Today, after 12 years, Uber is winding down its operations in Nigeria.

They launched in Lagos in 2014 and, for a lot of us, became part of the everyday rhythm of getting somewhere.

So much so that the name itself became a verb. Any day, any time, you could just “Uber” to work, home or the airport.

So yes, it’s a little sad to see them go 🥲

While Uber spent 12 years getting us from place to place 🫶 we’ve always been more interested in getting people together.

Enter: Consonance Connect (na wa o, click the link nau 🌚)

Consonance Connect is where African innovators come together to meet other brilliant innovators, take a break off work and just have a good time.

Football fans have match days. Alumni have their reunions. Who says innovators, founders and CEOs can’t have their own day too, ammaright?

Starting next month, Consonance Connect is coming to:

👉 Abuja, 10th of October

👉 Lagos, 31st of October

👉And of course, London, 13th of November

Remember these dates. Get your ticket early, and come prepped with only one goal in mind: MAD FUN! 🥳🥳

Check our socials for more deets.

You Missed Some Of Our Posts…

Why? 👀 Yes, i’m talking to you,

Because you’ve not subscribed? Let’s fix that quickly

1. You know you can build more than just text-to-speech tools, right? 👀

2. Fintech Innovators are no longer just building apps. Either get with the program, or get left behind! 🤷

Coming This Saturday:

We’ll keep this one a secret for now. Just know, you don’t want to miss it 🤫

Toodles!

Think about the last genuinely good industry event you heard about (seriously, think about it).

Did you attend? Or, did you only hear about it after it was already over?

Well, we don’t want that to be you this October, so here it is 👇

Consonance Connect Abuja is happening!!! 💃🏽🎉😍

We’re finally bringing Consonance Connect to the capital, and we’re telling you now, while there’s still a seat with your name on it.

If you caught what happened in Lagos or London (check our socials for the tea, IG and X) you already know this isn’t the kind of event where you walk in, collect a name tag, sit through a few panels, and slip out before the refreshments get cold😂

It’s smaller AND it’s better. No cap!

There’ll be people to connect with, argue with 👀and you might even get surprisingly competitive over the games that we have planned out.

Innovator, Consonance Connect Abuja is curated just for you! 🫵 It’s intentional, it’s fun and we’re bringing it to Abuja’s founders, investors, operators, builders, and a good number of people who just want to be in a room with others innovators who are doing interesting things😌

📅 Saturday, 10 October 2026
🕓 4:00 PM – 9:00 PM WAT
📍 Abuja (you’ll get the full location when you register)

Save your seat! 👈

And since there’s no shortage of rooms for innovators this season, you might also want to look out for:

• Inspire Africa Conference, Lagos, in October

• Moonshot by TechCabal, Lagos, also in October

• And of course, CONVERGE, Abuja, to round things out later in the year.

Lately In The Consonance Community Of Innovators…

Last Saturday, Sheila Mmehibe, Sales Manager at BMONI, walked the community through what it actually takes to stay on top of your money. Budgeting, saving, and everything in between 🤑

It wasn’t the usual “save more, spend less” talk, Sheila got into the practical side of it and everyone loved it! 😍

If you’re still figuring out how to make saving in dollars less of a chore, BMONI’s Mastercard is built for exactly that.

Jsyk, we have sessions like this all the time in the Consonance Community of Innovators, ‘cos we’re supportive like that 💅If you want to be a part of the community, it all starts with one click. Join us!

Tech News:

(as seen on TechCabal)

1. Here’s a full look at UBA under the leadership of Tony Mr Elumelu

2. Lisk has shut down its blockchain 😢

3. ThriveAgric has raised $3.93 million in commercial paper sale

Coming This Saturday:

What makes innovation so interesting? What makes Africa such an interesting place to build for? 🤔

The Consonance team sat down with someone who isn’t from here, but after 13 years in West Africa, he talks about it like home. He’s not building for Africa from somewhere else, he’s in it to the elbows!

We’re not saying more than that yet. For your sake, don’t miss the next post! 👀

How’s your weekend been?

While you prep for the start of the work week, quick question…

Have you considered building anything in AI recently?

A chatbot, perhaps? A speech-to-text tool? Or maybe it’s a tool that turns meetings into notes? 🌚

Before you make your next move, you should know that Google is reportedly lining up up to $200 billion in financing to expand its AI infrastructure. Just comparing the scale of that investment with how quickly AI products can become obsolete, you might want to rethink that ChatGPT lookalike that you’ve been building for months

Across Africa though, some builders are taking an interesting approach to these things. They are looking at problems that are deeply embedded in how the continent works and asking a much more important question:

What happens when we put AI directly inside the problem?

Keep scrolling👇

3 days ago, Nigerian defence-tech company Terra Industries announced a $52 million seed round, which is reportedly the largest seed round for an African startup.

Its ArtemisOS uses AI for autonomous mission planning and threat detection, while its drones are being developed for surveillance and protection of critical infrastructure, including power plants and mines. The company is also building a drone manufacturing facility in Ghana part

Then there’s Mathesis Analytics, which is tackling another Nigerian problem: credit!

