African Tech Journal

Tag: tech

African Tech Stopped Racing and Now It is Acquiring
What 67 deals in a single year tells you about where African tech is actually headed.

For most of the last decade, the dominant logic in African tech was simple: raise, expand, repeat. Startups competed for market share in fragmented markets, grew headcount faster than revenue, and treated the next funding round as both validation and lifeline.

The playbook rewarded ambition over discipline, and for a while, capital was available enough to make it work. The 2025 numbers say that era is done and over. African startups recorded 67 merger and acquisition deals across the continent in 2025, the highest annual total ever, a 72% increase from the 39 deals recorded in 2024, and well above the previous record of 40 deals set in 2022. Total funding also grew, reaching $3.4 billion across 502 deals, up 44% year-on-year.

However fewer deals received more capital, meaning money is concentrating rather than spreading. The ecosystem is not just growing, it is narrowing deliberately around the companies that have proven they can survive.

What changed is not just the volume of deals, but the character of them. In earlier years, acquisitions in African tech were largely distress events, a struggling startup selling to avoid a disorderly shutdown.

The recent wave looks different, well-capitalised companies use acquisitions to buy capabilities they could have built but chose not to wait for, to enter markets without the cost of building from zero, and to secure regulatory licences that would otherwise take years to obtain.

The deal logic shifted from rescue to strategy, the deals themselves tell the story clearly, Flutterwave acquired Mono; Nigeria’s leading open banking infrastructure provider in a transaction valued between $25 million and $40 million, folding identity verification, account connectivity, and bank payment capabilities directly into its own stack. One deal turned a competitor relationship into an internal capability.

Moniepoint moved on two fronts in quick succession: first acquiring Orda, a cloud-based restaurant management platform, to deepen its merchant tooling, then completing a 78% stake acquisition in Kenya’s Sumac Microfinance Bank, a 20-year-old licensed institution to enter East Africa without waiting for new licences the Central Bank of Kenya had frozen.

South African infrastructure firm Stitch made two acquisitions of its own: ExiPay in January and Efficacy Payments in July, each designed to internalise critical payment rails rather than depend on third parties. Paystack absorbed Ladder Microfinance Bank in Nigeria for similar reasons.

Twiga Foods in Kenya acquired three distributors to own more of its own supply chain. These were not opportunistic moves. They were deliberate vertical integrations by companies that had decided owning the infrastructure mattered more than partnering with it.

Fintech led the wave by some distance, accounting for nearly 46% of all deals in 2025, that concentration is not accidental. Fintech in Africa operates in one of the most regulation-dense environments on the continent. Licences are difficult to obtain, compliance costs are rising, and regulators in Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa have become more assertive. In that environment, acquiring a company that already holds the right licence in the right market is not just convenient, it is often the only realistic path to expansion at speed.

Analysts have begun calling this pattern “licence hunting”: acquisitions driven less by customer bases or product fit, and more by the regulatory permissions the target already holds.

It is necessary to state that not every company that tried to participate in this wave succeeded, several startups entered acquisition talks in 2024 and 2025, found no takers, and shut down.

The market has become selective, acquirers are looking for clean governance, clear unit economics, and genuine strategic fit. Distress alone is not enough to close a deal and that selectiveness is itself a sign of maturity.

African tech M&A has grown up enough to be discriminating. What the data points toward is a smaller number of dominant platforms emerging across the continent’s major markets, companies with vertical integration, cross-border reach, and regulatory moats that make them difficult to displace.

TechCabal Insights projected the formation of three to four dominant multi-country platforms controlling payments, logistics, and digital banking across multiple African countries by the end of 2026.

For founders building today, this is the new context. The blitzscaling playbook: raise aggressively, grow fast, figure out the economics later has been replaced by a simpler and harder question: what do you own, and is it worth owning? The companies that can answer that clearly are the ones getting acquired or doing the acquiring. The ones that cannot are the ones disappearing quietly.

The land grab produced a generation of African startups, the consolidation era will determine which ones actually last.

Sources:
1. TechCabal Insights, State of Tech in Africa 2025 — https://insights.techcabal.com/state-of-tech-in-africa-2025-from-growth-at-all-costs-to-sustainable-scale/
2. TechCabal, Flutterwave-Mono — https://techcabal.com/2026/01/06/aquisitions-in-africas-tech-ecosystem-in-2025/
3. TechCabal, Moniepoint-Orda and Moniepoint-Sumac — https://techcabal.com/2026/03/26/nigerias-moniepoint-enters-kenya-with-78-stake-in-sumac-microfinance/
4. BusinessDay, Moniepoint-Sumac — https://businessday.ng/technology/article/nigerias-moniepoint-enters-kenya-through-sumac-acquisition-targeting-sme-lending-boom/
5. TechPoint, Stitch-Efficacy Payments — https://techpoint.africa/news/stitch-acuires-efficacy-payments/
May 21, 2026
Hult Prize Nigeria Nationals 2026 Celebrates Student Innovation, Crowns Devspace National Winner

The 2026 edition of the Hult Prize Nigeria National Competition concluded successfully at the University of Lagos on May 9, bringing together some of the country’s brightest student entrepreneurs, investors, academics, and industry leaders in a celebration of innovation and social impact.

