African Tech Roundup Podcast

Montserrat native Kenfield Griffith is co-founder and CEO of mSurvey-- a data analytics SaaS startup based in Nairobi Kenya. In 2012, Kenfield partnered with Kenyan Louis Majanja to launch the business following an extended visit to Nairobi to conduct some research for his MIT PhD on the use of technology as a means to improving communication. In this conversation with Andile Masuku, Kenfield expl...

Rich Tanksley is the Senior Vice President of Special Projects at the Nigerian-American consultancy, NeuBridges. Formerly the CEO of Pulse.ng, Rich continues to be the Ringier-owned online media platform's brand ambassador. Prior to that, he spent three years working at the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) in Ghana as a senior faculty member and headed up Africa operations for...

French-born Cameroonian Alec Fokapu is the founder and CEO of FiftyFor, a B2B rating platform for African companies. FiftyFor uses an algorithm to compute ratings on governance structure, financial strength, operational capability, and the social and environmental impact of African companies.  Alec has 10 years of experience working as a financial analyst in international infrastructure projects a...

By this time last year, Africa's tech and innovation media community had started to go into hibernation for the Festive Season. But this year’s different… Bitcoin is doing the thing, America’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is poised to put net neutrality out of its misery, Uber is bracing for a severe regulatory backlash after trying to conceal a 2016 data breach affecting 57 million use...

2017 has seen Maya Horgan Famodu transition from overseeing efforts to assist corporations and investors integrate into the African tech ecosystem via Ingressive's market entry and operations services, to becoming an early stage tech venture capitalist at Ingressive Capital. In this conversation with Andile Masuku, Maya explains how she's leveraging her Nigerian-Swedish-American heritage, her bull...

This Medium blog entitled, "Startups4Africa: This is NOT OUR MANIFESTO" by Co-Creation Hub Nigeria Co-founder Femi Longe has caused quite a stir on social media: http://bit.ly/2AxCEMv. In this chat with Andile Masuku, Femi explains why he couldn't keep his pen still after he returned to Nigeria following the recent EU-Africa Summit, where a "collaborative" document entitled "Startups 4 Africa: Man...

Khaled Ismail is the Chairman and Founder of two Cairo-based angel funds— KI Angel and HIM Angel. He also serves as advisor to Algebra Ventures, Egypt’s leading technology venture capital outfit, which focuses primarily on Series A and Series B investments in Egypt and the MENA region. In this conversation with Andile Masuku - taped at the fringes of African Angel Investor Summit 2017 (www. AAIS20...

Israeli investor Ido Sum is a Partner at TLcom Capital— a venture capital firm with a presence in Nairobi, Lagos and London. Since 1999, the firm has invested in Telecom, Media and Technology (TMT) companies in Europe, Israel and Sub Saharan Africa and currently manages total commitments in excess of €200 million. In this conversation with Andile Masuku - taped at the fringes of African Angel Inve...

In this conversation, Andile Masuku asks PesaCheck.org Managing Editor, Eric Mugendi, to reflect on the unprecedented leveraging of digital technologies by leading actors in Kenya's controversial elections, and to factor in on how the country's emerging tech ecosystem is doing in the aftermath.

Last week, Africa’s early stage investor community came together for the 4th annual African Early Stage Investor Summit (#AAIS2017). At this exclusive investor-only event, hosted at Workshop17 in Cape Town, South Africa, key stakeholders in the ecosystem exchanged insights on best practice, shared lessons learnt, and debated what the roadmap for the future ought to look like. In this African Tech...

Timothy Kotin ​was born and bred in Ghana. ​​He is the co-founder and chief executive of SuperFluid Labs​--​ an ambitious African data analytics firm which supports enterprise clients spread across multiple sectors. Superfluid has offices in Kenya, Ghana and Germany. Kotin holds an MPhil. in E​ngineering for ​Sustainable ​D​evelopment from the University of Cambridge and a B.Sc. in ​Electrical ​E​...

The Facebook-sponsored TechCrunch Startup Battlefield competition which took place in Nairobi recently brought together fifteen African startups for a glitzy pitch session that offered entrants the chance to win $25,000, as well as the opportunity to go on and compete for $50,000 at the Disrupt Cup, which will be held in Silicon Valley next year. After the Kenyan logistics startup, Lori Systems, w...