Traditional credit systems do not always work particularly well in markets where millions of people have limited formal credit histories. Mathesis uses transactional and behavioural data to help lenders assess creditworthiness beyond the traditional credit score. The company recently secured fresh investment to expand this infrastructure.

And because Nigeria apparently refuses to let us have just one infrastructure problem at a time 🌝🌚 there’s PowerLabs.

Its Pai Enterprise platform uses AI to help businesses manage multiple energy sources, including the grid, generators, solar and batteries. Instead of assuming electricity is a single, predictable input, it is built around the reality that businesses often have to juggle several sources just to keep the lights on.

And that, right there, is what makes these products interesting.

What About Other Parts Of Africa? 🤔

Construction is one of those industries where an enormous amount of work still happens inside documents, spreadsheets, tenders and procurement processes. So Kuadra, a Cairo-based company, built an AI platform that can analyse construction tender documents, extract technical requirements, organise work packages and support procurement and supplier evaluation.

It is not glamorous, but that is precisely the point. If AI can turn days of document-heavy construction work into hours, somebody is going to care. No? 🤔

Stakpak, also an Egyptian-founded startup, built an open-source autonomous DevOps agent for software infrastructure. Vercel acquired the company in July as it expands its agentic infrastructure capabilities.

South Africa is one country that’s showing us another side of the shift 😐

Cue, a Cape Town company, raised $5 million in July to scale AI customer-service agents. Its systems already serve hundreds of businesses across South Africa and the UK. The best part is that these agents are going away from simply answering questions and toward actually completing tasks and resolving customer issues.

Kenya, meanwhile, is putting AI to work on agriculture.

The ADAPT-Kenya initiative combines AI, Earth observation and advanced analytics to produce things like crop maps and yield forecasts. The goal is to give farmers 🌱 𖧧 🌿traders, processors, financiers and policymakers better information about what is happening across the agricultural system.

In May, Zanzibar also launched a pilot using AI-powered drones to identify mosquito breeding sites as part of its malaria-elimination programme. The technology combines aerial mapping and AI to help health authorities locate breeding sites and target interventions more precisely (the malaria hate tho 😅)

In Zambia, the innovation is less flashy, but arguably just as important. The country has been rolling out SmartCare Pro, bringing more than 12 million patient records into a unified electronic health-record system across thousands of health facilities.

And no, the database itself is not the exciting AI application. The exciting part is what becomes possible when healthcare data is no longer scattered across disconnected systems.

Sometimes, before you can build intelligent systems, you have to build the infrastructure that gives them something intelligent to work with.

Then, in Mozambique, we find perhaps one of the simplest examples!

A pharmacist in Nampula built an AI platform that helps people find medicines, compare prices and locate pharmacies with stock. So far, more than 200 pharmacies have reportedly been registered on it!

TechCabal’s latest mapping tracked 207 AI startups across Africa, which is nearly twice the number it identified three years earlier. Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya remain the largest hubs, but activity is spreading across countries including Egypt, Ghana, Tunisia, Rwanda, Zambia, Morocco and Senegal.

More importantly, the apps and AI tools are increasingly concentrated in areas where Africa already has some of its biggest structural problems: finance, agriculture, healthcare, infrastructure, education and enterprise operations.

And I think that tells us something.

BMONI’s Got You!

BMONI is a fintech company helping everyday people manage money better —savings, spending, and everything in between, all in one app.

The BMONI Mastercard makes it simple to spend, save, and track your money without the usual banking friction.

Click here to get your card!

We’ll get to what brought you here in a minute (you growth-seeking individual 👀), there’s an elephant in the room that needs to be properly addressed first!

Based on reports, Ayra Starr may have been singing about the Consonance Community of Innovators in her latest Heaven Baby song 🤔😂

And you know what? It makes sense, ‘cos things have been feeling quite heavenly around here.

Keep scrolling, there are lots of deets for you 👇

1. 🥁🥁

   For the first time EVER, we’re bringing Consonance Connect to Abuja. Yayyyy!

Consonance Connect is a gathering of founders, investors and operators shaping Africa’s future. It’s built around genuine conversation and creating a space where innovators and founders can let their hair down and enjoy each other’s company.

No stage. No pitches. No speakers. Just good conversation with the right people in the room, the way it’s meant to be.

Check out our socials, IG and X. Our London and Lagos events were one for the books, and based on popular demand, we’re taking the party to the capital city!

As always, we’ve kept it intimate on purpose, so registration is subject to approval by the host. Once you’re in, we’ll share the full address. No worries there.

📅 Saturday, 10 October 2026
🕓 4:00 PM – 9:00 PM WAT
📍 Abuja (address on approval)

Click here to register!

2. Everybody loves a good rant, and it’s even better when the right people are in the room! 🤝

From technology and risk to leadership, people, creativity, strategy and growth, these are the faces 👆 behind the conversations at Founders Rant X 2.0.

