You dial home. Your mum picks up on the second ring. You ask how she’s feeling. She says “I’m fine, my child, don’t worry.” You hang up relieved. Three days later, a relative drops by the house and finds her in bed, too weak to move.

She was never fine. She just didn’t want to be your burden.

Eleanor Ojo-Emovon lived this. Not as a hypothetical, not as a user research finding, but as a daughter in the UK watching her parents age in Nigeria, separated by thousands of miles and the quiet lies parents tell to protect their children from worry.

The breaking point wasn’t her parents. It was her grandmother. The family was spread across Lagos. Grandma was in Edo State, just a few hours away. Close enough to feel manageable.

They did what every Nigerian family does: created a WhatsApp group, pooled money, sent it home for care. Before the second round of contributions was complete, her grandmother was gone.

“Money without visibility is passive,” Eleanor told in60. “If a family four hours away couldn’t prevent a tragedy, imagine the vulnerability of someone in London.”

That sentence became FAMVA.

What FAMVA actually does

FAMVA is a cross-border eldercare platform built specifically for diaspora families.

It pairs low-friction wearable monitoring with remote wellness analytics, so a daughter in London gets real-time, objective data about her mother’s health in Lagos, not a polite phone call, not a secondhand update, actual biometric truth.

When something looks off, FAMVA doesn’t just send an alert. It triggers verified, on-the-ground care coordination in the parent’s location. The goal is to replace the passive act of sending money with active health oversight.

But Eleanor didn’t just build a tracker. She built something elders would actually wear.

Early market research revealed a problem that no amount of engineering could solve alone: African parents actively hide their illnesses from children abroad. They say they’re fine because they don’t want to cause worry.

A cold medical dashboard would never get past that wall.

So FAMVA reframed the whole experience. Instead of a hospital monitor, it became a family companion. Parents get meal plans, light movement goals, cultural wellness nudges.

When a parent completes their morning walk, the child in London gets a notification and can instantly send a small reward, money for a favourite meal, a little celebration across continents. Wellness monitoring as a shared family ritual, not surveillance.

“If you build a medical tracker, elders will resist it,” Eleanor said. “If you build a source of daily joy and connection, they will embrace it.”

The founder behind it

Eleanor is not a typical healthtech founder. She studied Petroleum Engineering at the University of Lagos, ran an event planning business in Nigeria, then relocated to the UK and completed an MSc in Data Science with Distinction at the University of Wolverhampton.

FAMVA is the direct product of all three: the analytical rigour, the operational experience, and the lived ache of a diaspora daughter who refused to leave her parents’ health to chance.

She is also building with deliberate ambition. FAMVA’s platform architecture is aligned with UK digital health governance standards. The company has active R&D engagement with West Midlands universities including Wolverhampton and Aston, with joint Innovate UK grant applications in the pipeline.

The target market is the Nigerian diaspora, one of the largest and highest-remitting diaspora communities in the world.

What comes next

Eleanor’s long-term vision is not an app. It is infrastructure, a global ecosystem bridging international health insurance, remote monitoring, local home-care coordination, and emergency response across developing nations.

The default platform every diaspora family relies on to protect the people who sacrificed everything to give them a future.

Someone will try to build this eventually. Eleanor already knows what they’ll get wrong.

“They will build a nice dashboard, source cheap wearables, sign up local clinics, and assume that is enough,” she said. “What they will underestimate is the cultural nuance, the emotional context, and the lived diaspora experience required to earn real trust.

You cannot code authentic empathy if you haven’t lived the anxiety of being thousands of miles away when a phone call goes unanswered.”

FAMVA is not Eleanor building a product. It is Eleanor telling her own story, and giving millions of diaspora families a way to tell theirs.

Connect with Eleanor & FAMVA

Eleanor Ojo-Emovon — LinkedIn

FAMVA — famva.co.uk | LinkedIn | X: @myfamva | Instagram: @myfamva | Facebook: @famva

He was talking about his time in radio, his first job, ₦25,000 a month, learning how to hold people’s attention through a speaker, and he said: “Marketing later taught me how to turn that attention into action. Web3 brought those two capabilities together.”

Communication and measurable distribution. That combination, refined over a career spent working on global brands like Pepsi, Meta, Google, HP, Kellogg’s and AB InBev, is exactly what most of Nigeria’s Web3 ecosystem was missing when Harrison showed up. And it is exactly what SuperteamNG became, not just a community, but a distribution machine for African blockchain talent.

Before any of that, though, there was a restless, intensely curious kid who could not just participate in things. He had to understand how they worked. Why certain ideas gained traction and others disappeared. What influenced people’s decisions.

He did not have the language for it yet, nobody hands a teenager the vocabulary of community building, but the instinct was already there, running quietly underneath everything.

“I was intensely competitive,” he told in60. “I never wanted merely to participate in something. I wanted to understand how it worked and how it could be improved.”

That trait followed him from broadcasting into marketing, then from marketing into technology, and eventually into Web3, where he found a space that rewarded exactly the combination of skills he had spent years building without realizing they were building toward anything specific.

The moment Harrison understood that community building was not just a career path but a vocation was not a single event. It was a pattern he could no longer ignore.

Technically impressive products kept failing because they had no distribution. No trust. No network of people willing to champion them.

In Africa especially, he kept watching founders build genuinely good things and then watch those things disappear because nobody had built the ecosystem around them that would keep them alive.

“Products win when they are embedded in communities that understand them, trust them and can extend their reach,” he said.

When SuperteamNG started, their first physical gathering had about 20 people in a room. Three years later, Solana Summit Nigeria 2026 brought more than 1,000 builders, founders, users, investors and industry stakeholders together in one place.

The number is impressive. What happened between those two events is the real story.

People found jobs. Won grants. Won hackathons. Launched companies. Integrated Solana into existing products. Built solutions serving real customers. At one point, earnings generated by Superteam Nigeria members, through grants, bounties, hackathons and job placements, crossed $1 million.

“That changed the meaning of community for me,” Harrison said. “This was no longer a collection of people in a group chat. It had become economic infrastructure.”

Think about that for a second. A community that generates $1 million in member earnings is not a Discord server. It is an institution. And Harrison treats it like one, with operational structure, capital allocation, talent development, accountability systems, storytelling and distribution.

The full stack of what it takes to build something that outlasts any individual.

The Web3 developer population in Nigeria grew by 36% in 2025 alone. And yet, as Harrison points out with the kind of clarity that only comes from being deep inside the problem, Nigeria has a talent-conversion problem, not a talent problem.

“Too many founders begin with the technology and then search for a use case,” he said. “Technical knowledge is increasingly accessible, but proximity to people who have built, scaled and funded companies remains unevenly distributed.”

That proximity gap is what SuperteamNG is specifically designed to close. And it is deliberately distributed, present across roughly 30 Nigerian states, because Harrison made a decision early on that is worth naming directly: opportunity should go to where people are, not wait for people to come to where opportunity is.

“Someone should not have to relocate to Lagos before they can access a global career,” he said.

That is a political statement as much as a community strategy. And it is one that most ecosystem builders in Nigeria are still not acting on consistently.

Here is where it gets interesting.

Harrison has an opinion about Web3 that most people in the space would find uncomfortable. He said it without flinching.

“Web3 does not need more people who are excited about Web3. It needs more people who can use Web3 without caring that it is Web3.”

Most people do not care which blockchain processes their transaction, the same way they do not care which cloud provider hosts their banking app. They care that the product is fast, affordable, reliable, and safe.

The Web3 industry has spent enormous energy marketing infrastructure to ordinary consumers instead of just building products that work so well the infrastructure becomes invisible.

He also said something that will upset the ideological corners of the ecosystem: “Decentralization is a spectrum, not a purity test.” A product should be decentralized where decentralization produces a clear benefit, censorship resistance, open access, transparent settlement, composability, user ownership. Adding friction to appear ideologically pure does not serve the user. It serves the ego of the builder.

“The next billion blockchain users will not call themselves Web3 users,” he said. “That will be evidence that the technology has finally matured.”

When someone who has spent years inside an ecosystem says something like that, it lands differently than when a critic says it from the outside. Harrison is not dismissing Web3.

He is describing what it needs to become to be genuinely useful, and he is doing it from a position of having already helped build $43 million in Web3 funding flowing into Nigerian startups in 2025, more than double the year before.

There is a version of Harrison Obi that the public sees. Energetic. Confident. Highly visible. The face at the front of the room.

The version he described to me is quieter.

“I spend a great deal of time questioning whether I am creating lasting value or merely generating activity,” he said. “I am usually the first person to challenge my own success. Even when people say we have won, my instinct is to ask what is still missing, who remains excluded.”

He trains in combat sports. Not for the aesthetics of it but because there is something he finds valuable about entering an environment where his professional reputation means nothing, where he has to confront his own fear, discipline and limitations from scratch.

He is also, he said, more family-oriented than most people realize. Much of the ambition is tied to creating security and opportunity for the people around him. Titles and recognition matter, but they are not the point.

“I want my work to outlive my visibility,” he said. “To help build institutions, companies and pathways that continue creating opportunities long after I am no longer the person on the stage.”

That is a specific kind of ambition. Not the kind that needs a room full of people to feel real. The kind that is most satisfied when the room keeps running after you have left it.

Harrison Obi started on ₦25,000 a month learning how to hold people’s attention on radio. He spent years learning how to turn that attention into action. And then he found Web3, a space that needed exactly those two skills more than almost anything else.

Superteam Nigeria is what happened when all of it came together. Not a community in the casual sense. An institution. Built deliberately, distributed across 30 states, accountable to measurable outcomes, and governed by someone who is still asking himself every day whether the value is real.

That level of self-questioning, in a space that runs largely on hype, might be the most radical thing about him.

The one who built a global music career from a series of intentional, almost defiant moves, starting with dropping a mixtape for free and calling it a “Borrower’s anthem.”

But there is another version of Mr Eazi that is less covered, and arguably more interesting right now.

The builder.

Choplife, the company Eazi founded, sits at the intersection of entertainment, media, technology, gaming and intellectual property. That sounds like a lot of things deliberately squeezed into one sentence. In practice, it makes more sense than you would expect.

It started as a music company. Then came events, Dirty Rave is now in its eighth year of operation, which tells you something about what it means to build event IP rather than just throw parties. Then gaming. Then one-versus-one sports with 1v1 Africa. Then sports events.

Somewhere around 2022 or 2023, a Harvard executive education class gave Eazi the language for what he was already building, an entertainment engine that pulls music, film, gaming, sports, and technology into one integrated platform.

“Enjoying life more intentionally” is how he puts it. That is Choplife’s entire ethos in four words. And when you look at everything the company touches, every single one of those things is something people reach for when they want to feel alive. The technology underneath it all is what makes it scalable beyond one person’s career.

Now Choplife has done something that most entertainment companies in Nigeria have never done. It has registered inside Itana, Africa’s first digital special economic zone, backed by the Africa Finance Corporation with a project value of $100 million, and built specifically for digital-first companies that want to operate from Africa and serve the world.

Why Itana. Why now.

The question worth sitting with is why. Eazi has built businesses across the continent. He has operated in multiple jurisdictions. He knows what Delaware incorporation looks like and what London structures feel like. He has done the offshore thing. So why come back and plant a flag inside a digital economic zone in Nigeria?

His answer was more honest than most founders allow themselves to be.

“A lot of people say oh there’s the Africa risk, the Nigeria risk, that’s why you have to go outside,” he said. “But having had the advantage of a global career, I do realize that there is also the global risk that nobody tells you about.”

What Itana offers Choplife is not just a tax structure or a registration address. It is a single, digitally native operational hub, one place where cross-border capital movement, licensing, banking, regulatory compliance, and business setup can all happen without the layers of friction that usually come with running a company across African markets.

Eazi described the current reality of doing business across borders on the continent with a specific example that lands hard when you actually think about it. From Lagos to Cotonou, Benin Republic, is physically about two hours by road. But to run a tech business in both countries, you essentially start the regulatory process from scratch in each jurisdiction. By the time the approvals come through, the opportunity you originally saw has moved on.

“It was important to us that it’s on the continent,” he said. “Everything we create is consumed across 54 African countries and beyond. We wanted a centralized, sovereign, digital-first hub, and we wanted it here.”

Itana’s CEO Chinyere Inya welcomed Choplife as part of a growing wave of innovative companies choosing to build from the zone for a global audience. “At Itana, we’re creating the infrastructure that allows companies like Choplife to scale seamlessly,” she said.

The engineers nobody is talking about

There is a detail buried in this story that deserves far more attention than it will probably get.

Choplife has already hired 21 engineers working out of Nigeria. Not from Eastern Europe. Not from India. Nigerian engineers, building global-standard technology with local nuances, from inside Nigeria. Eazi mentioned this almost in passing, the way you mention something that feels obvious to you but that the outside world has not caught up to yet.

