Inside Paystack’s Journey: From Lagos Startup to a $200M Stripe Acquisition
StoryLab
20 min read
15

Inside Paystack’s Journey: From Lagos Startup to a $200M Stripe Acquisition

August 26, 2025
2

Paystack has evolved from a scrappy Lagos startup to one of the most influential fintech companies in Africa, redefining how businesses accept and process payments across the continent. It emerged at a time when Nigerian merchants faced broken digital infrastructure: payment integrations were slow, expensive, and riddled with failure. By

Continue Reading
Inside Yoco’s Journey: Powering the Future of SME Payments in SA
StoryLab
24 min read
55

Inside Yoco’s Journey: Powering the Future of SME Payments in SA

August 19, 2025
0

In 2015, South Africa had more than 1.3 million small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), yet fewer than 7% of them could accept cards. The barriers were steep—long application processes with banks, high transaction fees, prohibitive hardware costs, and a system that favored large retailers over street-side vendors and micro-businesses. This

Continue Reading
Inside Lipa Later’s Journey: From BNPL Pioneer to Hard Lessons in African Fintech
StoryLab
31 min read
90

Inside Lipa Later’s Journey: From BNPL Pioneer to Hard Lessons in African Fintech

August 12, 2025
0

In the mid-2010s, Africa’s e-commerce and fintech sectors were buzzing with optimism. Internet penetration was climbing, smartphone adoption was accelerating, and a young, tech-savvy population was eager for innovative solutions that could make life easier. Among the bold startups that emerged during this wave was Lipa Later, a Kenyan-born fintech

Continue Reading
Inside 54gene’s Journey: The Startup That Tried to Rewrite Africa’s Genetic Future
StoryLab
20 min read
101

Inside 54gene’s Journey: The Startup That Tried to Rewrite Africa’s Genetic Future

August 5, 2025
0

In 2019, Nigerian scientist Dr. Abasi Ene-Obong founded 54gene to tackle a glaring global health inequity: Africa’s vast genetic diversity was barely represented in global research, with less than 3% of genomic data coming from the continent. The mission was clear — build Africa’s first large-scale genomic database, revolutionize drug

Continue Reading
Inside M-Pesa’s Journey: An Idea That Changed the Way Africa Moves Money
StoryLab
26 min read
132

Inside M-Pesa’s Journey: An Idea That Changed the Way Africa Moves Money

July 29, 2025
0

Inside M-Pesa’s journey lies one of the most remarkable stories of technological innovation reshaping the financial industry of Africa and beyond. Launched in Kenya in 2007 by Safaricom and Vodafone, M-Pesa (short for “mobile money” in Swahili) emerged as a bold experiment to address the limited access to banking services

Continue Reading
Inside Interswitch’s Journey: From Pioneering Payments to Shaping Africa’s Fintech Future
StoryLab
17 min read
170

Inside Interswitch’s Journey: From Pioneering Payments to Shaping Africa’s Fintech Future

July 22, 2025
0

In 2002, long before “fintech” became a buzzword in Africa, one Nigerian engineer saw a broken financial system and envisioned a seamless digital payments network. That engineer, Mitchell Elegbe, would go on to found Interswitch, the company that built the rails for Nigeria’s electronic payments ecosystem and became a blueprint

Continue Reading
Inside Moniepoint’s Journey: From POS Terminals to Africa’s Fintech Powerhouse
StoryLab
20 min read
283

Inside Moniepoint’s Journey: From POS Terminals to Africa’s Fintech Powerhouse

July 17, 2025
2

In Nigeria’s fast-evolving fintech sector, Moniepoint has emerged as one of the most transformative players, redefining how millions of small businesses and individuals access financial services. Founded in 2015 by former Interswitch engineers Tosin Eniolorunda and Felix Ike, the company set out to close a critical market gap: the lack

Continue Reading