They are people who have built, led, scaled and learned in the real world. This time around, they are bringing bigger conversations, practical insights and stronger networks for founders and builders.

📅 Friday, 28 August 2026
📍 Alliance Française, Ikoyi, Lagos

Limited seats are available. Hurry, get yourself a ticket here!

Why Does Growth Scare You So Much?

It’s ‘cos for a lot of people, these things are easier said than done.

As an Innovator, growth sounds exciting when you’re talking about it from the outside, ‘cos it means more customers, more revenue, more people, and more visibility.

I mean, who wouldn’t want that…

Living it daily though, is a different story. It’s a little scary if we’re being honest.

You see, getting your product from idea to prototype, prototype to MVP, and MVP to those first real users, you did all that on instinct.

It was easy when it was just you, with your head down, as you figured things out on the go. For a while, it worked 💯

The part, however, that catches most innovators unawares is that eventually, there’ll be more decisions to make, more money involved as you fund different parts of your product, and more people to bring in.

When you get to this stage (or, if you are already here) you can’t just wing it anymore. And that’s really what scares you, isn’t it? 🤝

Not the growth itself, but the fact that the same instincts that got you here won’t be enough to take you further. You built your product on your own, and now it needs more than what you alone can give it. If you haven’t prepared for it, that can be a pretty strange place to find yourself in.

The good news though, you’ve done the hard part.
And even better news, there are people who are waiting to support you! 😁

Dear Innovator, if you’ve spent all this time trying to get people to take your product seriously, and now you’re thinking, okay, how do I actually make this bigger, the iDICE Growth Lab is currently open to post-MVP founders who are looking to scale.

With $100k in equity funding, support and the potential for follow-on investment, you can get all the help that you need, as you grow and scale your product.

Click here for more deets. Hurry, applications close today 💫

Tech News:

(as seen on Techcabal)

1. If you bought MTN’s shares, it’s cash-out time!

2. These Kenyan startups raised $500 million before shutting down. Where are the founders now?

3. Thinking of buying a new phone? See this full comparison between Google pixel 11 and 11 pro

4. Mr Eazi’s Choplife is the latest startup to move to digital free zone Itana

*
*

Smart Spending Just Got Easier!

BMONI is a fintech company helping everyday people manage money better — savings, spending, and everything in between, all in one app!

The BMONI Mastercard makes it simple: spend, save, and track your money without the usual banking friction
👉 Get your card here 👈

Coming This Saturday:

The rest of the world may be far ahead, but that doesn’t mean Africa is completely out of the race 💪

We’ve been keeping tabs on some really exciting African AI innovations, and we can’t wait to share them with you. Don’t miss the next post!

Today is Saturday, a widely recognised day for parties and owambe. Have you gone out today?

If yes, how did you move around the city? Public transport?

Did you drive? Uber or inDrive? 🤔

Three years ago, we wrote about inDrive as a new entrant fighting for its place in Africa’s transportation market, and back then, it was one bet among many 🤔

In those days, Gokada was the darling turning motorbikes into a transportation category, Jumia Food was the fastest-growing thing inside Africa’s biggest e-commerce company, and HerRyde was a solution that let women drive other women.

Between then (2023) and now, a lot has happened to all four of ‘em. Some of it good, and some of it... well... 👀

Just follow the hand! 👇

Innovator, Get In Here! 😍

You already have a product that people use, abi? (post-MVP)

Now you need money 💸 to grow it, and someone to help you figure out how to spend it right. That’s exactly what iDICE’s Growth Lab gives you.

You can apply in 4 easy steps:

1. Click here

2. Go through the website carefully, and check out the FAQs too

3. Click apply

4. Complete your application and submit!

If you’re accepted, here are the benefits 👇

Hurry though 😥 It’s closing on the 19th of August, 2026

*
*
As I Was Saying…

Between 2023 and now, HerRyde suspended operations a year in. Gokada filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, seven years and several pivots into its journey 😭 And Jumia shut Jumia Food down across seven markets in one clean announcement.

Three different companies, three different endings, and none of them were good.

Meanwhile inDrive, that “new entrant” we wrote about three years ago, told the world that it made $601.6 million in revenue and $6.4 billion in gross bookings in 2025, profitably, with over 400 million downloads to show for it.

All four operated in the same market, so why did three go down and one keep climbing? 🤔 It wasn’t funding or vision or the issue of “solving a real problem”, because all four had that. What separated them is worth sitting with if you’re building anything right now.

It starts in 2012, in a Siberian city called Yakutsk. When taxi prices spiked and people got tired of it, they opened a social media group and started negotiating rides themselves. That idea became inDrive, and when it reached Lagos, Nairobi, Kampala and Accra, nobody had to be taught what it meant, since we’ve all haggled with a taxi driver before 👀

inDrive didn’t invent the negotiation, it just wrapped a tech solution around a habit people already had!

Let’s look at what actually went wrong for the other three, starting with HerRyde.