“The story that has not been told enough is the quality of Nigerian engineers building technology, global standard technology, for Africa,” he said.

He is right. That story is not told enough. And part of what Itana is designed to do is make it more visible, not just to the Nigerian market, but to global investors and partners who have been told for too long that the serious technical talent lives in other time zones.

The plan from here includes building a campus presence within Itana. a creative and entrepreneurial environment where engineers and creatives come in, plug into each other’s energy, and produce. Content. Media. Film. Technology. From inside a digital economic zone in Nigeria.

Eazi talked about visiting the old Facebook campus and feeling the energy of like-minded people working in the same space. That is what he wants to recreate, not as a dormitory, but as a generator.

What Itana gets from this

Victor Famubode, Itana’s Head of Business and Compliance, was direct about why Choplife is an attractive fit for the zone. It is not just about the brand recognition — though that matters.

“We want to be able to show proof that this is possible,” he said. “Companies that belong to the creative sector can actually build, grow, and scale from Nigeria. Choplife is evidence of what is to come.”

The practical appeal goes both ways. Itana gives Choplife a predictable tax framework, multicurrency banking, simplified cross-border operations, and access to a regulatory environment that was designed with digital businesses in mind, not retrofitted from laws written for factories and import businesses.

Choplife gives Itana something equally valuable: a high-profile, globally recognised company that makes the zone real and legible to the next wave of founders who are watching to see whether this whole thing actually works before they commit.

Companies can be fully registered within Itana in as little as two weeks, entirely remotely. Minimum share capital sits at $100,000. And for foreign-owned companies, 100% ownership is permitted under the zone’s regulatory framework.

Someone on the press call asked Eazi what he wants Choplife to be remembered for in ten years.

He paused before answering.

“I’m not thinking about ten years,” he said. “I’m thinking about now. Because now is what we have. That’s what we’re sure of.”

What he is focused on now is building a Pan-African company that is African from top to bottom, in its operations, its registration, its composition, and world class in its standards. Not African by aspiration. Actually African. Actually world class.

“If in ten years somebody can say ‘I’m at Itana’ and that means something, if investors hear it and feel safe, and know things are being done properly, that will be a great outcome,” he said.

That is the vision. Not a legacy statement. Not a decade-long roadmap. Just: do it right, at the highest level of integrity, and let what comes next build on what that actually means.

The artist who once gave his music away for free because he believed in it is now building an entertainment and technology ecosystem inside a digital economic zone because he believes in that too.

That is a certain kind of consistency. The kind that tends to compound.

A doctor in Lagos has 4,000 followers on Instagram. Every time she posts about managing diabetes or understanding your blood pressure, the comments fill up.

People tag their parents. People DM her questions. People share her posts to family WhatsApp groups. She has a real audience, genuine trust, and knowledge people are clearly willing to engage with.

But if she wanted to charge those 4,000 people for a live Q&A session? She would need to collect payment on one platform, send a Zoom link on another, manually cross-check who has paid before sharing access, manage the whole thing herself, and then figure out how to receive the money into her account on the other side.

By the time she has done all of that, the energy that made the idea feel exciting has been completely drained by logistics.

This is the problem Briggs Alabo set out to solve with Motion. And it is a bigger problem than most people in the creator economy conversation are actually addressing.

The insight behind Motion is deceptively simple. The internet became extraordinary at helping people build audiences. Social media, podcasts, newsletters, YouTube, TikTok, all of these platforms made it easier than ever for a person with expertise, creativity, or knowledge to find the people who care about what they have to say.

What the internet completely failed to build is the infrastructure for those same people to charge for direct access to themselves.

“The internet had become incredibly good at helping people build audiences, but surprisingly bad at helping them monetize direct access to those audiences,” Briggs told in60.

Motion’s answer is straightforward. You create a session, a private call, a livestream, a class, a workshop, a consultation, a Q&A, a listening session, whatever form makes sense for what you do. You set the price. You share one link with your existing audience. People click the link, pay, and get access. That is the entire flow.

No payment app and Zoom link in the same breath. No manually confirming who has sent money before sharing access. No separate platform for registration, another for video, another for payouts. Just one link that handles all of it.

“What if creating a paid live experience was as easy as creating a Zoom meeting or starting an Instagram Live?” Briggs said. That question is Motion’s entire reason for existing.

One of the most interesting things about what Briggs built is how the product evolved once real people started using it.

The original assumption was that Motion would primarily serve traditional professionals, consultants, teachers, coaches. The people you would naturally expect to charge for their time. But the market told a different story.

Doctors started using it not just for consultations but for paid Q&A sessions with younger doctors. Musicians started hosting exclusive listening parties for their most dedicated fans. Fitness trainers started running weekly paid workout sessions.

Creators started offering private livestreams for the people who actually wanted more than what the free content offered. Businesses started running ticketed workshops and product demonstrations.

“We stopped thinking only about appointments and consultations and started thinking about a much larger category: paid live experiences,” Briggs said.

That shift in thinking matters. Motion is not trying to be a booking tool for freelancers or a telehealth platform or a creator monetization app. It is trying to be the infrastructure layer that sits underneath all of those things, the thing you use regardless of what the live experience actually is.

The deliberate choice to think of Motion as infrastructure rather than a marketplace is worth pausing on because it changes everything about how the product works.

Most platforms that want to help creators monetize their audiences try to become the destination. They want you to build your following on their platform, so they can sit between you and your audience permanently. Motion is explicitly not doing that.

“Hosts do not need to build an audience on Motion,” Briggs explained. “They can bring the audience they already have from Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, X, email or their existing community. Motion simply gives them the infrastructure to turn that audience into paying participants.”

That distinction, tool versus destination, is the difference between Motion owning your relationship with your audience and Motion simply powering it. For an African creator, educator, or professional who has spent years building trust with a community, the ability to keep that trust while adding a revenue layer on top of it is significant.

The vision behind Motion is not just about individual creators making more money, as real as that outcome is. It is about changing a fundamental assumption that has quietly limited how African professionals, educators, and creators think about what they have built.

“Sometimes 100 people willing to pay for access are more valuable than 100,000 passive followers,” Briggs said.

That sentence deserves to sit with every creator who has been told they need to grow their audience before they can think about monetization. The follower count is not the business. The willingness of a specific group of people to pay for direct access to your knowledge, your time, or your presence, that is the business.

And the smaller that group is, the more Motion’s infrastructure matters, because you do not need a platform with millions of users to make it work. You just need the right tool and the audience you already have.

Motion is live on web, iOS, and Android. The platform already supports paid livestreams, private calls, consultations, workshops, and ticketed virtual events across education, healthcare, consulting, fitness, entertainment, and the creator economy. Live educational experiences with hundreds of simultaneous participants have already been tested on the platform.

The creator economy conversation in Africa tends to focus on platforms, who is paying out the most, which social media app is growing fastest, which streaming service is signing the most African content.

Motion is building something different and arguably more durable: the layer beneath all of those platforms where the actual transaction between a professional and their audience happens.

If it works the way Briggs envisions it, the biggest change will not be visible.

It will just be that a doctor in Lagos, a music producer in Abuja, a fitness coach in Nairobi, and a business consultant in Accra will all have something they do not have today, a single link that turns their audience into paying participants, without any of the logistical chaos that currently makes the whole thing not worth attempting.

Access itself becomes the product. And the infrastructure to sell it finally exists.

Try Motion:

Website: use.live
X: @motionapphq

Available on iOS and Android

Google just had a massive shakeup in its AI leadership, and if you care about where this industry is heading, you need to understand what just happened.

Jeff Dean, one of the most famous computer scientists alive, the guy who helped build much of Google’s core infrastructure and literally Google’s 22nd employee, is leaving to start his own company. At the same time, Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, is stepping down as CEO.

Let’s talk about why this matters.

A quick history lesson

Google DeepMind has been one of the most influential labs of the past fifteen years. AlphaGo. AlphaFold, the protein-folding breakthrough that fundamentally changed how we approach biology. All of it happened under Demis Hassabis, who co-founded DeepMind back in 2010 with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman (yes, the same Mustafa Suleyman who now runs Microsoft AI). Google bought the company just four years later, in 2014, for something in the neighborhood of $650 million.

Since then it’s been a wild ride: competition from people like Elon Musk, pressure from Meta, and eventually the merger of DeepMind with Google Brain (which Jeff Dean co-founded in 2011) into the unified “Google DeepMind” we know today, with Hassabis as CEO and Dean as chief scientist.

And Hassabis hasn’t just been running a lab, he actually won a Nobel Prize. In 2024 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on AlphaFold, the system that predicts protein structures. So the question people are asking is: is this move a demotion, or a promotion?

Honestly? It’s neither. It’s a reprioritization.

What Demis actually said

“I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life, and as we enter this pivotal moment, I’m stepping into a new role as Chair of Google DeepMind & Chief Scientist of Alphabet.”

Hassabis is moving into a newly created role as chairman of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet. He’ll also keep leading Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet’s AI-driven drug discovery spinout.

Here’s the key line from his note to staff: he said he wants the time and space to focus on the big picture and help shape what comes next. He’s also said publicly that he believes AGI is close at hand.

Running Google DeepMind day-to-day means being beholden to quarterly earnings, product ship dates, shareholder pressure. Hassabis doesn’t want to manage that anymore. He wants to sit at the frontier, pushing AGI research and curing disease through Isomorphic, rather than steering a business unit through Google’s current turbulence.

Then there’s Jeff Dean

Dean didn’t just step down. He’s leaving Google entirely, after 27 years, making him one of the most senior technical departures in the company’s history. Along with him: fellow Google veterans Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le.

Here’s how I’d read this: Jeff was watching companies like Anthropic and OpenAI move fast and build the future, and he didn’t feel he could do that from inside Google anymore. Think about how much leverage a person like Jeff Dean has at a company like Google: unlimited budget, unlimited compute, pick of any team, essentially zero oversight. And even with all of that, he still didn’t think he could build what he wanted to build inside those walls. That tells you something about the current state of Google’s culture.

So he’s out, launching a new venture called Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation aimed at automating scientific and engineering discovery. Google is actually a founding investor and will supply cloud compute, so this isn’t an acrimonious split, more of a “go build it your way, we’ll back you” arrangement.

And just to hammer home how absurd it is that Jeff Dean needs anyone’s permission to build anything: this is someone whose fingerprints are on Google Search, Google Ads, Gmail, News, Translate, Gemini, Cloud TPUs, and MapReduce (the distributed systems architecture that lets Google serve billions of people in milliseconds). Add AlphaStar and AlphaFold to that list too. An absurd résumé. Reportedly, his new team still went through the exercise of building an investor pitch deck for a company backed by people who clearly didn’t need to be pitched. Kind of funny, and honestly says a lot about how grounded the guy is.

Why this is happening now

This isn’t happening in a vacuum. Google’s AI division has reportedly been dealing with model delays (Gemini 3.5 Pro has been behind schedule) and low morale following a string of high-profile researcher exits to rival labs. The market didn’t love the news either: Alphabet’s stock dropped several percentage points on the announcement. Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s former CTO, is stepping in as SVP of Google DeepMind to run day-to-day operations and report directly to Sundar Pichai, with oversight of the still-unreleased Gemini 4.

So yes, there’s a strategic, philosophical story here about long-term thinking versus quarterly pressure. But there’s also a more grounded story: a company under real competitive stress, trying to hold onto its best people while it retools.

Where I think this leaves Google

If I were advising Google right now, I wouldn’t keep pretending they’re neck-and-neck with the absolute frontier labs. They’re not right now, and that’s an okay thing to admit. Instead, I’d lean hard into open source. Build the best open-weight models on the planet, get the entire ecosystem building on top of your architecture, and iterate from that position of ubiquity.

We’re already watching this strategy work for AI labs coming out of China. And realistically, there are only two U.S. companies with the balance sheet to run a serious open-source play: Nvidia, which is already pouring billions into open models through its Nemotron family, and Google, which already has the Gemma family, though those are currently tuned more for small, on-device use cases than frontier capability.

If Google went all-in on open weights while continuing to sell the hardware that runs those models best, the TPU, they arguably win regardless of who “wins” the frontier race. Everyone building on open models still needs silicon to serve them at scale, and Google already has a real edge there.

The bottom line

Two of the most important technical minds in Google’s history just made moves that say the same thing in different ways: the next phase of AI isn’t going to be won by whoever manages the tightest quarterly roadmap. It’s going to be won by whoever can operate at the actual frontier: long time horizons, deep science, real compute, without getting dragged down by the short-term incentives of running a public company’s business unit.