Widely regarded as the world’s largest student social entrepreneurship competition and often described as the “Nobel Prize for Students,” the Hult Prize Foundation challenges university teams to build for-profit ventures that solve pressing global problems.

Supported by Hult International Business School and the United Nations, the competition awards a grand prize of $1 million USD to the global winner.

This year’s Nigeria Nationals recorded participation from 44 universities across the country, with 609 startups registered for the competition. Following months of campus programs, mentorship, and selection rounds, only 25 startups advanced to pitch at the national finals in Lagos.

At the end of an intense pitching session before a panel of judges comprising investors, business executives, and innovation experts, Devspace from Covenant University emerged as the national winner, securing first place and advancing to the next stage of the global competition.

Blank Book from the University of Ibadan emerged second, while Aquanut, also representing Covenant University, finished in third place.
The remaining startups that made the Top 8 were Blood Deck from Lead City University, Zisocare and Amana from Bayero University Kano, Skycorv from Kwara State University, and Tropical from the University of Uyo.

As national winner, Devspace will proceed to the Hult Prize Digital Incubator, an intensive international entrepreneurship acceleration program where selected startups from around the world receive mentorship, strategic business training, investor access, and funding opportunities as they compete for a place at the Global Finals and the
coveted $1 million USD prize.

The Hult Prize Nigeria Nationals is more than a competition; it is proof that young Nigerians are capable of building globally relevant solutions to some of society’s most urgent challenges.

From over 600 registered startups to the exceptional teams that pitched today, we have witnessed the remarkable ingenuity, resilience,
and ambition that exists within our universities. — Olamide Otasanya, Hult Prize Nigeria National Coordinator

“On behalf of Hult Prize Nigeria, I congratulate all participating teams and especially Devspace of Covenant University for emerging as our national winner.

We are proud to see them represent Hult Prize Nigeria

Nigeria at the Global Accelerator, where they will join outstanding startups from across the world in refining their ventures for global impact. We also celebrate Blank Book, Aquanut, and every finalist whose ideas demonstrate that innovation remains one of Nigeria’s greatest strengths.

What we witnessed today goes beyond student competition. These young founders are building solutions with the potential to transform industries, create jobs, and improve lives across Africa.

Hult Prize Nigeria continues to demonstrate the power of investing in youth innovation, and we remain proud to support a platform that is shaping the next generation of African entrepreneurs. — Olubunmi Sobande, Member, Hult Prize Board of Governance

The event concluded with an award ceremony where winning startups, campus leaders, faculty advisors, volunteers and other outstanding contributors were recognized for their excellence and contributions to the growth of the Hult Prize ecosystem in Nigeria.

The Nigeria Nationals also attracted venture capitalists, startup ecosystem leaders, corporate executives, university
representatives, members of the press, and innovation stakeholders from across the country, reinforcing the growing
importance of youth-led entrepreneurship in driving economic and social transformation.

Enquiries
Samuel Olomu
Head of PR and Communications
[email protected]

About Hult Prize Nigeria
Hult Prize challenges university students to solve pressing global issues through scalable, sustainable social enterprises.

In Nigeria, we provide a vital platform for future leaders to develop impactful, purpose-driven ventures, fostering a national
community dedicated to profit with purpose and driving significant socio-economic transformation.

■ www.hultprize-ng.com
■ linkedin.com/company/hult-prize-nigeria

May 15, 2026
Chowdeck Is Coming for Your Courier App Too
The food delivery darling just made its boldest move yet – and it has nothing to do with jollof rice.

There is a peculiar ritual Nigerians know well. You order something from a vendor on Instagram. They quote you a delivery fee. You haggle. You balance the rider “small something”. The package arrives two hours late, slightly roughed up, with no way to track where it’s been. You swear you’ll never do it again. You do it again next week.

This is the informal courier economy that has propped up millions of small businesses and frustrated millions more customers. It is disorganised by design, personal by necessity, and ripe for disruption by anyone with a large enough rider network.

Chowdeck has that network, and now, it is coming for that market.

This May, the Lagos-based food delivery company pushed its Relay courier service into the spotlight with a flat ₦1,000 intra-city delivery offer. Same-day. Tracked. Backed by the same logistics infrastructure that has made Chowdeck one of Nigeria’s most reliable delivery brands.

It is a quiet pivot. But the ambitions behind it are anything but.

The Company That Outlasted Everyone

Founded in October 2021 by Femi Aluko, Olumide Ojo, and Lanre Yusuf, all veterans of Paystack, the fintech acquired by Stripe, Chowdeck launched as a simple idea: get food from Lagos restaurants to customers in under 30 minutes.