Launched in Abuja in 2022, connecting women riders to verified women drivers, it facilitated over 2,000 rides for more than 500 passengers, with 200 registered drivers within a year, without spending a naira on marketing! 👏 But demand alone doesn’t cover insurance, fuel or drivers, and by October 2023 it had “hibernated,” which is the softer way of saying it ran out of money.

A real problem gets you users. It doesn’t, by itself, get you a business 📢

Gokada’s problem came from somewhere it couldn’t plan for: Lagos banned commercial motorcycles in 2020, and the whole model disappeared overnight. So it pivoted into logistics, kept adapting for four more years, and still filed for Chapter 11 in October 2024 with $5.2 million in liabilities against just $560,000 in assets😢

Jumia Food had everything the other two didn’t: a recognised brand, existing logistics, and years as Jumia’s fastest-growing category. Still, in December 2023 it shut down across seven markets, despite making up 11% of Jumia’s GMV. It was selling just fine, it just never once turned a profit.

Which brings us back to inDrive. From the get-go, they’ve been playing an entirely different game, and the negotiation was only ever the first move. Because once you’ve earned trust with millions of people who already open your app, the real question becomes what else they’ll let you carry: courier, freight, groceries, even finance 🤷🤷‍♂️

And it paid off. As at early this year, they’d passed 400 million downloads and were live across 1,100 cities in 48 countries. By February, inDrive’s Nigerian courier business had grown 100% year-on-year, and by mid-year, clothing and footwear had overtaken food as its top delivery category.

Of course, none of it works without drivers, so its Platinum Driver Programme has paid out over ₦1.2 billion to more than 3,000 drivers. Add it all up, and you land at $601.6 million in revenue, up 31%, on $6.4 billion in gross bookings, profitably.

Dear Innovator, the moral of the story isn't that these three lacked good ideas. What keeps a company alive long enough to matter is whether the economics of the product actually work, and whether it keeps finding new ways to be useful to the users who already trust it.

Think about what your users already do every day. Are they doing it badly, and would your product make it easier for everyone?

That’s the opportunity you want to leverage! 💪

Wanna learn how to manage your money 🤑 better?

Meet BMONI: Banking Built for How You Actually Spend

BMONI is a fintech company helping everyday people manage money better — savings, spending, and everything in between, all in one app!

The BMONI Mastercard makes it simple: spend, save, and track your money without the usual banking friction.

Get your card here 😍

In 2026, starting something new has never been easier. Whether it’s a tech startup, a roadside business, or something you’ve dreamt about since you were five.

As an innovator, thanks to AI, you can now turn an idea into a prototype in a weekend, test it before the month ends, and launch three different products side by side.

With all these extra tools and an overwhelming amount of information online, the hardest part of being an innovator is no longer getting started.

It’s what happens after.

When the excitement of your new idea fades, when the product doesn’t work the way you expected, when you’re unsure whether to pivot or stand your ground, or when you’ve spent weeks thinking about the same problem and can no longer even see it clearly…

Sometimes, what you need isn’t another tool or another late-night session to “figure things out.”

What you need is a pick-me-up from the people who have been operating on the same wavelength as you from day one.

Take your time and think about the products and startups that have shut down recently (seriously, sit with it and think 😐). It’s easy to assume that those founders simply weren’t good enough, right? But that’s rarely the full story.

According to CB Insights, some of the biggest reasons startups fail include building something that the market doesn’t need, running out of cash, pricing mistakes, competition, and having the wrong team.

Turns out, these challenges become even harder when you’re building in isolation 🫠

The truth is, what changes the trajectory of an idea or product often comes down to the people around you and the quality of your network.

And that’s exactly why we built the Consonance Community of Innovators!

Every Founder Needs Support And Community!

The Consonance Community of Innovators is a space where founders, creatives, researchers, operators, designers, and builders come together to challenge ideas, share lessons, exchange opportunities, and build meaningful partnerships.

It’s a community of innovators, by innovators!

So, whether you’re exploring your very first idea or scaling your tenth company (kudos, btw), in this community, you’ll find people who understand your journey to a T because they’re living it too. 🤝

Here, we connect with one another, we share, we support and most of all, we’d love to have you join us 😍

Here’s What You Have Been Missing:

Are you a new subscriber to this newsletter? Did you find this post by accident? Or, did someone share it to you?

Yetunde, welcome 👀AND you should stick around, things are about to get a lot more interesting! 👇

1. We did a thing in July. It’s called Consonance Connect!

2. “What should i build next?” Don’t worry, we’ve even thought about it for you 😄 just sha build

Opportunities:

1. It’s August. There’s still a lot of time to leverage Tech Cabal’s 2026 predictions

2. Are you looking to get into tech? Emem Adjah has some tips for you!

3. QVID Talent Solutions is looking to hire a Founding Product Marketer

4. Tobams Group is looking to hire a Product Design Intern

5. Tobams Group is looking to hire a Social Media Intern

Tech News:

1. See how Nigeria’s Blockops Network is powering stablecoin operations for fintechs and banks

2. SeerBit has integrated PayPal to expand global payment options for African merchants

3. Helium Health is making some management changes

We’ll be back on Saturday with an ecosystem update that you’ll want to see. Toodlessssssssssss! ✨✨

If you live in Nigeria, there is a good chance you have heard of Moove without actually knowing what they do 🫡

Since launching in Lagos in 2020, they’ve gone from 76 cars to 36,000 vehicles across 19 cities on six continents.