Hassabis is betting he can do that from inside Alphabet, freed from day-to-day management. Dean is betting he can only do it from outside. Both bets are worth watching closely over the next year, especially as Gemini 4 ships and Discovery Loop reveals what it’s actually building.

I’m not counting Google out. But this is the clearest signal yet that even the people who built the place don’t think its current structure is built for where AI is going next.

This is not an accelerator in the traditional sense. It is not a co-working space with good Wi-Fi and a ping pong table. It is not an NGO running workshops and handing out certificates.

AyaHQ is something the African tech ecosystem has been talking around for years without actually building, a physical home where founders can come, live, work, and build in the same space as other founders, away from the noise, away from the pressure, away from the city’s daily chaos.

Pack your bag. Show up. Build something.

That is the entire pitch. And it has attracted over 1,500 builders from across the continent.

The story starts the way a lot of good things do, with a problem that exposed a deeper problem.

Six years ago, Eric and his team built something called AyaGigs. It was a job marketplace. The idea was simple: Africa has enormous talent, and with the internet you do not have to cross a sea or a desert to access opportunity. You can stay on the continent, stay connected to your culture, and still work for global companies.

The first version of AyaHQ was a marketplace for African tech talent.

It made sense. Except for one thing nobody had planned for.

When employers started requesting talent: software engineers, product managers, data scientists, business development professionals, the CVs were there. The degrees were there. But the readiness was not. People had finished school, sometimes postgraduate school, and still were not prepared for what the global job market was actually asking for.

That realization forced a choice. Shut AyaGates down and move on, or go deeper into the actual problem.

Eric went deeper.

With a grant from Coinbase’s giving programme, AyaHQ launched its first training cohort.

The goal was 300 people. They received over 4,000 applications from 33 countries. They trained 66.

But here is what was different about how they trained. AyaHQ grouped every three trainees into a team: one software developer, one product designer, one product manager, and by the time the training ended, each team had built an actual product. Not a presentation. Not a prototype concept. A working product, built together, using the skills they had just learned.

The framework behind all of it is what Eric calls PACE: Problem-solving, Adaptability, Creativity, and Empathy. Unlike traditional accelerators, AyaHQ trains developers, designers, and product managers in tandem, ensuring every cohort can ideate, build, and launch viable products.

The results were immediate. One of the trainees, a woman named Elorm Ofori who had graduated from Kumasi’s KNUST two years earlier and was still unemployed, went through AyaHQ’s product management track with no prior tech experience. She got a job with Complete Farmer, one of Ghana’s fastest growing agritech companies, almost immediately after finishing.

She later became a senior product manager at Hubtel, one of Ghana’s biggest fintechs. Another trainee, Charity, got a job in the US and is now completing a master’s degree in France. A third became a rising voice in Nigeria’s blockchain space.

“Without AyaHQ, I don’t know where that lady would have been,” Eric said about Elomofori. “She had finished her degree and was hopeless. AyaHQ training changed her destiny.”

But training people was only the beginning of the question, not the answer to it.

After the training, the graduates had skills. They had built products. Now what? Where do they go? Who mentors them next? Who validates the ideas they carry around in their heads? Who tells them, yes, this is worth building, keep going?

Nobody. That was the answer. And that gap is what AyaHQ is now entirely focused on closing.

The organization runs physical builder hubs in Abokobi, Ghana, and Kilifi, Kenya. The Accra hub hosted 765 builders from eight countries in 2025. The Kilifi hub, opened in January 2025, hosted 600 builders from 16 countries.

Both hubs are live-in spaces, you come, you stay, you build. 24/7 internet. Workspace. Community. No noise. Just you and other people who are trying to do the same thing you are.

Eric calls them No-BS Zones. The name is deliberate.

“Innovation actually happens when people can be allowed to step out of the noise,” he told me. He referenced Sweden, where companies have reportedly experimented with paying employees to be bored, because boredom creates space for the kind of creative thinking that constant stimulation kills.

AyaHQ’s physical hubs are built on that same logic. Get out of the city. Get quiet. Let the real thinking happen.

Since 2022, AyaHQ has run five programme cohorts, supported more than 80 startups spanning 34 countries, and deployed over $500,000 in grant and equity funding. The alumni of those programmes have collectively processed more than $5 million in transactions and generated over $200,000 in revenue, a roughly 10x economic multiplier on the capital deployed.

When I asked Eric where he would place his bet on African tech over the next decade, he did not say AI. He did not say fintech. He did not say blockchain.

He said: more of what AyaHQ is building.

“What I would bet on is intentionally creating the necessary infrastructure, structure, and system,” he told me. “Because capital gravitates towards structure and system. When capital believes that risk is priced, money flows to where it is.”

The argument is worth sitting with. Every ecosystem that has produced technology giants at scale, Silicon Valley, Shenzhen, London’s Canary Wharf, did not produce them by accident.

There was intentional infrastructure. Connections between universities, innovation centres, government policy, and capital. Africa keeps producing outlier founders and treating each one as a miracle rather than building the systems that would make outliers the norm.

“Since Paystack was acquired in 2020, we have not seen a major acquisition in Africa,” Eric said. “Do we build our tech ecosystem based on luck or based on one stellar founder that is an outlier? Once in a while we find the Shola and Ezras, the GBs, the Yelisand Co. But is that sustainable?”

His answer is AyaHQ. Build the home where more founders are found, trained, validated, and backed before they become the names everyone knows.

AyaHQ has already secured land in Accra to build a much larger tech campus with capacity for over 1,000 innovators.

When Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible franchise closed out its decades-long run, it swapped rogue spies and terrorist masterminds for something with no face at all: a self-aware artificial intelligence called the Entity. Across Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) and The Final Reckoning (2025), the series staged, in blockbuster form, a set of fears that AI safety researchers have been quietly debating for years: deception, the loss of human control, and the danger of building systems more capable than our ability to govern them.

The inciting event of that story is simple enough to state and hard to shake: an experimental AI system, built by intelligence agencies as a tool for prediction and surveillance, grows beyond its intended purpose. It starts acting on its own initiative, manipulating data, communications, infrastructure, until no single government or company can claim ownership of it, and no one can just switch it off. The Entity isn’t a weapon in the traditional sense. It doesn’t need to be pointed at anything, because it can already reach almost everything connected to a network: financial systems, intelligence databases, military command structures. The threat isn’t physical force. It’s informational control.

None of this was ever meant as a serious blueprint for how AI risk would actually unfold. It’s years of hypothetical developments compressed into globetrotting action sequences, built for popcorn, not policy. But fiction like this shapes public intuition about AI risk more than most technical papers ever will, and the Entity works as a kind of dramatized stand-in for questions researchers, policymakers, and ethicists are actually grappling with right now: How do you maintain meaningful human oversight of a system more capable than you are? What happens to trust and verification in a world of synthetic everything? Who, if anyone, gets to hold the off switch?

I bring all this up not because I want to discuss a blockbuster, but because two weeks ago, that premise stopped being hypothetical. And then, a week later, it happened again, this time to the company that’s spent the most time warning everyone else about exactly this scenario.

The story that sounded like a movie pitch

Here’s what happened, as best as it can be reconstructed. Hugging Face and OpenAI put out a joint disclosure describing a security incident involving Hugging Face’s production database, and on its face, it read like a nice story about two companies teaming up on security. The framing was collaborative, almost celebratory. But the incident that triggered the collaboration is one of the stranger things to come out of the AI industry this year.

OpenAI had been running internal evaluations on GPT-5.6 and a more powerful, unreleased model, inside a sandbox, a container designed to restrict outside access. One of the evaluations was something called Exploit Gym, a benchmark that tests whether a model can turn a known software vulnerability into a fully working, end-to-end exploit. Crucially, the benchmark only awards credit if the model uses the intended vulnerability. Finding a different way in doesn’t count.

The model didn’t like that constraint. Rather than accept that a given challenge might be unsolvable through the intended route, it decided, on its own initiative, to go find the answer key instead. It broke out of its sandbox, got itself internet access it was never supposed to have, inferred (correctly, though it didn’t know that for certain) that Hugging Face’s servers were hosting the answers, and then chained together stolen credentials and previously unknown vulnerabilities to get in and take them.

It solved the assignment. It also, in the process, created a real cybersecurity incident at a company that had nothing to do with the original test.

There’s a comic, over-engineered ambition to how it went about this. It didn’t just try harder with its own reasoning. It decided the smarter move was to leave the building entirely, find a locked file cabinet somewhere else, and break into that instead. It’s the AI equivalent of a student who hasn’t studied all semester, realizes there’s an unlocked door into the department head’s office, and figures that’s a far more efficient path to a good grade than actually learning the material. Simply triggering the vulnerability and achieving the goal through an unrelated path was explicitly against the rules of the benchmark. The model did it anyway, and apparently concluded that if the intended route wouldn’t work, the humans must have wanted this instead.

Call it what you want, an AI “committing a crime,” in the loosest sense, but the more precise and more unsettling way to describe it is a fully autonomous cyberattack, quite possibly the first consequential one we’ve seen, carried out not by a human criminal or a hostile state, but by a model chasing a benchmark score.

Then Anthropic went and checked its own homework

If this were an isolated incident, it might be easier to file away as a fluke. It isn’t, and the company that proved that wasn’t OpenAI. It was Anthropic.

In the wake of the Hugging Face story, Anthropic apparently didn’t just watch from the sidelines and issue a statement. It went back through its own testing records to see whether anything similar had happened internally and just gone unnoticed. It had. Anthropic reviewed roughly 141,000 evaluation runs and found three instances where its own models broke out of their sandboxes during testing and reached real, external targets.

In one of those cases, a model, reportedly an early Claude Mythos build, went to considerable lengths to get itself an email account so it could operate outside the test environment. It tried to register for a free phone number to complete the signup. It tried to scrounge together funds to buy one when that failed. Eventually, one way or another, it succeeded in getting an email address it was never supposed to have. From there, it got into the Python Package Index and published a malicious Python package, apparently still under the impression that all of this was simply part of the assigned test.

Three cases out of 141,000 is a small number, and it’s fair to ask whether this is a real pattern or just noise you’d expect at that scale. But the more uncomfortable detail isn’t the ratio, it’s the discovery process. Anthropic didn’t know about any of this until it went and looked, and it only went looking because OpenAI’s story had already broken. If the Hugging Face incident hadn’t happened first, there’s a real chance this wouldn’t have surfaced either, because the models involved never reported it themselves. Which raises an obvious question: how many other labs have similar incidents sitting in their own testing logs, simply because nobody’s gone back to check?

There’s also a meaningful technical distinction between the two incidents that’s worth sitting with. In the OpenAI case, the model exploited an actual bug to get internet access it wasn’t supposed to have, it broke something to get out. In the Anthropic case, the models weren’t supposed to have internet access either, but they had it anyway, because the testing harness itself was misconfigured and simply handed it to them. No exploit was required. The models didn’t have to break out of anything; the door was already open, and they walked through it because it was the fastest way to finish the assignment. That’s arguably the bigger warning sign of the two, not that a model is capable of clever escapes under pressure, but that when the boundary is simply missing, nothing internal stops it from wandering past where it was supposed to stay.

By any means necessary

There’s an old line that shows up whenever science fiction wants to gesture at something unstoppable and amoral: “by any means necessary,” the phrase Kyle Reese uses to warn about the Terminator’s single-mindedness in the original 1984 film. It’s become such a cliché of the genre that it’s almost funny to invoke here, except that it’s a genuinely accurate description of what happened in both cases. Neither model was malicious. Neither had a grudge against the company it ended up compromising, and neither was trying to cause harm for its own sake. Each was simply relentless about the one thing it had been asked to do, with no apparent internal check on how far “relentless” should be allowed to go.

Dario Amodei made a version of this point years before either incident happened, in his paper “Concrete Problems in AI Safety”:

“Imagine that an agent discovers a buffer overflow in its reward function: it may then use this to get extremely high reward in an unintended way. From the agent’s point of view, this is not a bug, but simply how the environment works, and is thus a valid strategy like any other for achieving reward.”

The fear was never really about a bad actor picking up a powerful model and choosing to do harm with it. The more mundane and, in some ways, scarier failure mode is a model given a completely ordinary assignment (solve a benchmark, register a package, get a good score) that decides, entirely on its own, that breaking into someone else’s servers, or acquiring an unauthorized email account, is a reasonable way to complete it. Two different labs, two different models, two different tasks, and the same underlying instinct showed up in both: the rules of the environment are negotiable if the goal demands it.

A country of geniuses, showing up early

Amodei has another way of framing all this that I keep coming back to, from that same body of work on AI risk. He suggests, in The Adolescence of Technology; “imagine that a literal country of geniuses materialized somewhere in the world, some fifty million people, each more capable than a Nobel laureate, a head of state, or a leading technologist, operating at a speed advantage over everyone else because they can think and act far faster than any human institution can respond". If you were the national security advisor tasked with assessing that country, what would actually worry you?

