The Road Less Travelled

Hey, Sheriff here 👋 

How many times have you heard the phrase “Africa has too much fintech”?

Probably too many times. The truth is, there’s a lack of original ideas in Africa today.

But that wasn’t always the case.

This week, we’ll be diving into African startups that took the road less travelled and how it worked out for them.

Let’s get into it…

About 600 years ago, the map of the world looked very different.

Places like the Americas and the Caribbean hadn't been discovered yet. 

The edges of maps were filled with mystery and speculation. 

And whenever cartographers wanted to depict these uncharted territories, they'd write "hic sunt dracones": here be dragons.

It was a warning and a testament to the danger and risk of exploring the unknown. 

These unexplored regions represented both opportunity and peril. But explorers who braved them anyway changed the course of history.

In 1492, Christopher Columbus landed on an island in the Bahamas, making contact with the "New World." 

That single act of exploration sparked events that centuries later would lead to the creation of America. 

The risk paid off, not because the journey was safe, but because someone was willing to venture into uncertain territory.

This piece of history is a metaphor for what's happened in African tech over the last 15 years. 

The difference is, we're moving in the opposite direction, away from the unknown, toward the familiar.

The Class of '09

Back in 2009, African tech looked much different. There were no established sectors or categories, just companies. 

And interestingly, there was more diversity.

Let's have a look at the class of '09.

In 2009, African tech was a handful of companies building unusual things.

Paga had just created a way to transact offline without cash. 

Founded by Stanford-educated Tayo Oviosu, it combined mobile payments with a network of physical agents. 

At a time when Nigeria was 90% cash-dependent, Paga was betting people would trust digital money transfers. 

The company started commercial operations in 2012 and has since processed over $12 billion in transactions.

IrokoTV wanted to build Nigeria's version of Netflix. 

Jason Njoku launched it in 2011, streaming Nollywood content when internet penetration was abysmal, and data was expensive. 

He had to buy movie licenses on hard drives and fly them to the UK just to upload them. 

The streaming model eventually struggled in Nigeria's economic reality, but Njoku proved Nollywood had global digital appeal.

A few years later, in 2013, Hotels.ng set out to become Nigeria's Booking.com. 

Mark Essien built the first version as a test, just a dummy website with a few hotel listings. 

He watched the traffic it generated, validated the need, and then raised $75,000 from Jason Njoku's Spark Fund to launch properly. 

Today, Hotels.ng is Nigeria's largest hotel booking platform.

These companies were smaller, riskier, and not well-funded. 

None of them fit into neat categories that investors understood. But they still went ahead and built companies meant to disrupt entire industries.

Each one was betting on uncharted territory.

When funding became the reward

Today, there's much less disruption happening. And we can all trace it back to one ironic thing: funding.

In the startup world, funding is fuel for getting where you're going. But at some point in Africa, funding became its own reward.

We can trace this back to 2017, when it became commonplace for African companies to get into Y Combinator. 

That year, YC accepted 10 African startups, the highest number in a single year. Seven came from Nigeria alone, including names like Aella Credit, Helium Health, and Kudi.

The sectors these companies came from then became hotspots for founders, like fintech. 

As more funding flowed into fintechs, more founders simply launched fintechs, drawing even more funding to the sector. At this point, categories were becoming more clearly defined.

By 2022, 72 African companies had gotten into YC, and 36 of them were fintechs. That year, fintechs accounted for 39% of all VC dollars invested in African companies.

Even when the funding winter hit in 2023, people still stuck to the “safe” sectors that had produced winners.

In 2025, fintech secured 37% of all funding for African tech.

The numbers tell the story of a narrowing funnel. More money, but flowing to fewer types of companies, in fewer sectors, solving similar problems.

While select industries like fintech, e-commerce, and mobility boomed, they also became more mature. Regulations got clearer, and the standards and expectations were set, too.

But this came at the expense of taking real risks to build for new, unfamiliar problems.

The Black Swan effect

History has shown that in Africa, the unusual thing typically wins.

Nassim Taleb, in his book "The Black Swan," documents this well. 