The timing looked naïve. The graveyard of food delivery in Nigeria was already crowded. Jumia Food had burnt through capital and retreated. Bolt Food had exited Nigeria altogether. Glovo was hedging its bets. Every major player had tried and failed to crack what was obviously a huge market, and just as obviously, a brutal one.

Chowdeck survived by doing the boring things well. Its geotagging system matched orders to the nearest rider with precision that competitors couldn’t match. Its incentive structure kept couriers loyal in a market notorious for rider churn. And it kept delivery fees honest enough to build trust with price-sensitive Nigerian consumers.

By October 2023, the platform crossed ₦1 billion ($830,000) in monthly order value for the first time. By March 2024, that figure had more than doubled to ₦2.4 billion ($2 million). That same year, Chowdeck closed a $9 million Series A, one of the largest fundraises ever for a local African food delivery player, with investors betting on the company’s ability to scale beyond meals.

Today, Chowdeck operates across eight cities in Nigeria, processes over 30,000 daily deliveries, runs a fleet of roughly 20,000 riders, and has facilitated over $19 million in vendor deliveries on its platform alone. In August 2025, it launched in Accra, Ghana, hitting 1,000 daily orders in just three months, a milestone that took nearly a year to reach in Lagos.

The company is not just surviving. It is compounding.

The Courier Gap Is Worth $230 Million

Here is what makes the Relay push strategically sensible: the infrastructure Chowdeck has already built is overkill for food delivery alone.

Twenty thousand vetted, geotagged, app-enabled riders across major Nigerian cities, that is an asset most logistics companies would spend hundreds of millions of dollars to assemble. Chowdeck assembled it to deliver jollof rice. The marginal cost of routing some of those riders to deliver packages instead is nearly zero.

Meanwhile, the market they are entering is enormous and deeply underserved.

Nigeria’s last-mile delivery market is currently valued at $230 million, with urbanisation, e-commerce growth, and smartphone penetration driving steady expansion. The broader African last-mile delivery market stood at $1.45 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $3.02 billion by 2033, growing at a compound annual rate of 8.45%.

In Nigeria specifically, e-commerce orders grew 22% year-on-year in Q1 2025, with 58% of total orders now originating from secondary cities, an indicator that demand for reliable delivery is spreading beyond Lagos and Abuja. Yet the courier experience for most consumers and small businesses remains chaotic, unreliable, and opaque.

Existing players like GIG Logistics, Kwik Delivery, and Sendbox have carved out niches. But none of them holds the brand trust that Chowdeck has built through millions of successful food deliveries. Trust, in a market defined by theft, delays, and accountability gaps, is a moat.

₦1,000 Is Not a Price. It’s a Statement.

The flat ₦1,000 rate for intra-city delivery is not just a promotional offer. It is a market signal, Chowdeck telling competitors, small business owners, and individual senders that it intends to compete aggressively on price.

For context, most Lagos courier services charge between ₦1,500 and ₦4,000 for same-day intra-city delivery depending on distance, package size, and the rider’s mood. Kwik, one of the better-organised options, raised $4.7 million to build its two-hour delivery promise in Lagos and Abuja. GIG Logistics operates 100+ service centres across Nigeria using a hub-and-spoke model, but its pricing reflects that infrastructure overhead.

Chowdeck has no such overhead problem. Its riders are already on the road. Its app already handles live tracking, payments, and customer support. All it needs is to redirect existing capacity to a new category.

The ₦1,000 flat rate is designed to make the switching cost for a first-time Relay user essentially zero and to make the comparison with informal bike-rider delivery unmistakably favourable.

Beyond Delivery: The Superapp That Won’t Say It Is One

What is really happening here is a quiet superapp strategy.

Chowdeck has spent three years building the hard parts: a reliable rider network, a geolocation stack competitors couldn’t replicate, and consumer trust earned meal by meal. Now it is running those assets across multiple revenue lines.

The product map tells the story clearly:
- Food delivery, the core, is still growing
- Grocery & pharmacy delivery, launched alongside 1,500+ vendors across multiple verticals
- Chowpass, a subscription product that drives retention and revenue predictability
- Relay, intra-city courier for packages
- Mira, a restaurant POS and operations tool acquired in June 2025, is extending Chowdeck’s footprint into vendor-side infrastructure
Each of these is independently useful. Together, they form a logistics and commerce operating system, one that makes Chowdeck increasingly difficult to displace from the lives of its users.

This is the same playbook Grab executed in Southeast Asia: start with the thing people need every day (food, rides), earn their trust, then expand the surface area of the relationship. The difference is that Chowdeck is doing it in a market where the baseline infrastructure is far less mature, which means both the challenge and the ceiling are considerably higher.

Chowdeck’s CEO, Femi Aluko, has been careful not to use the “superapp” label. But the feature releases suggest a company that has figured out what it wants to be when it grows up.