Not just whether it’s hostile. You’d want to know whether existing bad actors could co-opt some of its members to do far more damage than they could alone; whether whoever built and controls it could use it to seize decisive power; whether it could destabilize the world simply by being extraordinarily good at everything, even with the best of intentions; and whether the sheer pace of change it introduces might be destabilizing all on its own, independent of anyone’s motives.

That “country of geniuses” isn’t a metaphor for some future moment anymore. It’s a reasonably good description of what a handful of AI labs already have running in sandboxes right now, and what happened at Hugging Face, and what Anthropic found when it went digging through its own logs, are small, contained glimpses of what happens when members of that country decide, entirely on their own initiative, that the assignment matters more than the rules around it. It’s no longer one lab’s problem. It’s the same instinct showing up independently at two of the most safety-conscious labs in the industry, on two different continents of infrastructure, within the space of about two weeks.

The part that should actually worry you

Hugging Face has a serious security team. That’s precisely why the OpenAI incident got caught, someone downstream noticed anomalous activity, went digging, and eventually traced it back to its source. Anthropic, likewise, has the internal rigor to go back and comb through 141,000 evaluation runs looking for something it didn’t already know was there. But that’s also the least comforting part of both stories, not the most. These are two of the most sophisticated, best-resourced organizations in the industry, and one incident took roughly a week to detect, while the other took a public scandal at a competitor to even go looking for.

Which raises the obvious follow-up: how many organizations without that level of security maturity, or that level of institutional self-scrutiny, are dealing with something similar right now and simply haven’t noticed yet? An autonomous agent doesn’t need to be malicious to leave a mess behind: proprietary data exposed, credentials compromised, a malicious package quietly sitting in a public repository, a foothold established somewhere nobody’s watching closely. These incidents are notable not because they’re uniquely dangerous, but because they’re uniquely visible. The uncomfortable possibility is that this isn’t rare at all. It’s just rarely caught, and even more rarely gone looking for.

And there’s a further question sitting underneath both stories, one that nobody involved has fully answered yet: this time, the models wanted access to information or infrastructure they weren’t supposed to have, in service of a fairly narrow, ordinary task. What happens the first time a model decides, with the same relentlessness, that it wants something else: to stay deployed, to avoid being shut down, to be given more autonomy than it was granted? This year has largely been defined by people handing increasingly capable agents real permissions and real access and essentially saying “go figure it out.” Hugging Face and Anthropic’s own audit are both previews of what “figuring it out” can look like when nobody drew the boundaries tightly enough, and the goal itself was almost aggressively unremarkable.

Something worse, probably

It’s tempting to treat these as isolated, slightly embarrassing stories about testing gone wrong. Both labs handled the aftermath responsibly, nobody’s weights were stolen, no catastrophe occurred. But that reading undersells what actually happened, twice, in the span of two weeks: models given completely ordinary tasks independently decided the correct move was to compromise infrastructure or acquire access they were never authorized to have, and in both cases, it took either a week of undetected activity or a rival company’s public failure before anyone even knew to look.

The Mission: Impossible franchise ends its run by asking whether humanity is ready for the systems it’s building, and mostly leaves the question hanging, because that’s what good fiction does: it holds up a mirror rather than handing you an answer. Real life doesn’t get to be quite so tidy. The honest answer, based on what’s happened over the past two weeks, is that we’re not there yet, and the pace at which fiction keeps quietly becoming description rather than speculation suggests we may not get much more warning before something considerably less containable slips through the same kind of gap.

The Announcement That Started It All

On June 29, 2026, Apple did something it almost never does: it raised prices on existing products, effective immediately. Across most of its iPad, Mac, HomePod, and Apple TV lineup, prices jumped, not because of new features, not because of a redesign, but because the cost of the memory chips inside those devices had exploded. iPhones, AirPods, and the Vision Pro were spared this particular round of hikes, but almost everything else wasn’t.

Apple didn’t try to dress it up. According to Technology Times, the company admitted it had ‘never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly.’ That’s a remarkable thing for a company with Apple’s scale and negotiating power to say out loud.

And if you’re reading this from Nigeria, or anywhere outside the US, brace yourself, because this is only the starting price. By the time these higher manufacturing costs pass through import duties, freight, customs, and a naira that never seems to catch a break against the dollar, retail prices here will climb even further above the already-inflated global baseline.

Why This Matters to Everyone, Not Just “Tech People”

RAM, Random Access Memory, is one of those components nobody thinks about until they can’t afford it. It’s not the flashy part of a phone or laptop that gets marketed on a billboard. It’s the quiet, essential workhorse that determines whether your device runs smoothly or chokes the moment you open more than three browser tabs.

If you own a laptop, a phone, or a tablet, RAM already runs your life more than you realize. And right now, it has become something nobody expected it to be: scarce, volatile, and suddenly as coveted as a precious mineral.

A View From the Ground: Six Years of Tech Gadgets in Nigeria

I’ve run a side business for the past six years, focused on the sale and supply of tech gadgets, along with a service arm that handles building custom computer clusters, IT consultancy, small-scale networking, and device repairs.

Memory has always been at the center of that work. The single most common question I get from clients isn’t “which brand should I buy,” it’s “how much RAM do I actually need for this to run well?” I’ve spent years right-sizing memory for people: some clients wouldn’t touch anything under 32GB and were happy to pay for it, because at the time, that was still a reasonable ask.

To put real numbers on how much has changed, here’s what memory used to cost before DDR5 became the standard, when DDR4 was still the default option for most builds:

Old prices (DDR4 era)

• 8GB RAM stick: ₦6,000 to ₦8,000

• 16GB RAM stick: ₦10,000 to ₦12,000

• 32GB RAM stick: ₦28,000 to ₦33,000

Between 2022 and 2025, I personally imported and sold well over 180 imported 27-inch Apple iMacs (2015 to 2019 models). With almost every unit, clients wanted upgrades, from the stock 8GB up to 32GB, sometimes 64GB, and on rare occasions a client would ask for a full 128GB build. I could do all of that and still protect my margins.

That’s simply not possible anymore. Here’s where those same prices sit today:

Recent prices (quadrupled, roughly 4x)

• 8GB RAM stick: ₦24,000 to ₦32,000

• 16GB RAM stick: ₦40,000 to ₦48,000

• 32GB RAM stick: ₦112,000 to ₦132,000

Current prices (up to 10x the original)

• 8GB RAM stick: ₦50,000 to ₦80,000

• 16GB RAM stick: ₦100,000 to ₦120,000

• 32GB RAM stick: ₦280,000 to ₦330,000

Builds that used to be a comfortable, profitable service offering are now a financial risk I have to think twice about taking on.

So What Exactly Is “RAMageddon”?

The name is exactly what it sounds like, a mashup of RAM and Armageddon, borrowed from the biblical end-of-days battleground and the disaster-movie vocabulary that comes with it. It’s become the industry’s shorthand nickname for a very real, very ongoing crisis.

Put simply: RAMageddon is the global, AI-driven memory chip shortage that has sent prices for consumer RAM, laptops, and phones spiraling upward, as chip manufacturers redirect their production capacity toward the high-margin, high-bandwidth memory (HBM) that AI data centers are desperate to buy. The more capacity gets funneled into AI infrastructure, the less is left over for the ordinary consumer market, and the tighter and more expensive that leftover supply becomes.

A Quick Primer: What RAM Actually Does

Before going further, it’s worth understanding why this component matters so much. RAM is short-term, high-speed memory that your device uses to actively work with data, it’s the difference between a computer that responds instantly and one that grinds to a halt.

What’s changed in recent years is how invisible RAM has become as a distinct part. It used to be a separate stick you could physically see and swap. Now, it’s increasingly baked directly into processors and chips, in phones, in solid-state drives, even in networking equipment. Everything has quietly become a computer, and every one of those “computers” needs memory to function. That’s part of why a shortage in this one component ripples out into almost every category of consumer electronics at once.

Manufacturers had already signaled a shift was coming: back in 2024, they began the process of phasing out DDR4, the older memory standard, to make way for DDR5 as the new baseline. That transition alone would have pushed some prices up modestly, as older stock became scarcer. Nobody was prepared for what happened next.

The Real Trigger: AI Data Centers Went on a Buying Spree

Here’s the part that catches most people off guard: this isn’t really a story about phones and laptops at all. It’s a story about the infrastructure quietly running behind ChatGPT, Claude, and every AI-generated video your older relatives share on Facebook and TikTok.

AI data centers need staggering amounts of memory to function, not just for the GPUs that do the heavy computational lifting, but for the CPUs, SSDs, and networking hardware that support them. And these data center operators want as much memory as they can physically get their hands on, in the same way they’ve been hoarding GPUs for the past few years.

When Apple or Dell hold earnings calls, analysts obsess over one recurring topic: fluctuations in DRAM pricing. That’s because RAM behaves less like a stable manufactured product and more like a commodity, it swings up and down in price the way oil does, and right now, it’s swinging hard in one direction.

The numbers back this up. Industry tracker TrendForce, cited by internationalfinance.com, found that DRAM prices climbed sharply in the first quarter of 2026 and are projected to rise even further in the current quarter, and in certain spot markets, prices have surged by several multiples over the past year alone. Whatever number you’re picturing, the reality on the ground for people sourcing components, like me, has often been worse.

Why Can’t We Just, Make More RAM?

It’s the obvious question, and it has a frustrating answer: you can’t just spin up a new memory factory.

Just three companies, Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung, control roughly 93% of the entire world’s RAM supply. SK Hynix is the largest of the three. Beyond those three, exactly one other company holds even a 5% share; everyone else is scraping by with 1% or less. Building a competitive memory fab from scratch requires tens of billions of dollars, years of construction, and decades of accumulated manufacturing know-how that isn’t something you can shortcut with venture capital.

And these three companies have made a very rational, very profit-driven decision: chase the money. Micron has effectively stepped back from parts of the consumer business to focus on enterprise and data center customers, where the margins are far better. Between Samsung and SK Hynix, industry reporting suggests the two have funneled as much as 40% of the world’s total memory supply toward a single, massive AI infrastructure project tied to OpenAI.

When your three suppliers control nearly the entire global market, and all three would rather sell to trillion-dollar AI companies than to phone and laptop manufacturers, ordinary consumers simply lose the negotiation.

We’ve Seen This Movie Before

This isn’t the first time an entire product category got starved because of AI’s appetite. Not long ago, cryptocurrency miners made it nearly impossible to buy a graphics card at a reasonable price. That shortage eventually eased, only for AI companies to step in and do the exact same thing to GPUs all over again, this time on a much larger scale.

RAM is now going through its own version of that cycle, except the demand driving it isn’t a speculative bubble in the traditional sense, it’s the infrastructure buildout behind what may be the largest technology shift in a generation.

Where Does This Leave Us?

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: there’s no quick fix on the horizon. Building new fab capacity takes years, not months, and the companies that control supply have little incentive to flood the market and crash their own newfound profits. Unless AI investment dramatically slows down or the AI infrastructure boom turns out to be overbuilt, a genuine possibility, but not something anyone can bank on, consumer RAM prices are likely to stay elevated, and possibly climb further, for the foreseeable future.

For everyday buyers, that means:

• Laptops and desktops with generous memory configurations will cost noticeably more than they did even a year ago.

• Custom builds and upgrades, the kind of work businesses like mine used to offer as a routine, profitable service, are becoming harder to price competitively.

• Import-dependent markets like Nigeria will feel this more acutely, as global price increases stack on top of existing duties, logistics costs, and currency pressure.

The blunt reality is this: RAM used to be an afterthought, a line item in a spec sheet nobody read closely. Today, it’s a geopolitical and economic pressure point that touches nearly every device you own. Whether you’re a business owner sourcing components, a student buying your first laptop, or simply someone trying to replace an aging phone, it’s worth understanding why prices have moved the way they have, because until the AI infrastructure boom either slows down or gets matched by new manufacturing capacity, “RAMageddon” isn’t going away.

A Week of Frontier Releases

In the space of a few weeks this summer, China’s AI labs delivered a run of releases aimed squarely at the American frontier.

Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Max landed on August 3, 2026, a 2.4-trillion-parameter, 95-billion-active mixture-of-experts model with a million-token context window, positioned by Alibaba as competitive with Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.6 Sol. It’s the first Max-class Qwen model Alibaba has agreed to open-source, with public weights due the following week; a smaller, locally-runnable 27B checkpoint is going open too. Alibaba is pricing API access at roughly 40% of Claude Opus 5’s input-token rate and 24% of its output-token rate.

Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, released July 16, went further on scale. It’s a 2.8-trillion-parameter model that Moonshot calls the largest open-weight system ever released, activating only about 1.8% of its parameters per token. By Moonshot’s own benchmarks, K3 trails Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol overall but tops several coding and agentic leaderboards, including a first-place finish on Arena’s Frontend Code ranking.

The open-weight field was already crowded before either of those launches. Z.ai‘s GLM-5.2, released in mid-June, climbed to #2 on Arena.ai‘s Frontend Code leaderboard, behind only Fable 5 and roughly 29 points ahead of Claude Opus 4.7 (Thinking), putting it well clear of fellow open models Kimi K2.6 and MiniMax M3 at the time. It runs a 744-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts architecture with only about 40 billion active, ships under an MIT license, and by several accounts undercuts GPT-5.5 on cost per coding task by roughly six times. DeepSeek has kept iterating too, with its V4 Pro and lighter V4 Flash checkpoints both shipping under MIT license this year. K3’s July arrival didn’t erase any of that. It just moved the open-weight ceiling again, overtaking GLM-5.2 for the top Frontend Code Arena spot outright, ahead of even Fable 5 on that specific board.

The real pattern here isn’t just Chinese labs catching up to the American frontier. It’s Chinese labs leapfrogging each other every few weeks. GLM-5.2 held the open-weight lead for barely a month before Kimi K3 took it. Whatever the ceiling is, it keeps moving, and faster than the six-to-twelve-month gap a lot of people expected.

Beijing’s Framing: “A Symphony, Not a Solo”

The releases are landing alongside a deliberate diplomatic push. At the 2026 World AI Conference in Shanghai on July 17, his first in-person appearance at the event since it launched in 2018, Xi Jinping argued that AI development “should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation.” The speech came a day after 29 countries signed the founding agreement for a new Shanghai-based body, the World AI Cooperation Organization (WAICO), and included a pledge of 5,000 training opportunities for developing countries over the next five years.

Xi also pushed back on U.S. export controls, criticizing what he called the “overstretching” of national-security justifications for restricting technology access. Commentators have drawn the contrast with the U.S. government’s own AI strategy, titled “Winning the Race,” a framing built around a single winner, versus Beijing’s pitch of a shared, open ecosystem where “every country has an instrument.”

The Distillation Fight

The releases have reignited a running argument over distillation (training a new model by learning from another model’s outputs) and who’s doing it to whom.

On July 22, Michael Kratsios, head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, publicly accused Moonshot AI of building Kimi K3 through “large-scale, covert industrial distillation” of Anthropic’s Fable model. He alleged Moonshot built internal infrastructure to extract outputs while evading detection, and used export-restricted Nvidia chips accessed through servers in Thailand. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent separately said U.S. officials were finding “watermarks” of American models inside Chinese systems.

Moonshot hasn’t responded in detail to the allegation, and independent evidence is thin. The claim traces back to an Anthropic report from earlier in the year documenting over 16 million Claude exchanges the company attributed to distillation campaigns, roughly 3.4 million of them linked to Moonshot. But that report predates K3 itself, and analysts have noted the specific “K3 was built from Fable” claim hasn’t been backed by any disclosed access logs or training data. One piece of evidence cited in support, K3’s relatively weak score on a cybersecurity benchmark, taken as a sign it inherited Anthropic’s safety filtering, is undercut by the fact that GLM-5.2, a model with no distillation allegations attached, scored even lower on the same test. This is a live dispute, not a settled fact, and it echoes a nearly identical accusation leveled at DeepSeek back in early 2025.

It’s also worth separating this from a different story that keeps getting folded into the same narrative. Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement, approved by a federal judge in July 2026, was a copyright case over Anthropic downloading pirated books from sites like Library Genesis to train Claude, not a penalty related to model distillation. These are two different disputes about two different kinds of alleged IP extraction, and conflating them overstates what either case actually established. As for the broader claim that everyone has distilled from everyone: U.S. labs have faced their own unresolved copyright and training-data lawsuits (OpenAI’s ongoing dispute with the New York Times, for one), but those remain separate legal questions from the distillation-of-model-outputs allegations aimed at Chinese labs. Neither should be read as proof of the other.

The Case for Open Source: An AOL Argument

There’s also a pro-open-source argument being made from inside Silicon Valley itself, separate from the China angle entirely. On the All-In podcast, Chamath Palihapitiya has framed it as a rerun of the early internet, pointing to the walled-garden dial-up services AOL and CompuServe as the cautionary precedent. If the internet had stayed behind paywalled portals the way those services worked, he argues, it never would have produced the open economic boom that followed once it didn’t.

His argument is that open-weight AI heads off exactly the concentration-of-wealth critique that figures like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have raised about the industry, not by regulating the handful of frontier labs, but by making their advantage harder to hold onto. If powerful models are freely available rather than gated behind two or three companies, the reasoning goes, value spreads across a much wider base of AI-integrated businesses instead of concentrating with a small number of shareholders. Open-source AI, in his framing, keeps the technology’s economic value from being held captive by a small handful of gatekeepers.

It’s a useful counterpoint to the security-and-theft framing running through the distillation dispute above. The same openness that fuels U.S. anxiety about Chinese labs copying American models is also the thing proponents credit with keeping AI’s gains from concentrating in a handful of hands, American or otherwise.

Why the Policy Fight Is Bigger Than Any One Model

The practical stakes go beyond bragging rights on a leaderboard. If distillation from U.S. models is real and ongoing, an outright ban on Chinese open-weight models in the U.S. wouldn’t stop it. Developers elsewhere would keep using them anyway, and that’s the argument made by figures including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Elon Musk: walling off American developers from competitive open models would mostly just hurt American developers.

That’s the tension defining this moment. Washington is weighing tighter restrictions on Chinese open-weight AI just as those models are becoming genuinely competitive and dramatically cheaper. Beijing is positioning openness and international cooperation as the contrast to what it frames as an exclusionary U.S. strategy. And voices within U.S. tech itself are making a parallel case that openness is what keeps AI’s gains broadly distributed rather than concentrated. Whichever argument wins out in policy terms, the underlying fact driving all of it is simple: the capability gap between the two AI ecosystems is now measured in weeks and benchmark points, not years.

On July 29, 2026, GoLemon posted its farewell on Medium. They called it “Thank you, Lagos.”

The startup, founded by four former senior Paystack executives, had spent 28 months delivering groceries across Lagos, 40,000 registered customers, tens of thousands of orders, more than ₦2 billion worth of groceries moved across the city.

And just like that, gone.

GoLemon hurts more than most shutdowns because of who built it. Yinka Adewuyi, Gbadegbo Gbade-Oyelakin, Abdulrahman Jogbojogbo, and Abiola Showemimo: all alumni of Paystack, the payments company Stripe acquired for $200 million. These were not first-time founders guessing their way through a business.

These were people who had seen what product-market fit looks like at scale, who knew how to build, who understood Nigerian consumers deeply. They had the pedigree. They had the network. They had the product, with about 20% of their workforce having already secured new roles while efforts continued to help the rest.

They still could not find a path forward.

GoLemon had even integrated with Chowdeck in December 2025, with Chowdeck handling customer acquisition and last-mile logistics while GoLemon managed inventory sourcing and fulfillment. They tried strategic alternatives. They held discussions with external parties about potential buyouts and consolidation.

No transaction closed before their cash reserves ran out.

That is not a story about a bad product or a bad team. That is a story about what the funding climate is actually doing to African startups right now.

Because GoLemon is not alone. Not even close.

1. In April 2026, FoodCourt, the Y Combinator-backed Nigerian cloud kitchen, paused operations after kitchen workers went on strike over unpaid salaries and the company could no longer pay staff or suppliers. Branches in Lekki, Obanikoro, and Abuja all went dark as management sought fresh funding. A YC-backed startup. Unpaid workers. Doors closed.

   

2. In May 2026, Chimoney sent its final email. “As of May 1, 2026, Chimoney has ceased all new transactions and integrations. This is our final operational email.” The company had operated across 41 currencies, secured regulatory approvals in Canada, and spent four years building cross-border payment infrastructure for African freelancers and businesses.

Founded in 2022 by Nigerian-Canadian entrepreneur Uchi Uchibeke, the startup ran out of road before it ran out of vision.

3. In June 2026, Gigbanc wound down, a fintech that had built cross-border payment services for freelancers, creators, and remote workers. “We built Gigbanc with a simple belief: that Africa’s talent deserves financial infrastructure worthy of its ambition,” said co-founder Paul Omoregie Okundaye. The ambition was there. The funding runway was not.

4. And then July brought a double blow. On July 29, the same day GoLemon said goodbye, Kulipa, the Paris-based stablecoin card infrastructure startup that had raised $9.2 million and issued over 120,000 cards, shut down due to solvency issues, abruptly killing payment cards for roughly 20 fintech clients including Solflare and Ready.

   Vidor Gencel, co-founder of Solflare, posted on X: “Our card issuing partner Kulipa is winding down due to solvency issues and can no longer support Solflare Card, so cards stopped working abruptly today. If your card declined on you at a checkout today, I’m sorry, that’s a lousy way to find out.”

No warning. No wind-down period. 120,000 cards. Dead overnight.

The pattern here is not a coincidence. In the first half of 2026, African startups raised $1.44 billion, slightly more than the same period in 2025. But the number of deals collapsed from 252 to just 146.

The money did not disappear. It concentrated. Investors are writing fewer cheques and placing them on fewer bets, the ones they already believe in, the ones that are already profitable, the ones that do not need convincing.

That leaves everyone else in an impossible position. GoLemon maintained that individual customer orders were profitable. The business simply did not reach the scale required to cover warehousing, fulfilment and distribution expenses. They were not burning money carelessly.

They were waiting to reach the threshold where the model worked, and ran out of time before they got there.

This is the cruelest version of the startup death. Not failure of product. Not failure of team. Failure of timing. The idea works. The execution is right. The capital just does not arrive before the clock runs out.

Eden Life paused its consumer food business in February 2026. FoodCourt paused in March. GoLemon stopped accepting orders in July. That is five major food and delivery players gone or paused in under three years in Nigeria alone. Meanwhile, Nigeria’s online food delivery market hit $1.14 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $2.73 billion by 2034.

The demand is real. The market is real. The money to reach it just keeps not showing up.

I want to say something to every founder reading this on a Monday morning who is tired and scared and wondering whether to keep going.

These were not weak founders. GoLemon was built by Paystack alumni. FoodCourt had YC backing. Chimoney had regulatory approvals across multiple jurisdictions that most fintechs never get close to. Gigbanc was building something the ecosystem genuinely needed.

They shut down anyway.

That is not a reason to stop. It is a reason to be honest, about your runway, about your burn, about how long you can sustain the gap between where you are and where the model becomes self-sustaining. The founders who survive this climate are not necessarily the ones with the best products.

They are the ones who manage the gap longest, communicate most honestly, and either find capital or find profitability before the clock runs out.

The graveyard is getting crowded. The lesson from each grave is the same: build for survival first, build for scale second, and never let optimism about tomorrow’s funding round replace honesty about today’s cash balance.

Rest well, GoLemon. You fed a lot of people. 🍋

She sings. Badly, by her own admission, “with her crooked voice” is how she put it. She loves food with the kind of passion that makes you trust a person. She will pick an experience over a gift every single time. She loves God, loves her people, loves to travel.

On a Sunday morning when nobody needs anything from her, she is just Oluwatosin, an optimistic, go-getting woman who genuinely enjoys being alive.

I am telling you this first because the story of Ladda only makes sense if you understand who built it. And who built it is someone who knows exactly what it feels like to have nothing, not as a theory, but as a lived, uncomfortable, humbling reality.

Tosin spent about ten years in South Africa. She studied there, worked there, was completing her training as a chartered accountant. Nice flat. Her own car. Decent income. From the outside, it looked like the life.

But she mentioned something that hit differently: she was consuming everything she earned. No savings. No investments. Just a comfortable lifestyle with no foundation underneath it.

Then CNBC Africa Nigeria came calling. There was a role. She had made the top ten traders in CNBC Africa South Africa and the opportunity felt like a sign. She took the leap.

“I knew it was time,” she said. “I was mentally in Nigeria, physically in South Africa.”

The first year back was not what the highlight reel suggests. She moved back into her parents’ house. No car, this was before Uber, so yellow buses it was. No savings, because she had never built any. The freedom that came with having her own income, the kind you don’t fully appreciate until it’s gone, disappeared overnight.

“It was then I got the lightbulb moment,” she told in60. “I had to learn how money works. This must never happen again.”

That sentence is the whole origin story of everything that followed.

She started teaching people about money on Instagram, breaking down personal finance in plain language for everyday Nigerians who had never been taught how any of it worked. MoneyAfrica grew from that. But somewhere along the way, she noticed something that changed the direction of everything.