And now, after raising $250 million, Moove is reportedly valued at $2.1 billion 🤑

How did they get here? More importantly, what did Moove get right along the way?

Let’s get into it. Follow the hand! 👇

It Started With a Car 🚗

When Moove launched, the problem was fairly ordinary. People wanted to drive and earn from it, but couldn’t afford the car that they needed.

Across Africa, vehicle financing was difficult to access, particularly for drivers whose income came from ride-hailing and delivery platforms rather than a conventional salary.

So Moove built its model around the driver’s future earnings.

Through its revenue-based financing model, Moove could assess a driver’s performance and revenue data, finance a vehicle and then collect repayments from a percentage of the driver’s weekly earnings. To top it all, drivers could eventually own the vehicle once they completed their payments 🥳 Talk about top-notch innovation!

Moove wasn’t just financing cars, it was financing an income-generating asset, using the economics of the work being done with that asset to assess the customer.

And that was a pretty smart place to start 🤝

They Understood The Assignment 🤖

From the jump, they could have tried to build another ride-hailing solution, but no. Instead, they plugged into one that already had millions of riders and drivers.

Uber!

Uber became Moove’s key partner, with the company providing vehicles to drivers using the platform. By 2021, it was described as Uber’s preferred car-financing and vehicle-supply partner in sub-Saharan Africa.

This meant Moove didn’t have to solve the hardest part of a marketplace business, which is creating demand from scratch.

Eventually, their relationship went beyond distribution.

In 2024, Uber invested in Moove alongside Mubadala, leading a $100 million Series B that valued the company at $750 million. By then, Moove had grown their annual recurring revenue to more than $115 million and raised $350 million in equity and $210 million in debt since launch.

You see, unlike a typical software startup, Moove cannot add thousands of customers without also putting thousands of physical assets on the road. Why? ‘Cos cars cost money 💸 Lots of it!

So instead, they built a funding model around that reality, by combining equity and debt to finance their expansion.

They were essentially figuring out how to finance a capital-intensive tech business without relying entirely on venture equity; once the model worked in Nigeria, it became clear that ride-hailing drivers 🚗 elsewhere needed access to vehicles too. Naturally, they expanded.

In 2025, Moove acquired a Brazilian mobility company called Kovi in an all-share transaction. This acquisition took them to 36,000 vehicles across 19 cities on six continents, while their ARR rose to approximately $275 million.

When the news broke, everybody and their favourite investor also knew that acquisition did more than add cars to their fleet. It gave Moove another company that was solving a similar problem, in another major market and with more experience operating mobility fleets at scale.

The business was evolving from helping drivers get cars into operating the infrastructure around those cars 👏

They Are Building For The Future!

In 2024, Waymo announced that Moove would become a fleet partner for its autonomous vehicles, beginning in Phoenix and later expanding to Miami.

Waymo would, of course, remain responsible for its autonomous-driving technology, while Moove would take on fleet operations, facilities and charging infrastructure (it’s the progression for me 💃)

Moove started by financing cars for people, then expanded into managing fleets. Now, they are helping manage fleets that drive themselves, and that gives the company a much bigger market to play in.

So, What Did Moove Actually Do Right?

We’ve highlighted them throughout this post, but in case you missed it, here’s a quick recap for you:

• They found an existing ecosystem and became useful to it. They didn’t try to create demand from scratch.

• Moove built expertise in vehicles first, then found a new market for that expertise.

• They figured out how to finance a capital-heavy business with both equity and debt; and when the opportunity expanded beyond Nigeria, they didn’t abandon the original model.

• Finally, they took what they had learned about financing, data, vehicles and fleet operations and applied it in new markets.

Since 2020, there’s been a consistent thread connecting every strategic move they’ve made.

Now, that’s how Unicorns are made. We love to see it! 😍

It’s the 8th month of 2026, and the date isn’t the only new thing in the air

🤫 Come closer…

In 2023, “How fast can I move money?” used to be the only question that mattered in African fintech. Back then, as an innovator, all you had to do was build an app, make it easy to use, and win the hearts of your users.

Shikina! 👐

If you’re still building like that in 2026, take this as your sign 👀, the rest of the world no longer moves like that.

What’s New In African Fintech

Quick one: can you guess how much of the world’s mobile money moves through Africa?

If you said three-quarters, you’d be right!

Three-quarters of the world’s mobile money activity happens here, and for a market that’s specifically geared towards phones, it also exposes African users and African fintech solution providers to a unique kind of risk.

