey from professor to pan-African ecosystem builder. Following Tunisia's revolution, she transformed uncertainty into opportunity, now helping young entrepreneurs across 19 African countries develop through "hope, skills, and exposure." Houda discusses entrepreneurship as a common language that transcends borders, the ev...

After a decade as Nigeria's leading financial literacy advocate, Tunji Andrews realized education alone wasn't enough. Inspired by an elderly lottery agent from his childhood who fell into poverty, he founded Awabah to bring pension solutions to Nigeria's informal sector workers. In this candid conversation, Tunji reveals how his company is using local language and cultural understandi...

Yassine Laghzioui, CEO of UM6P Ventures and Director of Entrepreneurship at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, joins The Grinders Table to discuss building Africa's innovation ecosystem through deep tech investment. When Yassine chose to return to Morocco while his peers stayed abroad, he embarked on a journey to transform how innovation happens in Africa. In this conversation, he shares why...

In this reshared episode, Uwem speaks with Massimiliano 'Massi' Spalazzi, former CEO of Jumia Nigeria and early employee who helped scale the company to become Africa's first tech IPO on the NYSE. Key highlights: The origins of Jumia in Nigeria and early challenges of building an e-commerce pioneer How Jumia introduced cash-on-delivery to transform online shopping in a low-trust environment Buildi...

In this episode of The Grinders Table, we speak with Jelle Schuitemaker, co-founder of Goal 3, whose innovative patient monitoring system has reduced child mortality by 42% in African hospitals. Jelle shares his journey from first encountering global inequality in the Philippines to building technology that's transforming healthcare in low-resource settings. We explore the philosophical founda...

In this enlightening conversation, Ghita Zniber, co-founder of Kalys Ventures, shares her unique journey from rugby player to venture capitalist. Discover her "first follower" philosophy reshaping African startup investment and how a childhood conversation with her father about values became the foundation for her business approach. Ghita reveals why she embraces being a generalist in a specialist...

From train driver's son in Austria to building Africa's pioneering Direct Air Capture company, Martin Freimüller shares his journey of building Octavia Carbon in Kenya. In this episode, we explore why Kenya is the world's best place for DAC, the reality of building deep tech with local talent, and the true tests of entrepreneurial conviction. Martin shares candid insights about startup crises, his...

What happens when a Lebanese-born, Paris-educated investment banker returns to Dakar and discovers her true calling in venture capital? In this deeply personal episode, Sabrine Chahrour, Investor at Partech Africa, takes us through her remarkable journey from Googling "what is venture capital" to becoming a key player in Africa's tech ecosystem. But this isn't just another VC sto...

In this episode of The Grinders Table, we take a journey into the transformative world of healthcare in Africa with our guest, Tobias, CEO of Viebeg. Tobias, originally from Vienna, Austria, has spent over seven years in East Africa, where he has witnessed firsthand the critical challenges faced by healthcare providers, particularly the lack of reliable medical supplies. Tobias shares his journey,...