Expatriate As a Service

Hey, Caleb here 👋 

Last month, African tech internet erupted over a photo of ten founders who’d raised $100 million to build Africa’s future.

It was a civil war of opinions, from accusations of neocolonialism to diversity concerns. This week, we’re hoping to give a more nuanced take on the issue.

But before we get into it.

Now, on to this week’s story….

A month ago, a seemingly well-intentioned LinkedIn post broke African tech internet.

Axel Peyriere, a founder and angel investor, posted a photo from the Africa CEO Forum. 

It was a group shot of ten well-funded tech founders (including him), who’d raised over $100 million to, in his words, “build Africa’s future”.

Incidentally, seven of them weren’t African. 

Shortly after, African tech Twitter and LinkedIn lit up.

Some called it neo-colonialism. 

Others praised them for trying to build Africa’s future. 

One particularly viral comment said it outright:

“Seems like if you want to raise big money in Africa, you need a white co-founder.”

Now that the dust has (mostly) settled, we’ve got a few things to say on the topic.

First, a few disclaimers:

• We’re on the side of the ecosystem’s growth.
  

• This isn't racial politics, and it’s not a binary take. It’s about reality. 

Now that we’ve made that clear, let’s start with a question as old as Africa’s tech ecosystem.

What makes a startup “African”?

In 2019, Jumia went public on the New York Stock Exchange.

Day one on the NYSE? It hit $3 billion in valuation.

It was a big milestone for African tech.

Jumia had just become the first African startup to go public.

But not everyone was celebrating. 

Because some people said… Jumia wasn’t African at all.

For starters, it was incorporated in Germany. 

It had its HQ in Dubai.

It was also taken to IPO by two French co-founders, Sacha Poignonnec and Jeremy Hodara, both ex-McKinsey consultants.

And although the company had two other African co-founders—Tunde Kehinde and Raphael Afaedor—they’d left the company a year after launch and divested from it.

But here’s the thing: Jumia employed thousands of Africans.

It operated across 14 African countries.

And built logistics and payments infrastructure tailored to African cities.

So, what defines a startup’s “Africanness”?

• Where it’s registered?

• Where the founders were born?

• Or who it serves and what it solves?

I think it’s about where the company’s core operations are—its team and customers.

From this point of view, Jumia would be an African company, since it was entirely built here.

But Bolt and Glovo aren’t.

The debate about Jumia’s Africanness didn’t go away so easily, though.

And this identity struggle has simmered for years, with one unspoken truth beneath it.

If you wanted to win big in African tech, having a white co-founder helped. 

Why is this? 

Because white co-founders unlocked capital and access

Let’s go back to Jumia.

Before it IPO’d, Jumia’s biggest backer was Rocket Internet— a German venture studio started by three brothers who copy successful Silicon Valley playbooks for a living.

To them, Jumia was a replica of Amazon, but for Africa.

So, they helped kickstart Jumia with $1 million in funding. But they didn’t stop there.

Over time, they pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into it, giving Jumia the runway to scale fast and go public.

By the time it went public in 2019, Jumia had raised over $800 million from Rocket Internet and other global investors like Goldman Sachs.

Now, compare that to Konga, Nigeria’s homegrown e-commerce rival. 

Even at the height of the e-commerce boom, Konga had only raised $75 million.

And in 2016, when a recession hit in Nigeria, Jumia was able to weather the storm.

Konga, on the other hand, was sold a few years later for cents on the dollar.

But this advantage is not just ancient history.

Even today, some of Africa’s most successful companies have non-African founders.

Wave, the only unicorn to come out of Francophone Africa, was founded by Americans.

70% of Kenyan growth-stage companies have at least one co-founder who’s not African.

And in 2019, only 6% of startups in Kenya that raised more than $1 million in venture capital were led by local founders.

Let’s be real: the privilege is real.

But it’s not just about skin tone. It’s about exposure.

And we’ve seen this play out in other ecosystems before.