New data out this year from Smile ID’s 2026 Digital Identity Fraud in Africa Report shows the majority of confirmed biometric fraud across African fintech platforms is now AI-generated. Everyday, deepfakes, synthetic faces, fake identities are being built well enough to beat the exact selfie checks and fingerprint scans that everyone trusted to keep their money safe.

In one case documented in that same report, a single fraud syndicate used a hundred stolen faces to launch over 160,000 verification attacks in a single month, all across African fintech platforms. Scary stuff! 😬

In 2026, this verification issue has flipped all of Africa’s fintech conversations on its head. The old leverage was speed and making sure your solution can move payments in the shortest possible time.

This new one is trust; The need is for solutions that have checks in place to tell a real person from a convincing fake, while still being fast enough that your actual, honest users never feel the friction.

With this, some innovators seem to be far ahead of others.

Identity Is the New Infrastructure In Fintech

More than half of African fintech solutions are still built around payments and lending.

Now obviously, there’s nothing wrong with that (in fact, it’s what’s moving the whole industry) but lately, capital has begun shifting toward the unglamorous middle layer of identity infrastructure and fraud detection. And it’s not just talk, the money’s actually moving! 🤑

Across the continent’s H1 2026 funding, over 100 active enterprise AI use cases are now tracked in production, and credit scoring and fraud detection are two of the biggest categories driving that number.

You can also see it taking shape in solutions like BMONI.

This AI-and-biometrics outfit, founded by Jørn Lyseggen, is betting their entire business on solving the identity problem in African Fintech, using AI and biometric verification (backed by 22 patents, hello!) to confirm in real time that the person behind a transaction is actually who they claim to be 💪

Their whole pitch is built around one idea: your face is your password; and they do this by converting users' facial and fingerprint biometrics into cryptographic keys, so there's no traditional password to steal or phish in the first place.

Another notable example is OPay. When they first rolled out extra checks for huge transfers and slightly different app behaviour, some Nigerians made jokes about it. Turns out, they were ahead of the times.

In 2025, they launched a full security centre with features like night guard (facial verification for late-night, high-value transfers), large transaction shield (extra checks once you cross your own set limit), and an AI-powered anti-sShield that flags suspicious transfers before the money even leaves your account.

There’s also some action going on in South Africa.

Down South, some fintechs are already layering behavioural signals like typing speed and device geolocation on top of the old SMS-and-password systems everyone’s now retiring, all for the sake of catching fraud before it even happens.

You Saw It Here First…

As an Innovator, being super talented and having a funded/well-known product is the goal, but one of the ways you can also get ahead is by maximising every leverage within your reach.

In 2026, the leverage is no longer just in building the fastest app, it’s in proving who’s on the other end of it.

“How do I prove this person is real?” That’s where 2026’s edge is sitting. Lucky for you, most people haven’t started looking there yet 😎

Don’t Just Read About It, Experience It In Person!

Innovator…

Mind-blowing conversations are happening outside of X and LinkedIn, and the maaaaaaaaaad innovators behind some of these crazy good products are a delight.

They bring all the aura, vibes and fun, but you won’t know, ‘cos every weekend you refuse to leave your laptop to meet people! (it’s giving co-dependent 🌚)

We can help, sha.

Very soon, we’re going to be hosting an in-person and intimate gathering of innovators in the city of Abuja. If you’re reading this, this is your unofficial invitation!

Right now, tickets aren’t out yet, but when we make ‘em available, our community members will hear about it first 🥳

If you want to experience the world of innovation beyond the abstract and disjointed conversations online, this is your chance.

Didn’t we just conclude Consonance Connect Lagos III? Yes indeed, and a time was had! 💃🏻 💃🏻

Click here to get all the deets

Okay, so if you were at CCHub on Friday, we know that you had the time of your life.

If you weren’t there, hurry, catch up on what you missed here (click the link)! 👈

However, you should know that no matter how much we explain what went down at Consonance Connect Lagos III, there are some things that are bound to get lost in translation, and honestly, hearing about it secondhand might even be worse than not knowing at all ‘cos how do you explain GREATNESS?!

How do you explain genuine connection and people actually having fun? How does one even put that type of thing in words? 🤔😭

What we’ll say is this, there are tons of people who’ve been to a lot of tech “networking” events, but they often never end up networking at all.

Sure, you might exchange a couple of phone numbers, but it’ll most likely not translate to a real life connection, and the feeling usually never lasts beyond the event’s grounds (you know it’s true 🌚)

Since last Friday, the innovators and founders that attended ours have been telling us, unprompted, that they’d never experienced anything like Consonance Connect before 😍

Everything was curated to ensure that everyone went home with a unique experience of the day, and connecting happened as natural as breathing.

Big thank you to BMONI for sponsoring the day 🙌

BMONI is an AI-and-biometrics-powered financial solution, built by Jørn Lyseggen (the guy behind Meltwater and MEST Africa). It has 22 patents and a team spread across Lagos, Accra, Chicago, San Francisco, Oslo and London.