The most impactful events are tail events, events that are rare but timed just right. Their impact dwarfs every other event.

The emergence of Google was a tail event. The 2008 Global Financial Crisis was a tail event. COVID was a tail event.

In business, positive tail events come from experimentation with new, unorthodox, and sometimes unpopular models, markets, and technologies. 

The very creation of Microsoft was a tail event given its day. Google's rise was a tail event. So was the rise of YouTube.

And they had an impact: PC ownership, social media, and search all transformed how we live.

In Africa, some of the biggest companies looked very unusual at inception.

Andela started as a dev school in 2014. It ran intensive six-month bootcamps in Lagos, Nairobi, Kampala, and Kigali, training junior developers. 

At the time, over 130,000 applicants competed for spots in these programs.

Then in 2020, it pivoted completely, shutting down its physical campuses and becoming a remote talent marketplace. 

Today, it's a $1.5 billion company, placing senior engineers with global companies.

Moove was selling cars to people on credit and making them pay it off by driving on platforms like Uber, a model it pioneered.

Today, it’s active in 13 cities worldwide and is set to power Waymo’s electric vehicle fleet. It has nearly $400 million in annual recurring revenue and is a unicorn.

There’s ThriveAgric, which started out pooling investments and extension services for Nigerian farmers. 

It provided input financing, agronomic advice, and market access to smallholder farmers.

Despite a rocky 2020, the company has disbursed over $100 million in loans to more than 820,000 farmers and facilitated the production of 2.3 million metric tonnes of grains.

In 2024, ThriveAgric crossed $100 million in revenue.

And even back in 2014, companies like DealDey tried a different e-commerce model and found success as Nigeria's answer to Groupon.

Each of these companies was solving a problem that didn't fit neatly into established categories. Recently, we saw it happen again.

The TerraHaptix moment

Last month, Terra (formerly TerraHaptix) raised $11.8 million to build autonomous security drones for Africa. 

The round was led by 8VC, founded by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. There was no African investor participation in the deal.

A week ago, they raised an additional $22 million, bringing their total seed round to roughly $34 million, with participation from only one local investor.

This created a lot of fanfare and outcry. 

Some noted the risk of having Palantir stakeholders invest in a key African startup. 

The firm’s bread and butter is building surveillance tech, so many are worried this is a Trojan Horse into Africa’s security space. 

Others, in typical fashion, claimed it was a landmark deal and the founders must have been geniuses for building the company.

But they all miss the point.

Africa needs more risk-taking.

Terra was founded by two Nigerians, Nathan Nwachuku, 22, and Maxwell Maduka, 24, to design and manufacture autonomous drones, sentry towers, and unmanned ground vehicles for security. 

The company operates a 15,000-square-foot facility in Abuja, building most components in-house.

Its systems secure infrastructure assets valued at $11 billion, including Nigerian hydropower plants and Ghanaian mining operations. In May 2025, Terra beat an Israeli company to secure a $1.2 million contract for AI-powered security at Nigerian dams.

The company has already signed more than $50 million in commercial and government contracts.

This is hardware. This is defense tech. This is uncharted territory for African venture capital. Because before Terra launched, defense tech wasn’t a category in Africa.

Last year, we wrote about Africa's need for more hardware startups. In it, we showed that Africa needs more of these companies solving tenuous problems.

Many of these companies might transcend category definitions and current funding trends. But they're worth rooting for.

Because they're taking the road less traveled.

And when it works out, it can make all the difference.

Why we need to remap Africa

The argument remains the same: the digital economy can only go so far if the physical economy is broken. 

You can have the best e-commerce app in the world, but you won’t get far if the roads are broken and unsafe or the power is out.

The companies that solve these problems might not fit neatly into a category. They might not look like a B2B SaaS business with high gross margins. They might require actual factories and boots on the ground.

But they’re worth rooting for. They take the road less traveled. They’re sailing into the uncharted parts of the map where the dragons live.

And as history has shown us, when those explorers finally find land, they don't just find a new market; they often build a new world.

Do you know a startup that’s building something truly unusual?

Tell us 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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