Let’s fly over to LatAm

Between the late 90’s and early 2000s, Latin America was where Africa is now.

A promising market with limited capital, patchy infrastructure, and barely any exits.

And in those early days?

Most of the big companies were started by people with global exposure.

Like MercadoLibre—Latin America’s most valuable tech company.

It was founded by Marcos Galperin, an Argentine, in 1999 while getting his MBA at Stanford.

His first investment came after his MBA professor introduced him to a partner at HM Capital, a VC firm in the US.

And when he raised growth rounds, they were led by JPMorgan (where he’d worked) and Goldman Sachs.

Similar stories happened with Nubank and Rappi.

David Velez, the founder of Nubank, had two degrees from Stanford and worked for years at Andreesen Horowitz before becoming a founder.

When he left, he had world-class experience, capital, and a great network. 

Looking at these founders, the trend gets clearer.

They had global credibility and insider access.

So they raised the first big cheques. And built the first major companies. 

Fast-forward to today?

The biggest up-and-coming startups in Latin America are built by fully local teams.

Founders who studied at home.

Worked at Rappi, Nubank, and MercadoLibre.

And learned from the ecosystem those early teams helped build.

Today, Rappi has the largest startup mafia in Latin America.

According to Latitud, over 120 startups have been started by Rappi alumni.

And they’ve collectively gone on to raise over $1.5 billion in capital.

Africa is following the same trajectory

What we’re seeing in Africa today—white founders, diaspora founders, foreign capital—is not strange.

If LatAm taught us any lessons, it’s that this is sometimes the normal evolution of tech ecosystems.

Because startups—the Silicon Valley kind—are still new in Africa.

Sure, tech companies like MTN and Safaricom have been around for a while.

But VC-funded, hypergrowth startups? Barely 15 years old.

The first landmark raise in Africa was a $8 million deal from Tiger Global to IrokoTV in 2012.

That was just 13 years ago.

Which begs the question: How many people have 10+ years of experience building startups in Africa?

Not many.

Which is why, in the early days, experience had to be imported.

From foreign founders, diaspora founders, and expats.

These were the people who had picked up experience abroad and in more developed tech ecosystems.

And had formed relationships with talent and global investors.

So they came, they built, and in doing so, they helped jumpstart the ecosystem.

Companies like Jumia, Paga, Wasoko, and Wave.

And as these early companies scaled, they spun out a new generation of local talent.

Engineers, product managers, salespeople, and founders.

And many of them now run startups. 

Jumia spun a mafia that now runs more than 10 African startups, most of whom are local founders.

And the white-founder edge? It’s already phasing out.

We’re not hitting the part of the story arc where the local founders are winning big, too.

For instance, Moniepoint hit a billion dollars in valuation last year with an all-black founding team.

And five of the ten unicorns in Africa have entirely black founding teams.

The best parts? Hundreds of thousands of jobs have been created, many of them incubating tomorrow’s founders.

Yes, we can do better on equity and representation.

But shaming the people who are building—white, Black, local or diaspora—won’t fix that.

Because building an ecosystem is a team sport

And to win, you need the best players on the field—founders, investors, and operators..

That’s how football works, right?

You don’t build a winning team by only picking players from your street.

You pick the best talent available—across defence, midfield, attack—and from anywhere in the world.

That’s how the best teams grow. The same goes for African tech.

Because in the end, what makes a startup African isn’t the passport of the founder.

It’s about the problem being solved and the impact being made.

So…will $100 million build Africa’s future?

No. It’s barely 1% of the capital raised by Africa’s tech ecosystem over the last decade.

But it helps.

And it doesn’t matter if the hands building it are local or expats.

As long as they’re honest, committed, and all-in.

That’s what matters.

So, what’s your take on expat founders building Africa’s future? 

Let me know here.

That’s it for this week. See you on Sunday for a breakdown on This Week in African Tech.

Cheers,

The Tech Safari Team

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