When Forbes published its 11th annual Fintech 50 list, the headline story was about an industry under pressure. Funding for private fintech entities, though recovering to $53 billion in 2024, remains a fraction of the $152 billion invested at the sector’s peak in 2021.
Valuations are sober. AI startups are the new darlings. Fintech, for the moment, must prove itself on fundamentals.
Against that backdrop, something quietly remarkable happened. Three companies with deep African connections made the cut. Two were founded by Africans, one from Nigeria, one from Tanzania. The third has built much of its business serving African consumers.
The 3 ‘African’ founders on Forbes’ fintech 50
Abbey Wemimo came to the United States from Nigeria and encountered firsthand what it means to be invisible to a financial system. No credit history. No rental record. No way in.
That personal experience became the founding logic of Esusu, which he co-founded with Samir Goel in 2018.
Esusu reports rent payments, one of the largest recurring expenses most Americans make, to credit bureaus, converting what was previously a financial dead-end into a credit-building tool.
Today, the company processes $100 billion in annual gross lease volume, serves 12 million renters across 5 million rental units, and has helped users achieve an average 45-point credit score increase. It crossed the unicorn threshold in 2022 with a $1.2 billion valuation.
Benjamin Fernandes built Nala from a different vantage point.
Inside Africa, watching the friction of sending money across borders. The Tanzanian founder launched what began as a mobile money aggregator and evolved it into a full-stack remittance and payments platform.
Nala now operates across 11 African markets, enabling senders in the UK, EU, and US to transfer money home seamlessly. Its growth has been staggering. 34x growth in transaction volume over 20 months, 10x revenue growth year-over-year, and the company is already profitable.
Having raised $50 million in total funding, Nala is reportedly planning a $120 million raise in late 2026.
Shivani Siroya is American, but Tala is, in some ways, an African story. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Santa Monica, Tala extends microloans to underserved populations in Kenya (its growth story is increasingly a Latin American one), the Philippines, Mexico, and India, using mobile data and alternative credit signals where traditional credit scores don’t exist.
With 12 million customers across three continents, $7 billion in total credit disbursed, and a $300 million annualised revenue run rate growing at 35% over three years, Tala demonstrates that serving Africa’s financially excluded is not charity, it’s a business model.
What unites Esusu, Nala, and Tala is not geography or sector, it’s philosophy. Each was built on the premise that exclusion from financial systems is not an inherent condition but a design flaw. And each has monetised the correction of that flaw.
Esusu operates in the B2B2C space, partnering with property managers and landlords who pay to have their tenants’ rent reported. It’s a clever alignment of incentives.
So, landlords benefit from financially healthier tenants, tenants build credit, and Esusu collects recurring platform fees.
Nala earns revenue on the spread and fees in remittance transactions. This is a high-volume, thin-margin model that demands operational efficiency and scale.
Tala, the most mature of the three, operates a consumer lending model, generating interest and service fees on short-term loans underwritten by proprietary data models trained on mobile behaviour.
The African opportunity they’re betting on
Africa’s financial inclusion gap remains one of the most significant and most investable problems in global finance.
About 57% of sub-Saharan Africa’s adult population remains unbanked, according to the World Bank. Remittance flows to Sub-Saharan Africa exceeded $50 billion in 2023. Mobile penetration has raced ahead of banking infrastructure, creating an opening that traditional institutions have been too slow to exploit.
Nala is playing directly in this corridor. It has built infrastructure for the African diaspora to move money home more cheaply and reliably than legacy players like Western Union. Tala has gone further by extending credit where no credit bureau exists, relying on behavioural data from mobile phones to underwrite loans in minutes.
Esusu’s angle is more diasporic. It serves African immigrants and other marginalised groups in the United States who are locked out of the American credit system despite years of steady rent payments.
The market logic is compelling. Africa has the world’s youngest population, a rapidly urbanising middle class, and mobile infrastructure that is increasingly first-rate. The fintech companies that learn to operate effectively in and around African markets today are building the rails that the next generation of African financial consumers will rely on.