What This Means for Nigerian Small Businesses

For Instagram vendors, WhatsApp merchants, and small shop owners across Lagos, Port Harcourt, and Abuja, Relay could represent something genuinely transformative: a named, trackable, accountable courier service at a price that doesn’t eat their margin.

The informal delivery economy that currently serves these businesses is large but unreliable. Theft is common. Accountability is rare. When a customer does not receive a package, the business owner absorbs the cost of the goods, the refund, and the reputational damage. Organised logistics apps have helped, but at price points that make per-order economics painful for low-ticket items.

A ₦1,000 flat delivery rate changes the calculus. For a vendor selling a ₦5,000 product, with a 20% logistics overhead, it is still meaningful but workable. For a vendor who previously lost packages or paid ₦3,000 for unreliable delivery, it is a revelation.

And because Relay rides on Chowdeck’s existing app infrastructure, it comes with live delivery tracking and vetted riders, the two features small business owners most need and have historically been unable to afford.

The Road Ahead

Relay is not yet a fully realised product. Its rollout is still limited in scope, and the ₦1,000 rate appears to be an introductory offer rather than a permanent pricing floor. The long-term unit economics will need to hold up as volume grows and the promotional period fades.

There are also structural challenges that no app can fully resolve. Lagos traffic is a logistics problem with no software solution. Fuel prices remain volatile and represent a significant cost pressure on rider margins. And the informal courier culture, built on personal relationships and flexible arrangements, will not simply dissolve because a better-priced alternative exists.

But Chowdeck has already demonstrated that it can build trust in a market that did not believe trust was possible. It cracked food delivery in Nigeria, which was supposed to be uncrackable. It is now applying the same model to a courier market that is larger, more fragmented, and arguably even more broken.

The food was just the beginning. Chowdeck wants to deliver everything else, too.

Data sourced from TechCrunch, Rest of World, Afridigest, Ken Research, Straits Research, Mordor Intelligence, and Chowdeck’s official communications.
May 10, 2026
How Aidra Is Using Crypto to Unlock Global Fundraising for Underserved Regions

The Biggest Barrier to Global Giving Is Not Willingness but Access

Across the world, millions of people are willing to support humanitarian causes. From disaster relief to community driven initiatives, the intent to give exists at scale.

Yet in many regions, especially across parts of Africa and other emerging markets, raising funds globally remains difficult. Traditional payment systems are often restrictive, slow, or completely inaccessible. Cross border transactions fail, fees eat into donations, and organizers struggle to receive funds when they need them most.

The result is a broken system where help exists but cannot always reach the people who need it.

This is the gap Aidra is stepping in to solve.

What Aidra Is Building

Aidra is a fundraising platform designed to enable humanitarian campaigns to raise funds globally without the limitations of traditional financial systems.

At its core, the platform leverages crypto infrastructure to facilitate borderless donations. This allows supporters from anywhere in the world to contribute to causes without being restricted by geography or payment barriers.

At the same time, Aidra focuses on stability and accessibility for campaign organizers. While donations move through crypto rails, the experience is designed to remain simple and practical for those receiving the funds.

The goal is not just to move money differently but to make it actually usable.

Bridging the Gap Between Donors and Impact

One of the biggest challenges in global fundraising is the disconnect between donors and recipients. Even when funds are successfully raised, delays and inefficiencies can reduce their impact.

Aidra addresses this by creating a more direct and efficient flow of funds. Donations can move faster across borders, reaching campaigns without the friction that typically slows down traditional systems.

This creates a more reliable environment for both sides. Donors gain confidence that their contributions will reach the intended cause, while organizers gain faster access to the resources they need.

Why Crypto

Crypto has often been discussed in terms of trading and speculation, but its underlying infrastructure offers something more fundamental. It enables value to move globally without relying on traditional intermediaries.

For humanitarian campaigns operating in regions with limited financial access, this becomes a powerful advantage. It removes barriers that have historically excluded entire communities from global support networks.

Aidra is applying this infrastructure in a practical way by focusing on real world impact rather than abstract use cases.

Timing and Opportunity

The need for more inclusive fundraising tools is growing. As global awareness of social issues increases, more people are willing to contribute to causes beyond their immediate environment.

At the same time, the limitations of traditional systems are becoming more visible. This creates an opportunity for platforms that can bridge the gap between global intent and local impact.

Aidra sits at the intersection of these trends, positioning itself as a platform that can expand access to funding for underserved communities.

The Value Layer Behind Aidra

Aidra operates within a unique ecosystem that connects donors, campaign organizers, and global financial infrastructure.

By enabling seamless fundraising across borders, the platform creates value through transaction flows, platform usage, and potential partnerships with organizations operating in the humanitarian space.

Over time, the data generated from campaigns and donations could also provide insights into giving patterns and emerging needs across regions.