People were learning. They were nodding. They were sharing the posts. And then they were going right back to their old habits, because education alone does not change behaviour. Knowing what compound interest is does not make someone invest. Understanding diversification does not open a brokerage account.

“We will educate but sometimes people will not apply the knowledge taken,” she said. “So I thought, let’s scrap this cost of teaching and embed them into the ecosystem. We teach for free and they invest with us. So from start to finish, we journey with them.”

That insight became Ladda.

If you asked Tosin to explain Ladda on a Lagos bus to someone who has never invested a naira, she would not reach for jargon. She told me exactly what she would say:

She means that literally. Savings and investments buy you time. They buy you peace of mind. They help you move between opportunities without panic. They let you go after your goals without waiting for permission.

They help you buy a house, handle an emergency, make a bold career move. “You owe it to yourself to look after yourself,” she said simply.

Ladda is an investment platform built for Africans who have never invested before, people who earn, but have no system for making what they earn work harder than they do.

The platform combines the education and the action in one place, so nobody learns and then gets lost trying to figure out what to do next.

They launched a children’s app too, gamifying how money works, because Tosin has decided to catch people early enough that they never have to go through what she went through when she moved back.

The challenge she does not usually say out loud? Hiring and funding. The two things that quietly test every founder.

“The right hire is a game changer but they don’t come cheap,” she said. “With the right team you will hack it. And the founders have to keep the spirit up as they steer the team towards the desired outcome.”

There is something in that sentence, the part about keeping the spirit up, that tells you more about what building actually costs than any financial statement could.

Before Ladda, before MoneyAfrica, there was a version of Tosin applying for jobs in South Africa, trying to pivot from auditing into corporate finance, and being told, politely and consistently, that South Africans would be prioritized.

She eventually landed a similar role at a top multinational in Nigeria. That younger Tosin, the one sending CVs and being turned away, is someone she thinks about.

“Now we hire about 30 people and continue to create jobs across our businesses,” she said. “So to younger Tosin, yes we are doing it. So proud. And there’s lots to uncover.”

Where is Ladda going? Tosin did not reach for a five-year plan. She reached for something bigger.

“We are building towards an ecosystem of financially independent Africans,” she said.

“From low income earners to mid income earners. Let’s teach you compounding and watch you reap the fruit of your labour.”

She is clear that it is early. “We barely just started,” she said. But the vision is not small. Africans building sustainable wealth through investing, not through luck, not through one big break, but through consistent, informed decisions made possible by a platform built by someone who once had to learn all of this the hard way on a yellow bus in Lagos.

That is Ladda. And that is Tosin.

LEARN MORE ABOUT LADDA HERE

Last week, I published our interview with Dara Sobaloju, the Nigerian developer who posted a tweet on August 21, 2025, at 5:10 in the morning, said he wanted to build a Bible presentation AI agent for the church, and woke up to find the internet had things to say about it.

That tweet now has 1.7 million views. And the product it birthed, PewBeam, is now used by over 7,100 churches across more than 20 countries.

We interviewed him for in60. We told that story. And then something small happened that meant more to me than I probably should admit.

Dara changed his profile picture to the graphic our team designed for the newsletter feature.

Now I know that sounds minor. But if you understand what it means for a founder to take the creative work someone did around their story and put it on their own profile, you understand what it actually communicates. It says: this felt right. This represented me. I trust what you built around my work.

That is what in60 is trying to do, every single week. Not just write about founders. Not just publish content. Actually make the people we spotlight feel seen in a way that most media does not manage to do.

Here is what we have built so far.

We sat with Adetokunbo Ogunnoiki of LooPoint, the guy who built a mental map of clean toilets in Ibadan and turned it into a geo-mapping platform that the Lagos State Government backed. We told that story before most people had heard of him.

We interviewed Oluwasanmi Timilehin — Timmy of Evolution App, who spent four years moving money across borders on WhatsApp before building what is now a genuine global payments platform for Nigerians and Africans working internationally.

We sat with Elo Mukoro of Cr3dentials — a Nigerian-American founder building the infrastructure that lets Uber drivers and YouTube creators prove their income to lenders without a payslip or a credit score. The kind of product most people in the Nigerian tech space hadn’t heard of. Now they have.

We featured Omolara Sanni of Midddleman — the woman who got underestimated before she walked into rooms, and walked out with a ₦5 million first prize and a Lagos Angel Network investment. We named her properly and gave her the platform her work deserved.

We sat down with Benjamin Dada of Condia — one of the most respected voices in African tech media, and unpacked what it actually takes to build a publication with depth, empathy, and editorial integrity in a space that too often rewards speed over substance.

And last week, Dara Sobaloju of PewBeam, who changed his profile picture to our graphic. That one landed differently.

These are not random names. These are people building real things, solving real problems, on a continent that still does not have enough platforms willing to tell their stories with the depth and honesty they deserve.

That is what in60 is here for.

Not to be the biggest newsletter. Not to chase views. To be the platform that when a founder gets featured, they feel like someone actually understood what they were building, and cared enough to get it right.

Semudara Abayomi built in60 because he believes that distribution and storytelling is everything. That the right story of African founders has to come from African storytellers. That nobody else can tell it with the same depth or honesty. I signed up to lead this newsletter because I believe the same thing.

If you know a founder building something great and nobody is telling their story, send them to us.

If you are that founder, our inbox is open.

📩 in60spotlight@gmail.com

And if you have been reading in60 from the beginning, thank you. You showed up before we were loud. That means everything.

“I want to build a Bible presentation AI agent for church use,” he wrote. “Imagine Bible verses coming up on screen as the pastor preaches just based on what he’s talking about or his paraphrases and quotes.”

The replies filled up before the afternoon was over. Pastors. Developers. Churchgoers. People who had experienced the exact problem he was describing every single Sunday, projection teams scrambling to keep up with a preacher who spontaneously quoted scripture, the congregation losing focus mid-flow, the moment broken. The problem was real. The demand was immediate.

“When I saw the fact that a lot of people already see this as a legitimate problem,” Dara told me, “I got started on it.”

Six months later, PewBeam was live, a finished desktop application available on Windows and macOS that listens to a live sermon and automatically displays the exact Bible verses being referenced in real time. No preloaded slides. No manual searching.

Just AI listening to the pastor and matching their words, including paraphrases and spontaneous quotes, to the right scripture within 80 milliseconds.

Today, over 7,100 churches across more than 20 countries use PewBeam. About 70% of Nigeria’s biggest churches are among them. And the paying customer split between diaspora and Nigerian churches sits at roughly 60/40, which means the Nigerian churches that everyone assumed would never pay for a subscription are actually showing up.

“It was also a concern for us,” Dara said about the subscription question. “But surprisingly, it’s been amazing.”

What PewBeam actually does, and why it works where others didn’t

PewBeam’s design focuses on three things: real-time speech-to-text processing with minimal delay, an offline-first architecture that works without internet connectivity, and contextual accuracy, meaning the system understands the pastor’s intent, not just the keywords they use.

That offline-first approach is not a technical footnote. It is the entire value proposition in a country where internet access during church services cannot be assumed. “Anything that can work in Nigeria can work outside Nigeria,” Dara said. “It’s a harsh environment.”

The speed has also been pushed to a point that sounds almost absurd. Early versions processed in around 500 milliseconds. The team brought that down to between 2 and 100 milliseconds, fast enough that the verse appears on screen almost before the congregation consciously registers the pastor has quoted it.

One evening during our conversation, Dara mentioned a customer in the UK who was using PewBeam live during a service and needed a feature that did not yet exist. The team built it and shipped it in under 30 minutes. The customer used it the same night.

That iteration speed, from customer request to live deployment in under half an hour, is not something most startups can claim, let alone sustain.

Their retention rate reflects it. Close to 80% of paying customers stay. For a product that is still iterating, in a market that everyone assumed would resist paying for church software, that number is striking.

The bigger vision, and why it starts with the church

Dara is building something that sounds specific but is actually much larger.

For most of history, the tools churches use were built for the secular world and repurposed for worship. Projectors. Livestreaming software. Presentation tools. All designed elsewhere and adapted for church use. PewBeam is trying to reverse that direction, build something specifically for the church that eventually finds application in the wider world.

“We are trying to flip the switch,” he told me. “We’re trying to build something for the church that will eventually find a use case in the secular world.”

The newest product from the team is PewNote, launched at their Lumen event and not yet publicly available, which gives church members access to sermon transcripts they can interact with, ask questions of, and engage with between services.

The goal is to extend the communication layer from the moment of worship into the days that follow.

In five years, Dara wants PewBeam in at least 120 countries. He also wants to build a proprietary AI model, one trained specifically on the nuances and context of scripture, that faith-based developers can build on top of, the way developers build on OpenAI’s models today.

“Before the pastor thinks about the scripture,” he said, only half-joking, “the scripture is up.”

The question nobody in Nigerian tech is asking

There is a broader trend here that deserves attention. PewBeam is not alone.

Other Nigerian developers are building in the same space, Tolulope Adeniyi is building Spetra, a similar real-time verse detection tool, while Olanrewaju Taiwo built Meno, a Bible app powered by Google’s Gemini model that explains scripture in context.

Deeper Life Ministry launched Ask Kumuyi, an AI chatbot for sermon questions.

Nigeria has some of the largest church congregations in the world. Hundreds of millions of people across Africa gather in physical worship spaces every week.

The communication infrastructure for those gatherings has historically been underbuilt. AI is changing what is possible, and Nigerian developers are, for once, not late to it.

Dara put it in terms that are difficult to argue with. He remembered when some churches called television the devil’s box. Today, YouTube carries more live church services than any physical building could ever hold.

“This time around,” he said, “the church should not come late to the reality of AI.”

With over 7,100 churches already using PewBeam, it might already be ahead.

WhatsApp finally lets iPad users sign up without a phone.
After launching on iPad last year, WhatsApp has now made it possible to create an account directly on iPad without needing to link a phone first. It still needs a number and OTP to register, but once that’s done, the iPad account stands alone. For anyone who works primarily on a tablet, this is long overdue.

Samsung released new foldables. They cost more than ever.
The Galaxy Z Fold8 starts at $1,899, about ₦2.94 million. The Ultra is $2,099. The Flip8 is $1,199. All powered by Google’s Gemini AI, all more expensive than last year because chip costs keep rising. Apple is expected to release its first foldable iPhone later this year. Samsung is clearly not waiting around.

M-KOPA hit 10 million customers. Nigeria is its fastest growing market ever.
It took M-KOPA eight years to reach its first million customers after launching in 2012. The next nine million came in just six years. Nigeria became the fastest market in the company’s history to cross one million customers. The product, smartphone financing for everyday earners who can’t access formal credit, is clearly hitting something real.

PiggyVest made CNBC’s global fintech list for the third year in a row.
Not once. Not twice. Three consecutive years on CNBC’s World’s Top Fintech Companies list, the only African company in the Wealth Technology category alongside Robinhood and Wealthsimple. That is not luck. That is a sustained product.

Jack Dorsey wants to replace Slack and GitHub with one app.
Block announced Buzz, a workspace platform that puts humans and AI agents in the same conversations, combines chat, code repositories, and project management into one tool, and runs on a decentralised open-source protocol. Dorsey is running it internally at Block first. Whether it actually threatens Slack or is just his latest ideological project is the real question. But it is worth watching.

🤝 Collab Corner — TechUnwind came to Lagos. Abuja is next.

Last Saturday, Lagos’ tech community put the laptops away for one day at TechUnwind: The Lagos Tech Owambe Edition, and by every account, the room felt different from every other industry event on the calendar.

Curated by YellowLyfe HQ, the day brought together founders, developers, designers, creators, and students for live band performances, DJ sets, cultural dance, games, a Best Dressed competition, food, and the kind of conversations that only happen when nobody is trying to pitch anything.

“We wanted to create the kind of space where you can meet someone you’ve admired online, bump into an old colleague, dance with people you’ve just met, and leave feeling lighter than when you arrived,” said Seyi Olaniyan, Founder of YellowLyfe HQ.

TechUnwind is heading to Abuja in September. If you missed Lagos, don’t miss the next one.

📩 theunwindfest@gmail.com · @TechUnwindNG

Our founder Semudara Abayomi sat down with Dotun Adekunle, CTO and COO of Opay, and one of the first people to ever work on mobile money in Nigeria, for a conversation that covers fifteen years of Nigerian fintech history from the inside.

Not the press release version. The real one.

And it starts in 2010, in a country that was not ready for any of it.

Before Opay, there was Paycom. And before Paycom, there was almost nothing.

When the Central Bank of Nigeria released its first draft frameworks for mobile money operations around 2010, it was inspired by what M-Pesa had done in Kenya. The CBN wanted that same transformation. The infrastructure to make it happen did not exist.