What’s the word? Goated! 💪

Which brings us to the thing we actually want to tell you today

🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁

We’ve done Lagos three times now. We’ve done London twice. And for the rest of 2026, we’re not staying put.

Next stop is confirmed: ABUJA!

You’ve been asking, and we’ve been listening.

Lagos and London have had their fill of our Connect events (for now) and this time, we’re taking it to the Capital City! 🥳🥳

That’s right, the next Consonance Connect is happening in Abuja.

We’ll soon make tickets 🎫 available, and as always, members of the Consonance Community of Innovators will hear about it first.

If you missed the last one, don’t wait till Abuja’s tickets are sold out, click here to join the community!

Wait, Did We Promise To Share More Updates from Consonance Connect Lagos III?

Hmmmm!

Hurry to our IG account, you’ll want to see this 👇

Tech News:

1. GoLemon has stopped taking orders and is winding down its Lagos grocery business 😢

2. Airtel Money wants a $1 billion IPO. Is it possible?

3. An Egyptian startup, Fincart, has raised $2.8 million to expand its AI commerce platform

Coming This Saturday:

Africa’s been running almost three-quarters of the world’s mobile money. Three-quarters! And somehow, everyone’s still talking about the wrong side of things 👀

New data out this year shows the majority of biometric fraud across African solutions is now AI-generated, and there’s a budding issue of fraudsters building deepfakes and synthetic faces good enough to beat even the most trusted KYC verification system.

Be back on Saturday for the rest. It’s an African fintech snapshot update!

Yesterday was too lit!

Let me tell you all about it 👇 follow the hand!

Consonance Connect Lagos III happened yesterday at the CCHub building in Yaba, Lagos, and honestly, we’re still reeling from everything.

If you didn’t show up, bummer, ‘cos you missed out on A LOT!

It’s unlike any tech event you’ve ever heard of or been to, before.

How Did It Go?

When you first walked in, before anything else, you got tagged. Founder, Investor, or Customer — and just like that, your whole night was decided.

Investors and customers got cash in hand immediately, but founders got nothing. Why? Because theirs was supposed to come from the room (if they could earn it 👀)

Then my personal favourite, the ‘Four Corners’ game 🥺

A question with four answers forced everyone to pick a side.

Based on the question, every attendee picked a corner, and each answer led to a mix of full-blown debate and lots of insightful takes from these really brilliant people; it was the kind of stuff that normies would pay heavily to hear.

And you know what? It kinda makes sense.

One has to be somewhat of a genius to survive as an innovator in Nigeria, no?

With it, we stayed true to our goal of making sure that everyone got to use the mic at least once, ‘cos at these Consonance Connect events, there are no dull moments 💅

This event was made possible by our sponsor, BMoni 😍

BMoni is an AI powered finance platform built by Jørn Lyseggen (yes, the Meltwater guy) that lets you hold multiple currencies, save in dollars, and spend on a card that works well past Nigeria’s borders.

Cool stuff! 😎

As I was saying…

There was a pitching session for the founders, snacks, drinks, and in the end, when we were supposed to leave, NOBODY WANTED TO GO HOME😅

We took networking and connecting to a whole new level!

All this is to say, everyone had a good time, and the way I see it, one newsletter is not enough for the full downlow

To get more updates:

» Click here for IG

» One click will take you to X

» Browse through our website for more deets

Hey, Pssst, Over Here 👋…

Our Consonance Connect events are a physical extension of what happens in the community!

If you weren’t there yesterday, the fun part always starts from within.

The Consonance Community of Innovators is a place made for innovators, by innovators; this means if you need someone to introduce you to your next co-founder, need people to cheer you on as you build daily, or just need proof that your goals are possible by seeing what other people are building, over here, there’s always room for one more.

Click here to join us!

— With love, Consonance Club 💙

“What is this Consonance Connect?”, you ask 🤔

Well, it’s an evening of mad fun and debauchery!

Ok, fine, the debauchery part is a bit of a stretch 😅Our Connect events are all about providing a space where innovators can have fun, play games, win prizes, and connect (literally) with other innovators.

It’s like Christmas, but for the serious-faced ‘giran’ people of tech & innovation (jokes, jokes 👀)

Last time we did this in Lagos, the room was FULL.

Not “cozy full”. It was full-full. People showed up because they wanted to have fun and they loooooooved 😍 every second of it.

Then we took the same energy to London. We sold out there too!

So far, we’ve shuffled between two cities, two different continents and two different crowds. Every time we do, innovators show up from all over 🥳 and everyone ends up having the best time of their lives.

This Friday, we’re bringing it back home.

If the last two are anything to go by, you should know that this isn’t the kind of thing you want to hear about from someone else’s timeline on Saturday 👀😂

Innovator, if you’re in Lagos, you know what to do!