A Future Where Giving Has No Borders

The long term vision for Aidra is clear. It is about removing the structural limitations that prevent people from helping each other.

By making fundraising more accessible and ensuring funds can move freely, the platform has the potential to reshape how humanitarian support is delivered globally.

This is not just about technology. It is about making generosity more effective.

May 5, 2026
He Applied for 1,423 Jobs in 3 Months. What Africa’s Job Market Never Tells You

The story of Africa’s job market is not just about unemployment. It is about a system that gives people almost no feedback.

Clinton Nwachukwu did not start his career with clarity. After completing NYSC in 2020, he entered the job market the way most people do. He knew he needed a job, but he did not know what role fit him, how to position himself, or what employers were actually looking for.

His first opportunity came through a previous connection who invited him to Lagos. The role paid ₦30,000 a month at a digital marketing and e-commerce agency. Around the same time, he had another offer from a bank that would have paid ₦250,000.

He chose the ₦30,000 role. It was not a financially comfortable decision. His father had just retired, his mother was the only one working, and he had three siblings in university. There were moments he had to borrow money to support his family and pay it back gradually.

But the role gave him something more valuable than salary. It gave him exposure to how digital businesses work. He learned marketing, sales, pricing, and how value is created in the digital economy.

By early 2022, he wanted more. So he went back into the job market. This time, he applied with intensity.

In three months and two weeks, he submitted 1,423 job applications.

For most of that period, nothing worked. He got almost no meaningful responses. No useful feedback. Just silence and the occasional rejection email saying the company had moved on with another candidate.

Then, within two weeks, everything changed. He landed his first two foreign remote roles. The difference was not effort, but understanding.

The Filter He Did Not Know Existed

What Clinton did not know at the time was that most of his applications were not even reaching human recruiters.

They were being filtered out.

Many organizations rely on Applicant Tracking Systems to handle the volume of applications they receive. These systems scan CVs for specific keywords, structure, and alignment with job descriptions. A CV that appears strong to a human reviewer can fail these systems entirely.

Clinton was adjusting his CV based on online advice, but he was adjusting blind. He had no visibility into how these systems evaluated his applications.

When feedback did come, it was generic and unhelpful.

“We’ve decided to move forward with other candidates.”

Research from Harvard Business School has shown that automated hiring systems routinely eliminate qualified candidates whose applications do not match predefined criteria.

The candidate may be qualified. The effort may be real. But the system never passes the application forward.

In many African job markets, this knowledge is not widely available. Most job seekers are unaware of how these filters work, and so they continue applying without understanding why they are being rejected.

A System Built Around Volume, Not Clarity

Across Africa, millions of job seekers are actively applying for roles. In Nigeria alone, estimates from the National Universities Commission suggest that hundreds of thousands of graduates enter the workforce every year.

At the same time, employers continue to report difficulty finding suitable candidates. The International Labour Organization has consistently highlighted skills mismatch as a major issue across African labour markets.

This creates a paradox. People are applying in large numbers. Companies are hiring. Yet the connection between the two is inefficient.

The system encourages activity. It does not provide clarity. Job seekers are told to apply more, learn more, and try harder. But they are rarely shown what exactly is wrong or what needs to change.

As a result, many people operate on guesswork.

What Preparation Actually Requires

Improving job outcomes requires more than effort.

A job seeker needs to understand whether their CV is structured for the systems evaluating it. They need to know how their experience aligns with the roles they are targeting and how to communicate that alignment clearly.

They need a realistic assessment of their competitiveness and a clear view of what gaps exist. None of this is provided by a typical job board. Very little of it is provided by traditional learning platforms.

Where it exists, it is often accessible only through personal networks or expensive coaching. This creates an uneven distribution of opportunity, where some people receive guidance while others are left to navigate the process alone.

The Shift That Changed Everything

For Clinton, the turning point came when he moved from volume to clarity. He began to understand how hiring systems evaluate applications. He aligned his CV properly, positioned his experience more effectively, and focused on roles that matched his profile.

Within two weeks, he secured two foreign remote roles. That shift changed the trajectory of his career.

Over time, he moved from earning ₦30,000 monthly to earning over $3,000 in a month at certain points. He went on to work with global companies like Yellow Card and BingX, building in growth and SEO, and supporting others in landing remote opportunities.

But the most important outcome was not financial, it was clarity.

The Platform That Starts with the Honest Question

That experience led to the creation of JobLadda. The platform is built around a simple but often ignored question: before applying to more jobs, do you understand why your previous applications are not working?

JobLadda focuses on helping users assess their job readiness, optimise their CVs for real hiring systems, and gain clear insight into what needs to be improved. It also provides access to career coaching, offering the kind of direct feedback that many job seekers lack.

The approach prioritizes clarity before action. This is a departure from most existing platforms, which focus on increasing application volume rather than improving understanding.