Electrical engineer, Yannick Lefang, is the Founder and CEO of Kasi Insight-- a research and advisory firm that provides African consumer data and actionable insights. Since 2013, Yannick's firm has been intent on empowering business leaders and entrepreneurs with the game-changing insight they need to tap into the continent's fast-growing markets. In this conversation with Andile Masuku - taped a...

Sean Godoy is the Founder and Executive Director of Divercity Property Solutions. He has cross-sector experience in the property industry in both South Africa and the UK. In this conversation with Andile Masuku, Sean explains why he's excited about the global rise of real estate tech aka proptech. He believes that this trend could facilitate the democratisation of land and property ownership in Af...

Adebayo “Ade” Alonge is the Nigerian co-founder of RxAll, a platform which provides patients in the developing world with authenticated and verified medicines. Prior to this, Ade was a strategy consultant with the Boston Consulting Group, and before that, he spent eight years working a Sanofi, Roche, and BASF. In this absorbing, not-so-quick chat with Andile Masuku, Ade unpacks the state of play w...

South Korea has reportedly become the latest notable nation to follow the likes of Nigeria and China by outlawing the use of cryptocurrency. Given these developments, policymakers all across the continent are no doubt mulling over the merits of banning Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). They are probably concerned that by shunning cryptocurrencies, they might end up being on the outside looking in on...

Bertil van Vugt is Business Development Lead at the Amsterdam-based organisation, VC4Africa. In this quiet chat with Andile Masuku, taped at Afrobytes Tech Conference 2017, Bertil gives us a sense of the mind space tech industry business opportunities occupy in the average European. Given his vantage point, he's also well-placed to factor in on how Africa's tech ecosystem is coming along in terms...

Michuki Mwangi is the Regional Development Manager for Africa at the Internet Society where he has worked in the African Regional Bureau to promote Internet growth and sustainability since 2008. As the Internet Society is celebrating its 25th year anniversary in 2017, Michuki reflects on the progress being made to enable more and more Africans harness the life-changing potential of the internet. A...

A few weeks ago, Africa's richest man, Nigeria's Aliko Dangote, baffled many pro-African investment proponents by telling Bloomberg that if things go the way he plans, come 2020, a significant chunk of his wealth will be deployed abroad. In this African Tech Round-up episode Andile Masuku and Musa Kalenga are joined by Bitmari co-founder and self-proclaimed "pre-racial thought leader", Sinclair Sk...

**Apologies for the poor sound quality** Adedana Ashebir has recently been tasked with heading up Village Capital's business on the continent. In this conversation, Adedana walks Andile Masuku through some of the thinking behind and the findings published in Village Capital's implicatory Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded report called Breaking the Pattern: Getting Digital Financial Servic...

George Asamani is an exceedingly well-traveled 39-year-old Ghanaian who currently calls Addis Ababa home. He is the co-founder of a music and messaging app called DooWapp-- an alumnus of Telefónica's Wayra startup accelerator in the UK. In this conversation, taped at the Enterprise Africa Summit 2017 hosted by the British Council in Accra some months ago, George gave Andile a sense of the positive...

The last few weeks have seen three promising African tech startups land significant investments-- namely, the Nigerian digital payments firm, Flutterwave ($10 million), the Kenyan mobile-driven food supply platform, Twiga Foods ($10.3 million), and the South African fractional investments service, EasyEquities ($7.5 million). In this installment of the African Tech Round-up, Andile Masuku and Musa...

Charlene Chen is the Chief Operating Officer of BitPesa-- an online payment platform founded in Kenya that leverages Blockchain settlement to lower the cost and increase the speed of business payments to, from and within sub-Saharan Africa. In this chat with Andile Masuku, Charlene explains how BitPesa helps clients, that range from African businesses and multinational companies paying suppliers a...

Eunice Baguma Ball is the Ugandan Founder and Executive Director of the Africa Technology Business Network (ATBN). For over 10 years, Eunice has worked at the intersection of tech and social enterprise - leveraging her engineering background to build an impressive reputation as a tech and innovation specialist. In this chat with Andile Masuku, Eunice gives her take on the state of African women in...

Eric Mugendi is the Managing Editor at PesaCheck.org. In this chat with Andile Masuku, taped on Monday, August 7th, 2017 - a day before Kenya's General Election - he factors in on how fake news has influenced public sentiment in the lead up to the highly-contested polls. We deliberately asked Eric to weigh in on the fake news situation before his insights were clouded by the election results. We'v...