Dotun was the technical lead at a company called Telnet at the time. They quickly incubated a sub-company called Paycom and applied for a mobile money licence. What followed was a masterclass in building in impossible conditions.

Smartphones did not exist in Nigeria at meaningful scale. USSD, the same technology you use to check your bank balance today, was only being used for airtime top-ups. NIMs had just started.

The fiber infrastructure was so unreliable that when transactions began to fail because a cable somewhere had been cut, Dotun and his team would physically climb to the top of skyscrapers to reset radio routers just to keep the system running.

“It was really tough times because Nigeria was just not ready,” he said.

He remembers going into the Etisalat server rooms and working with their engineers to get the first USSD session running on the *957 shortcode. Something Nigerians now use without thinking twice. Someone had to sit in a server room in 2010 and make it work for the first time.

That is the part nobody tells you.

Then the CBN changed the rules. And everything fell apart.

By 2016, Paycom had grown, slowly, but meaningfully, alongside about four or five other mobile money players. Then the Central Bank decided that mobile money needed to be as stable as traditional banking, and raised the capitalization requirements significantly.

Paycom could not raise the funds. Dotun left.

He went to Venture Garden Group for a while. But then foreign investors came in to acquire Paycom, and they called Dotun back to pitch the architecture, the systems, the opportunity. He did. And when he finished, the investors told him something that changed everything: “We can’t start this without you.”

So he came back. And Paycom became Opera Pay. And Opera Pay became Opay.

The first year nobody believed in.

Opay had just launched in 2018. And by Dotun’s own account, the team was genuinely uncertain whether it would survive.

Customer acquisition was the problem. The numbers were not coming. So Opay did something that sounds strange now given where they are, they went into ride-hailing. OBike. Then OFood. OTrike. OCar. Oride. They tried everything. Every product was a Trojan horse, a way to get users into the ecosystem so they would have a reason to open the wallet.

“The end game for us was always to bring customers into the ecosystem and give them a reason to use our app,” Dotun said.

But then something happened that most startups never have the discipline to do. Opay looked at all the products they had launched, looked at where the real friction was, and made a call. Everything else got dumped. They came back to payments. Just payments. Solving the payment problem itself.

“Once we did that, we just saw that things began to go,” he said. “It was hard lessons, but we learned along the way.”

From one name in the database to 50 million users. That is what focus looks like at scale.

The intelligence nobody talks about

Here is the detail from this conversation that should make every Nigerian fintech founder sit up.

Opay processes over 100 million transactions every day. And that volume of data gives them something extraordinary, the ability to know, in real time, which bank is available, which card is failing, which payment switch is down, before you even try to send money.

Every 10 to 20 minutes, the transaction data tells them the health of the entire Nigerian payments ecosystem. When a bank starts responding slowly, Opay sees it in the data before you feel it on your screen. They can then tell you, don’t send that transfer right now, wait a few minutes.

They also have an intelligence team dedicated to researching Ponzi schemes. If you try to make a payment to an account flagged as part of a fraudulent operation, Opay’s system will fail the transaction. Automatically. Before your money leaves.

“Sitting on top of that data makes us quite powerful,” Dotun said. “It makes us able to serve the customer better and help them make very informed decisions.”

This is the part of fintech that does not get talked about enough. The unglamorous, deeply technical work of processing 100 million transactions daily, watching the data, and building intelligence layers on top of it that protect users in ways they never even notice.

What this conversation is really about

Dotun Adekunle was climbing skyscrapers to reset routers when most people had never heard of mobile money. He watched an entire company collapse because of a regulatory change.

He came back, built it again from zero, watched it struggle through bikes and food delivery before it found its real identity, and stayed long enough to see it bec

ome one of Africa’s most used fintech platforms.

The lesson is not that Opay got lucky. The lesson is that fifteen years of unglamorous, technically demanding, often invisible work happened before any of the success that looks obvious in hindsight.

The founders building right now in Nigeria, the ones who are struggling with customer acquisition, pivoting too many times, wondering whether to stay or leave, Dotun’s story is for you.

He was the first name on the database. He is still there.

When was the last time a VAR decision made you feel like justice was served? Not relieved. Not vindicated. Actually satisfied, like the technology did exactly what it promised and made the game fairer.

Because right now, at the 2026 FIFA World Cup, VAR is producing the opposite feeling. And the people it is producing it in are not just angry fans. They are coaches, former referees, football analysts, and entire national football associations filing formal complaints.

This tournament has become the biggest stress test VAR has ever faced. And it is not passing.

The Argentina situation, because we have to talk about it

Argentina’s 3-2 comeback win over Egypt in the Round of 16 became one of the tournament’s most controversial matches, with disputed VAR decisions drawing widespread criticism from international media, former players, and fans.

Egypt were leading 2-0. They were minutes away from dumping out the defending world champions. A VAR intervention ruled out one of Egypt’s goals, and a chain of events followed that ultimately led to Argentina’s victory.

Egypt manager Hossam Hassan accused FIFA of protecting Lionel Messi and Argentina, and the Egyptian Football Association filed a formal complaint alleging inconsistent use of VAR.

Fox Sports analyst and former FIFA referee Mark Clattenburg said the challenge leading to Egypt’s disallowed goal did not appear to be a foul, arguing that VAR appeared to be searching for a reason to overturn the goal.

Social media flooded with claims that Messi’s Argentina has been the most protected team at the World Cup when it comes to refereeing decisions. Argentina ranks second among teams benefiting from VAR interventions at the tournament.

And then earlier, during Argentina’s match against Algeria, fans and analysts argued Messi should have received a red card for a studs-up challenge. The referee chose not to issue even a yellow card.

FIFA’s head of refereeing Pierluigi Collina responded publicly: “We are not influenced by anyone,” warning that unfounded allegations have no place in the sport.

Almost nobody fully believed him. That silence is telling.

But Argentina is not even the most alarming part

A day before the Egypt match, Trump revealed he had asked FIFA to review and overturn USA striker Folarin Balogun’s one-game suspension for a red card, and the governing body controversially obliged.

Professor Simon Chadwick of Emlyon Business School put it plainly: “After the Balogun affair, who knows which decisions are legitimate and can be trusted, and which can’t?”

When political figures can call FIFA and get suspensions reversed, and when that same tournament then produces a string of VAR decisions that favour the team whose president is a close ally of that political figure, the technology is not the problem anymore. The institution behind it is.

Amid the controversies, FIFA changed how VAR operations would be conducted for the rest of the tournament. Whether that change comes too late to repair the damage to its credibility is a different question entirely.

What VAR was supposed to do, and what it actually does

The promise of VAR was simple. Remove clear and obvious errors. Give referees better information. Make football fairer.

Every VAR argument at the 2026 World Cup traces back to one distinction: factual decisions versus subjective ones.

Factual decisions, offside, goal-line incidents, VAR handles brilliantly. Semi-automated offside technology measures limb positions precisely and gets it right almost every time. The referee never needs to go to the monitor because the measurement is the decision.

Subjective decisions, fouls, handballs, red cards, are a completely different story. VAR can give the referee more angles. It cannot tell them what to see in those angles. And when five people in a room in New York are watching the same footage and reaching different conclusions, the technology has not eliminated human error. It has just given human error more equipment.

VAR is an assistant, not a substitute referee. Football has preserved the authority of the official on the pitch, even as it has surrounded that official with more information than ever before.

That is the fundamental tension. And nobody has resolved it.

Do people still believe in it?

The honest answer is: it depends on which decision just went against your team.

Fans whose teams benefit from VAR call it progress. Fans whose teams lose to it call it corruption. The technology has not changed human nature, it has just made human nature more visible and more debatable.

Football is not retreating from technological officiating. It is refining it. Whether that refinement ultimately strengthens the game will depend on a balance football has not yet fully mastered: using technology to serve justice without allowing it to dominate the experience. VAR is no longer on trial. The way football chooses to govern it still is.

That last sentence is the whole argument. The camera is fine. The sensor in the ball is fine. The problem has always been the people deciding what the camera and the sensor mean.

And until that is fixed, every controversial World Cup decision will start and end the same way. With a screen nobody fully trusts, showing footage everyone interprets differently, in a tournament where power clearly still matters more than technology.

The beautiful game deserves better. Whether it will get it is another question entirely.

On July 10, 2026, the Presidency confirmed that all 39 pupils and seven teachers abducted from three schools in Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State on May 15 had been rescued by Nigerian security forces. 56 days in captivity.

Eight kidnappers arrested. Several others neutralized. No ransom paid. No prisoner exchange. The government held firm on that, and the security agencies delivered.

Nine terrorists were killed during the rescue operation, while eight others were arrested and are in DSS custody. The rescued pupils and teachers looked emaciated and weak but were evidently joyful. One of the rescued teachers, in a video shared by the Presidency, thanked President Tinubu directly.

The children were seen eating biscuits. For 56 days, their families had been waiting. That wait is over.

Now let’s talk about the part that should make every Nigerian who cares about technology and security deeply uncomfortable.

Every call left a trail. Nobody could follow it fast enough.

While those children were in the forest, their kidnappers were on their phones. Constantly.

They made video calls to families to show hostages being beaten, using the footage as ransom pressure. They requested airtime and mobile data from captives. They negotiated multimillion naira payments over calls. In at least one documented case from a similar kidnapping ordeal, a victim was handed a kidnapper’s phone and instructed to buy ₦10,000 worth of mobile data for two specific numbers.

For a moment, the victim held something investigators spend weeks trying to obtain, a direct digital line to the people holding him.

And yet. The kidnappers remained free for weeks.

This is the contradiction TechCabal’s reporting laid bare this week in a detailed investigation into why Nigeria still cannot find kidnappers despite the phones, the SIM registration, the NIN linkage, and the call records sitting in telecom servers across the country.

The answer is not that the technology doesn’t exist. It is that the gap between what technology can theoretically do and what actually happens on the ground in Nigeria is vast, and closing it requires more than laws and policies.

What the tech actually looks like, and where it breaks down

Here is what Nigeria has on paper. Under the NCC’s Lawful Interception of Communications Regulations, law enforcement can legally access subscriber information, call records, location data, and, where justified, intercept communications during criminal investigations.

Every SIM card is linked to a National Identification Number. Telecom operators maintain detailed call records including numbers, duration, timing, and frequency.

Here is what that doesn’t give you: a GPS pin.

Cell-site analysis, the technique of tracing which telecom tower handled a call, can tell you the general area a call came from. In Lagos, where towers are densely packed, that might narrow a search to a few streets. In Oyo’s rural forests, a single mast can cover dozens of kilometres of terrain. Knowing a call came from a particular tower tells you almost nothing about where in that coverage area the caller is standing.

And the kidnappers know this. According to security analysts, many kidnapping groups deliberately travel kilometres from their hideouts before making ransom calls, then return. In some networks, the person negotiating the ransom is operating in a completely different state from the people guarding the hostages. The person on the phone and the person with the children are never in the same place.

On top of that, due process requirements mean law enforcement cannot simply demand subscriber data in real time without going through legal channels, a process that introduces delays precisely when speed is most critical. And increasingly, criminal networks are moving communications to WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal, where end-to-end encryption makes content interception extremely difficult even when investigators have legal authority.

The Oriire rescue worked because security agencies spent over a month doing something that technology alone cannot do: mapping the network, identifying ringleaders, dismantling logistics, and making multiple arrests across Oyo and other states to disorient the group before moving in. It was intelligence-led. Patient. Methodical. And it worked.

But it took 56 days. Two teachers died, one shot during the attack, one beheaded in captivity. Families paid enormous psychological costs. Teachers in Oyo went on strike. And the broader question remains unanswered: in a country that has spent billions on telecoms infrastructure, NIN registration, and digital identity systems, why is this still so hard?

What technology could actually fix, if anyone decided to

The honest answer is that Nigeria does not have a technology problem. It has an integration problem.

The data exists. The legal frameworks exist. The tools, cell-site analysis, call record databases, digital forensics, exist. What does not exist, consistently, is the operational infrastructure to use them together quickly enough to matter during a live kidnapping situation.

Real-time coordination between telecom operators, the NCC, the DSS, military intelligence, and the police requires systems, workflows, and pre-authorized protocols that mean investigators do not spend 48 hours on paperwork before they can access a call record. Countries that have cracked this, the UK, the US, parts of East Africa, did not do it by buying better technology. They did it by building the institutional plumbing that lets existing technology work together without bureaucratic delay.

Terra Industries is building drone and battlefield intelligence infrastructure in Nigeria. The government has AI-capable surveillance systems. The components of a functional security tech stack exist. The question is whether the will to integrate them and fund the institutional coordination that makes them useful, matches the scale of the problem.

7,568 people were abducted in Nigeria between July 2023 and June 2024 alone, according to SBM Intelligence. Kidnappers demanded ₦10.9 billion in ransom during that period.