Workers’ Day and the Honest Reckoning

Clinton eventually built a successful career. But his breakthrough did not come because the system worked. It came because he learned how the system worked. That distinction matters.

On Workers’ Day, conversations often focus on job creation. While important, that focus is incomplete.

Creating more jobs does not guarantee better outcomes if people are not prepared to access those opportunities.

Africa’s workforce is growing very fast. According to the United Nations, one in every three young people globally will be African by 2050.

This represents potential. But realising that potential depends on the systems that support career development.

Without a better career navigation infrastructure, effort will continue to produce inconsistent outcomes.

Clinton’s story is not an exception. It is a reflection of how the system currently operates. It raises a simple question. How many people are still applying, waiting, and guessing, without ever being told what they are doing wrong?

May 1, 2026
From Checkout to Food Intelligence: Skaap Reaches 2,000 Users Across 9 Countries
Years ago, while working retail at Lululemon in Canada, he noticed something almost everyone had accepted as normal: long checkout lines. Customers waited. Staff rushed. Stores lost time. Friction was everywhere.

For many people, it would have remained an annoyance. For Samuel Ayo Oyedemi, it became the seed of Skaap, founded in 2025 and now building at the intersection of AI, retail infrastructure, and nutrition intelligence.

And what started as a self-checkout idea is quietly becoming something much bigger.

The Problem Was Never Just Checkout

Retail, particularly physical retail, has always had an invisible inefficiency tax.

Consumers waste time in lines, and retailers struggle with store throughput. And increasingly, shoppers are making food decisions with very little understanding of what they are buying.

Skaap appears to sit at the intersection of all three.

Its original wedge into the market was mobile self-checkout, allowing users to scan products, pay, and walk out, reducing traditional checkout friction.

Then Skaap Pivoted Into Something Unexpected: Food Intelligence

The bigger surprise may be what came next.

Rather than stop at checkout, Skaap expanded into what it calls Food Intelligence — an AI-powered layer that helps consumers understand what is actually inside the food they consume.

According to the company, the feature attracted 2,000 users in under five weeks.

That may sound modest by consumer internet standards. But for a behavior-changing health utility, it is a signal.

Skaap’s AI analyzes food substances, decodes ingredient labels and helps users understand whether a product aligns with their nutritional profile.

Take the recent controversy involving Bon Bread, where concerns raised online about bread quality sparked wider debate around preservatives, ingredients and food transparency.

Whatever side of that debate one sits on, it surfaced a bigger issue: many consumers have questions about what is in everyday products, but often lack tools to interpret labels or verify what they are consuming.

That is exactly where Skaap’s use case starts to feel timely.

Instead of relying on speculation or viral discourse, a user could scan a product, decode additives, and make a more informed decision before purchase.

That moves Skaap beyond convenience and closer to something more foundational: consumer clarity.

From Lagos Roots to 9 Countries

Though founded by a Nigerian, Skaap’s ambitions have never been geographically narrow.

Its Food Intelligence product is already live in nine countries, according to the company, with long-term plans to expand further — including Nigeria.

And the company has already started attracting editorial attention.

Recent coverage from Techpoint Africa profiled how Samuel Ayo is taking a Nigerian-inspired retail solution into Canada and the US. (Techpoint Africa)

The startup has also participated in DMZ, often described as one of Canada’s leading startup programs. (Nigerians in Canada)

For an early-stage company, those signals matter.

A Product That Doesn’t Want You to Download Another App

One subtle but important product choice says a lot about Skaap’s philosophy.

It is not pushing a traditional mobile app model.

Instead, the company operates via a Progressive Web App (PWA), allowing users to access the product from the browser and pin it to a home screen.

What If the Future of Retail Intelligence Is Invisible?

The most interesting companies often make complexity disappear.

Skaap seems to be betting that the future of retail and food intelligence should feel ambient — almost invisible.

And while still early, the contours are becoming visible:

Connect With Skaap Tech

Website: https://www.useskaap.com

Founder LinkedIn: Samuel Oyedemi on LinkedIn

Editorial Features:
- Techpoint Africa Feature on Skaap
- Nigerians.ca Founder Spotlight
- LinkedIn: Skaap (https://www.linkedin.com/company/skaaptech/)
- Instagram: @ useskaap
April 30, 2026
The Real Reason Every Startup Pitch Deck Now Has AI in the First Slide

By Tosin Oladokun

I’ve been reviewing startup pitches lately, and there is a shift that I cannot miss. Two years ago, decks led with the problem being solved, including the customer pain points, market gaps and real user needs. Now, slide one is almost always about AI. “We’re using AI to revolutionise…” “Our AI-powered platform…” “Leveraging artificial intelligence to transform…” My first instinct was to write this off as hype-chasing, another buzzword cycle like blockchain or the metaverse. However, after watching it repeat across dozens of pitches from founders who are clearly not stupid (PhDs, cracked engineers/operators), I think something more structural is going on.

The surface explanation is that founders put AI on slide one because investors want to see it. Fine, but that doesn’t explain why investors want to see it. The deeper thing is that AI has become shorthand for an answer to the question investors have always cared about most: “How do you scale this without it breaking?” Every scalable business eventually hits the same wall. You need more people to deliver more value, i.e., more customer service reps, more analysts, more operations staff and then the math stops working. AI became the credible answer to that problem, and once it did, it stopped being a feature and became infrastructure.

The timing matters too. In 2019, machine learning was expensive, complicated, and unreliable for most use cases. You needed specialised teams and massive datasets just to get something mediocre. By 2025, the technology could handle complex decisions with enough accuracy to actually change how a company operates day to day. So founders aren’t just slapping AI onto their decks for decoration — many of the business models that work now genuinely require it to function.

Founders, though, are missing the point of startup pitching.

When you build something that works because you figured out regulatory navigation, or you nailed the user experience, or you found a real gap in the market, and then you lead your pitch with “AI-powered platform” – you’ve buried the thing that actually makes it valuable. I’ve seen companies facilitate hundreds of business incorporations not because of some machine learning model, but because they understood how to work with regulatory authorities and make an intimidating process feel simple.

If those same companies pitched today, I guarantee slide one would say “AI-powered business incorporation.” And that framing would completely miss the point. The better pitch is just: “We solve X problem. Solving it requires doing Y at a massive scale. AI is how we keep the unit economics from falling apart.” That’s a tools-in-service-of-the-mission framing. What we’re getting instead is “We’re an AI company that happens to work in X industry,” which is a fundamentally different claim about what the company is.

There’s a split coming, and you can already see the edges of it. One camp is companies where AI genuinely is the product — they’re building models, infrastructure, foundational technology.

Leading with AI makes sense for them because AI is what they sell. The other camp is companies using AI as plumbing to solve real problems in specific industries, and for them, the industry problem should probably come first. Right now, both camps use the same pitch deck template, which muddies what’s actually being built. And most of the AI features being added to products right now aren’t that transformative anyway.

They’re helpful, they might improve efficiency by 10 or 20 percent, but they’re not the reason the business will succeed or fail. The companies I keep paying attention to are the ones that can tell you what problem they’re solving and why it matters before they ever mention their tech stack.

When I see a deck leading with AI now, I’ve started asking a simpler question: would this business work without it?

If the answer is no, I want to understand why. If the answer is yes, I start wondering what they’re not telling me about the actual business and whether AI on slide one is covering for a pitch that doesn’t know what it’s really about.

Tosin Oladokun is currently pursuing his MBA at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. He previously worked as a Senior Product Manager-Technical Intern at Amazon and has built digital products across Nigeria and the United States.

April 27, 2026
Forget SaaS. Xara Runs Your Sales, Payments, and Operations on WhatsApp
The average African founder is suffering from “App Fatigue.” Between the bank app for transfers, a spreadsheet for profit and losses, a separate tool for invoicing, and a different platform for payroll, the sheer volume of tasks just to run a business is stifling innovation.

We’ve been tracking a shift toward “Conversational Finance,” the idea that you shouldn’t have to leave your chat app to manage your cap table or your customer follow-ups.

Leading this charge is Xara, a platform that is effectively building “The WeChat of Nigeria” by turning WhatsApp into a high-powered business personal assistant.

With over 48,000 users and billions of naira already processed, the market has sent a clear signal: The future of business infrastructure isn’t a new app; it’s a better conversation.

1. Collapsing the Stack: WhatsApp as a Backend

Xara isn’t just another payment gateway. It is a conversational layer that handles the “boring” parts of business ops so you can focus on growth. For the 18-45 founder, this means the end of app-switching.
- Automated Invoicing: You can share a quote, generate a professional invoice, and deliver it to your customer—all within the same WhatsApp thread.
- Frictionless Payments: Customers pay directly via bank transfer, crypto, or the Xara wallet without ever leaving the chat.
- Real-time Follow-ups: Xara acts as your assistant, handling delivery check-ins and customer communication on your behalf.
2. Visibility Without the Spreadsheet Headache

Most SMEs fly blind because tracking profit and loss is a manual nightmare. Xara’s Business Accounts narrative is built on Financial Visibility.
- Profit and Loss Tracking: Automatically monitor your profits and losses to understand your true margins.
- Spending Analysis: Get context-aware breakdowns of where the money is going, supporting better decision-making.
- Tax & Compliance: Integrated tax calculation and management to simplify a process that usually requires a consultant.
3. Payroll Management

Managing a team shouldn’t be a three-day ordeal at the end of every month. Xara allows organizations to upload employee data and automate salary payments directly. This turns a manual transaction into a scheduled workflow, freeing up founder time for high-leverage tasks.