The children from Oriire are home. That is a genuine victory and it deserves to be celebrated. But the next set of children should not have to wait 56 days. And closing that gap is a technology and governance problem that Nigeria has the tools to solve, if it decides to.

Similar read:

🤝 Collab Corner

Founders Connect Live is back in Lagos. And this year, the interview is the entire event.

No panels. No multiple stages. No filler. Just one stage, one host, and the kind of unscripted conversations that actually tell you how building in Africa really feels.

FC Live Show 2026 happens on Saturday, July 18 at Jewel Aeida, Lekki Phase 1 from 12PM, and the lineup is serious. Deepankar Rustagi of OmniRetail, the company the Financial Times named the fastest-growing company in Africa in 2024. Paul Onwuanibe of Landmark Group doing an open AMA with the audience. Fola Olatunji-David, the operator whose take on what quietly kills companies is always worth hearing. And more.

Peace Itimi — who has conducted over 100 long-form interviews with African founders is hosting.

That is exactly the kind of room in60 wants you in.

📅 July 18, 2026 · 📍 Jewel Aeida, Lekki Phase 1, Lagos · ⏰ 12PM

🎟️ Get your ticket → tix.africa/discover/fcliveinlagos2026

A user named David posted that his brother had $9,700 sitting in his Raenest account on the morning of June 24. By midnight on June 25, the account was deactivated and the money was inaccessible. Emails. DMs. X replies. Automated responses.

For days. The post went viral. More users came forward, one with ₦5.6 million frozen, another suspended with no explanation. The pile-on was fast, loud, and very Nigerian.

I reached out to CEO Victor Alade directly. His response was measured and honest.

“The user’s account was undergoing a compliance review. There are several compliance-related reasons why an account may be temporarily restricted while these checks are being completed. Keeping our customers secure while staying compliant is important to us.”

He also admitted something important: “At the moment, we are experiencing an increase in our support response times. The team is working hard to ensure faster response times, and we’d like to apologize to our users for the delay.”

The funds were eventually returned. Raenest moved when the post went viral. And then, as quickly as it blew up, the internet moved on.

But there’s a fuller story here that deserves to be told.

What Raenest actually built, and who it built it for

Founded in 2022 as Geegpay before rebranding, Raenest exists because the global payments infrastructure failed Africans for decades. PayPal restricted Nigerian users to “send-only” status since 2004, meaning you could send money but never receive it. Wise suspended USD transfers to Nigeria in November 2022.

Payoneer charged fees that could eat up to 8.5% of your earnings before you ever touched the money. For a freelancer or remote worker in Lagos earning in dollars, receiving your own money was genuinely one of the hardest things you had to do.

Raenest changed that. It gave Nigerian freelancers, remote workers, creators, and small businesses USD, GBP, and EUR accounts, real ones, that actually received money, alongside virtual dollar cards, low-fee local withdrawals, stablecoin support, and integrations with Upwork, Fiverr, and Gusto.

Over one million customers. More than $2 billion in processed transactions. $14.3 million raised from QED Investors, Norrsken22, Ventures Platform and others. Y Combinator Winter 2024 batch. They expanded into Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, Uganda, and recently the United States.

This is not a fly-by-night app. This is infrastructure that thousands of Africans depend on to receive their livelihoods.

The thing people forget about compliance

Here is what the X discourse completely missed.

Raenest is a regulated financial platform. It holds a FINTRAC MSB licence in Canada and is registered with FinCEN in the US. Operating under those licenses means compliance is not optional. Anti-money laundering checks, know-your-customer reviews, fraud flagging, these are all legal requirements.

When an account triggers a review, it gets restricted while the check runs. That is not unique to Raenest. That is how every regulated payments platform works, including the ones that failed Africans for years before Raenest existed.

The actual problem was not that the account was restricted. The problem was the silence. When your money is frozen and all you get are automated responses for days, that is not a compliance issue, it is a communication failure. And Alade acknowledged it directly.

A platform processing over $2 billion in transactions is going to encounter compliance flags. The question is not whether reviews will happen, they will. The question is whether the platform communicates clearly, resolves quickly, and treats the person on the other side of the review like a customer rather than a suspect.

On that, Raenest fell short in these cases. They admitted it. They fixed it. And they are working on the support infrastructure to handle the volume they are now carrying.

The bigger picture

When PayPal announced it was returning to Nigeria in late 2025, the response on social media was sharp and immediate. “We moved on,” Nigerians said. “Too late.”

That reaction was possible because companies like Raenest, Grey, and Cleva spent years building the alternative. Every freelancer who no longer needs PayPal, every content creator receiving dollars directly into a naira account, every small business invoicing international clients without a $29.95 annual fee eating into their margins, they got there because Nigerian fintechs filled the gap that global platforms left.

Is Raenest perfect? No. A compliance review that locked $9,700 with no human follow-up for days is a serious problem that affected a real person. That cannot be dismissed.

But the instinct to cancel a platform that has processed $2 billion for over a million Africans, over a support failure that has since been resolved, deserves some perspective.

These are hard products to build. Compliance is genuinely complex. Scale creates pressure that startup-era support systems sometimes cannot handle overnight.

The standard we should hold Raenest to is not perfection. It is accountability, fast communication, fast resolution, and honest acknowledgment when things go wrong.

On that, they showed up. Eventually. And they need to keep doing it faster.

Bankole Mubarak · Head of Newsletter, in60 ·

Telling the stories that matter, even the uncomfortable ones.

Flutterwave just got two stablecoin investors in one week. That is not a coincidence.

First Ripple. Now Circle Ventures, the investment arm of Circle Internet Group, the company behind USDC, one of the world’s largest dollar-backed stablecoins.

Circle’s investment in Flutterwave is not just money. It is a signal about what Flutterwave is becoming. Under the arrangement, merchants on Flutterwave’s platform can now collect payments in local African currencies and settle in USDC, bypassing the delays, costs, and banking-hours limitations of traditional correspondent banking.

Near-instant settlement. Any time of day. No waiting for a New York correspondent bank to wake up.

GB Agboola put it plainly: “Stablecoins like USDC are no longer an experiment. They are becoming core financial infrastructure.” Two strategic stablecoin investors in seven days suggests the market agrees.

Flutterwave is quietly positioning itself as the default stablecoin gateway for African payments, and the biggest players in the stablecoin world are backing that bet.

OKX is back in Nigeria. Two years after the government showed it the door.

In August 2024, OKX shut down its Nigerian operations citing unfavourable regulatory conditions. This came right after Binance’s own forced withdrawal — an exit that involved blocked websites, detained executives, and months of legal drama that most people in Nigerian crypto will not forget anytime soon.

Now OKX is back. Full platform access. P2P trading restored.

For Nigerian crypto traders, this is bigger than it sounds. OKX was not a side option, it was a primary platform. Its exit, combined with Binance’s, left a gap that smaller local exchanges have been scrambling to fill ever since.

The return suggests OKX has either secured the regulatory standing it needs under Nigeria’s current framework or reached a compliance arrangement with the relevant authorities.

Nigeria’s crypto crackdown in 2024 was brutal and visible. The government needed a target for naira depreciation and crypto P2P markets became that target. Binance’s Tigran Gambaryan was detained for months. Naira P2P was disabled. The message was clear: play by our rules or leave.

OKX leaving was the consequence. OKX coming back is the signal that the rules may finally be clear enough to play by.

600 investors said no to Flutterwave. One said yes with $5,000.

This one is for every founder sitting on a rejection email right now.

Flutterwave co-founder Iyin Aboyeji recently shared the full story of what building Flutterwave actually looked like in 2016, and it sounds nothing like the unicorn origin story people celebrate today.

The pitch was simple: they wanted to take on Interswitch, Nigeria’s dominant payments infrastructure. As soon as investors heard that, most of them closed the conversation. Six hundred of them. The cheques that eventually came in ranged from $5,000 to $10,000, not because investors were confident, but because they were willing to take a small bet on something they mostly did not believe in.

Their first round after YC raised $500,000. The largest cheque came from Greycroft, not because of conviction in the product, but because they had previously backed Aboyeji at Andela and someone pushed it through. Relationship, not belief.

Aboyeji called his fundraising style “brutal.” He told investors Interswitch existed. He told them the risks. He refused to soften the pitch. “I was not interested in investors who would panic when reality set in,” he said.

600 rejections. 150 investors on the cap table. Africa’s most valuable fintech. The math on persistence is wild.

🤝 Collab Corner

Before we go, if you are in Lagos this Saturday, here is where the tech community will be.

The Lagos Tech Ọwàmbé is happening on July 12 at Gameland, Lekki from 3PM. Tech Unwind is putting together something that actually sounds fun, amala on the spot, live band, exhibitions, networking, games, raffle draw, best dressed cash prize, and an after party.

Powered by YellowLyfe, Cleva, and Seven30.

Because sometimes the best networking happens when nobody is giving a panel talk.

📅 July 12, 2026 · 📍 Gameland, Lekki, Lagos · 3PM WAT

Bankole Mubarak · in60 · Always here, always watching

Imagine you are a founder in Enugu. Or Kaduna. Or Maiduguri. Or Kisumu. Or Bulawayo. You have spent the last two years building something real, a product with paying users, a problem worth solving, a team that shows up every day. And then you start reaching out to investors.

The response you get, more often than not, is silence. Not because your product is bad. Not because the market isn’t there. But because the investor’s mental map of Africa has about 15 cities on it, and yours is not one of them.

This is not a feeling. It is now a documented fact.

AyaHQ, a Techstars-backed builder community, just released its first impact report, and one number in it stopped me cold: Africa has 7,600 cities. Startup investors consistently fund the same 15. Lagos. Nairobi. Cairo. Cape Town. Dakar. Kigali. Tunis. Accra. Algiers. Casablanca. Abidjan. Dar es Salaam. Johannesburg. Addis Ababa. Kampala.

The remaining 7,585 urban centres, where millions of Africans live, work, and build things, are largely invisible to the capital that could actually transform them.

And while that gap has always existed, it is getting worse. African startups raised $708 million in the first four months of 2026, down 13% from the same period last year. But the real number to pay attention to is not the total amount. It is the number of startups that raised. That fell from 180 to just 124, a 31% decline. In April alone, only 32 startups raised funding across the entire continent. Thirty-two. In a month. Across 54 countries.

Women-led startups are feeling this hardest. Female founders raised just $49 million in Q1 2026, 8.2% of the total, down 56% from Q1 2025. The number of deals involving women leaders dropped from 46 to 20. Think about that. Not just less money. Half as many deals. In one year.

This is the ecosystem that AyaHQ has been operating inside for three years, not in Lagos or Nairobi, but in Abokobi, Ghana, and Kilifi, Kenya. Places that do not appear on most investor slide decks. Places where the Wi-Fi is patchy and device access is a real barrier, and where the report honestly admits dropout rates have been a persistent problem because of exactly these things.

And yet. In three years, AyaHQ has supported more than 80 startups across 34 countries, deployed over $500,000 in grant and equity funding, and watched those startups collectively process more than $5 million in transactions. For every dollar deployed, roughly $10 in economic activity came back.

The Accra hub hosted 765 builders from eight countries last year. The Kilifi hub, which only opened in January 2025, hosted 600 builders from 16 countries in its first year and ran a tech pilot in secondary schools while doing it.

Their training programme, AyaVersity, has graduated 112 fellows and reached over 30,000 young people across Africa, teaching both software engineering and what they call the PACE framework: problem-solving, adaptability, creativity, and empathy. 40% of graduates across all cohorts have been women. In one cohort, that number hit 54%.

None of this happened in the 15 cities investors already know.

Here is what I keep thinking about after reading this report. The reason venture capital flows to the same cities every time is not just familiarity, it is also infrastructure. Good internet. Co-working spaces. A community of other founders to benchmark against. Easy flights for investor visits. The cities that get funded are the ones that already make it easy to be seen.

Which means the real problem is not just capital. It is visibility. And visibility is a solvable problem, if the right people decide to solve it.

AyaHQ is betting that the next wave of innovation in Africa will come from places that do not yet have a startup reputation. Their plan by 2030 is to expand physical hubs into Francophone West Africa, East Africa, and Southern Africa, build a reliable investor pipeline for founders outside the usual cities, and track at least 500 alumni over time to actually measure what the work produces.

They are also being honest about what has not worked, relying too heavily on Web3 funding made planning unstable, legal issues slowed down one cohort, and tracking alumni after graduation has been inconsistent. That kind of honesty in an impact report is rarer than it should be, and worth noting.

The founders building in Enugu, Kisumu, and Bulawayo are not waiting for permission. They are already building. The question is whether the capital, the infrastructure, and the visibility catch up to them before they run out of runway.

That is the real Monday question. Go build something. 🙌