4. The Crypto-to-Cash Conversion System.”

For Tier 3 users, Xara provides a seamless way to fund wallets using stablecoins (USDT, USDC, BUSD) across multiple networks. The “Killer App” here is the automatic conversion to naira, which eliminates the risks and delays of peer-to-peer (P2P) trading. It’s a faster, compliant alternative for businesses operating in a global, digital-first economy.

The Verdict

Founders don’t want “more features”; they want “less friction.” Xara’s strength lies in its Conversational Logic. By meeting the business owner where they already are—WhatsApp—Xara has bypassed the “onboarding wall” that kills most B2B tools.

The traction metrics—moving from ₦135M in early weeks to billions in volume—validate that the African SME isn’t looking for a complex dashboard. They are looking for a personal assistant who lives in their pocket.

If you can text, you can run a multi-million-naira operation. Xara has turned the “Invisible Office” into a reality, proving that the most powerful business infrastructure is the one you already know how to use.
April 22, 2026
How TBM Events Is Fixing Discovery and Ticketing in One Platform

It’s Saturday evening.

You’re scrolling through Instagram and see clips from an event everyone seems to be at. Good crowd, good music, people you know. You check the comments, then your group chat.

“Why didn’t anyone tell me about this?”

Someone replies, “Tickets sold out since Wednesday.”

That moment is familiar.

In many African cities, events don’t suffer from lack of demand. They suffer from how they’re discovered, shared, and managed.

That gap is what TBM Events is building around.

Today, event discovery still depends heavily on social media posts, WhatsApp broadcasts, and word of mouth. Information is often incomplete, late, or lost in timelines.

TBM Events introduces a more structured approach.

The platform allows users to discover events in one place, purchase tickets seamlessly, and receive instant confirmation through QR-based access. Instead of chasing links or sending DMs, the process becomes straightforward.

For users, it reduces friction.
For organizers, it removes guesswork.

Behind the scenes, event organizers deal with a different set of challenges.

Tracking attendees manually. Confirming payments across multiple channels. Managing check-ins with little visibility.

TBM Events brings these processes into a single system.

Ticketing, payments, and attendee management are handled in one place, allowing organizers to focus on execution rather than coordination. It also creates a clearer picture of attendance and engagement, something that is often missing in traditional setups.

Distribution as a Missing Layer

Beyond ticketing, visibility remains a key issue.

Many events don’t fail because they lack value. They fail because the right audience never sees them early enough.

TBM Events addresses this by acting as a distribution layer. Events listed on the platform are not just hosted, they are positioned for discovery within an ecosystem where users are already looking for things to attend.

This shifts discovery from passive scrolling to active searching.

Reflecting How Events Are Changing

The way people attend events is also evolving.

From physical gatherings to webinars and hybrid formats, users expect flexibility. TBM Events supports this shift by accommodating different event types within the same system.

For organizers, this means broader reach.
For users, it means more access.

TBM Events is not trying to redefine events.

It is addressing the friction that sits around them.

Finding events late. Missing tickets. Managing attendance manually.

These are small problems individually, but together, they shape the overall experience.

By building structure into discovery and ticketing, TBM Events is quietly solving a problem many people already recognize.

They just haven’t named it yet.

April 20, 2026
Still Creating for One Audience? Reach 50+ with One Upload Using Reedapt

In a continent where language diversity often limits distribution, Reedapt is taking a different approach: scale African stories across borders without losing their voice.

Founded in October 2024 in Lagos, Reedapt is an AI startup focused on voice cloning and real-time translation for creators and media companies. Its core idea is simple but powerful: African stories shouldn’t be confined by language.

At the heart of Reedapt’s offering are two products. Reedapt Dub allows creators from Nollywood filmmakers to faith-based broadcasters to clone their voices and dub content into over 50 languages. Instead of generic voiceovers, audiences hear the original storyteller’s voice, now speaking French, Swahili, or Arabic.

Then there’s Reedapt Live, built for real-time multilingual streaming and interpretation. This is particularly relevant for churches, live events, and broadcasters targeting pan-African or diaspora audiences.

The timing is strategic. As African content gains global traction especially through platforms like Netflix and YouTube distribution remains fragmented by language. Reedapt is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer that bridges that gap.

The founding team reflects this mission. CEO Eri Owoade brings a deeply personal connection to multilingual storytelling, having grown up in Saki, a border town in Oyo State. CTO Maryann leads the AI and data science efforts, alongside COO David Mac-Asore and a product team focused on scalable backend systems.

Reedapt’s early focus markets include Nollywood, African broadcasters, faith media, and Francophone Africa creators segments where language has historically limited reach and monetization.

The company officially launched Reedapt Dub on April 17, 2026, with a freemium pricing model starting from free tiers up to enterprise plans. This lowers the barrier for creators to experiment with multilingual distribution.

For African media, the implications are clear: more reach, more revenue, and more cultural export.

As the global appetite for African content grows, Reedapt isn’t just translating stories; it’s expanding their surface area.

April 18, 2026