👉Get your ticket here 👈

ICYMI…

1. Everybody is building in AI. You can help ‘em power it🤷

2. Yum! 😋

Tech News:

1. Opay has plans for 2031. Click here to read all about it!

2. Zipline has delivered over 6.1 million vaccines across three Nigerian states, now it wants to go national

3. LemFi has partnered BVNK to power stablecoin-based remittance settlements

Alright. That’s it for today, Innovator. See you on Friday! 👋

AND it’s Wednesday 😊

You know what that means…?

There’s never been a more perfect time to do a self assessment, so…

Daily, as an innovator, what do you actually do?

Don’t skip over it. It’s a direct question.

WHAT DO YOU 🫵 DO?

Leave a comment

Let’s say someone was trying to invest in your product or partner up with you, and they needed a log of your activities to make the final decision, would your daily routine prompt them to do so?

Or would they hold back for a minute? 🌚

See the thing is, somewhere along the way, building got a reputation for being complicated. And you know, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but most of what makes it feel that way is just noise.

As an innovator, your goals should always come down to these 4 bullet points:

• Identify a problem/gap

• Create a solution that solves that specific problem (and emphasis on specific, ‘cos some of you do too much 👀)

• Let people know you exist.

• Deliver.

That’s it. That’s the whole shebang!

Everything else, the routines, the rebrands, the research that never quite pans out, the new logo, the longer roadmap, the 12am strategy conversations, is just decorative and an excuse to make things far more complicated than it needs to be.

It might be necessary, but it shouldn’t take precedence over why you started building in the first place.

Remember, 2026 will soon be over.

At the start of the year, you made some promises to yourself. You and your team laid out some goals too. If you still intend to cross ‘em off your list, then don’t operate in Q3 like you did in the first part of the year.

This week, commit to simplifying your building process. Ok?

And If You Need A Little Extra Help….

Easy fix, attend Consonance Connect Lagos! 🎉

It’s the best kept secret 🤫 in the innovation ecosystem.

So much that we’re even limiting access to JUST 50 PEOPLE!

Come talk and chill with other innovators who are on the same journey as you 🎊 🎉 who knows, maybe the reason why you’re overcomplicating things is because you haven’t relaxed in a loooooooooooog time 👀😂

Get a feel for unstructured fun through Consonance Connect Lagos, all while being surrounded by innovators who see life like you do. It doesn’t get better than this.

Do you have a ticket yet? Get yours here!

Tech News:

1. The Nigerian Telecommunications Limited (NITEL) is saying goodbye to the telecom market, and they have a good reason

2. In 2024, FoodCourt reportedly had over $4 million in annual recurring revenue. In 2026, they’re temporarily suspending operation. Why?

3. Here’s how Nigeria’s SereniMind is using AI to improve mental health

4. SeamlessHR has plans to expand into AI and finance

Coming This Saturday:

Remember when we said “AI is not for you”

Welp, we’d like to take that back. There’s been some UPDATES!

Come back on Saturday to find out what it is 🤭🫢

Do you know the saying:

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

In Africa, too many innovators are building alone.

Maybe not in the literal sense. But after spending years in the innovation ecosystem, we’ve seen the same pattern over and over again.

As an innovator, it’s hard to find a space where the people around you genuinely understand what you’re carrying without you having to explain it first. Right?

Well, that's just sad 🥺’cause all that innovative brilliance deserves to be supported.

If you've been wearing multiple hats, and lately you've been feeling the weight of building pressing down on your shoulders, you don't have to carry it alone anymore.

Consonance Club is a community by African innovators, and we exist to give African innovators (like you 😊) a support system.

Here's how we do it:

We Spotlight What Deserves Your Attention

From engaging on X, to positioning yourself on LinkedIn and a host of other obligations that demand your time and attention, we understand how crazy things can get in the life of an innovator.

That's why every week, through this newsletter, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, we cover the companies, the deals, the policies, and the shifts in the ecosystem that are actually worth your attention.

We don’t just follow good stories and headlines that are trending.

We tailor our newsletters around the stories and activities that might change how you think about your products, your hiring decisions, your growth trajectory, and your journey as an innovator.

We Celebrate Your Innovative Wins

No matter how insignificant 🥺 you think it is, we’ll make a big deal of it.

If you need a solid cheerleading squad behind you every time you achieve an impossible milestone, when you hit your revenue target or even when you get your first customer in 6 months, we’ve got you!

The support that you need is only one click away.

We Connect You

Twice now, first in Lagos and most recently in London during London Tech Week ‘26, we’ve brought people together in a room with no stage, no panels, and no name tags that reduce people to their job titles.

Just good people, good conversations, and a room full of founders, innovators, and problem solvers.

We call these gatherings Consonance Connect 🥳🥳

And no, it’s not like your typical tech conference. It's unlike anything you've attended before!

From the games to the easy conversations, each Consonance Connect event is tailored to make you thoroughly enjoy yourself in a way that pleases the Lord 🤏

The next one is coming up soon. Wanna attend?

It’s happening on 24 July 2026. Pick up your invite here!

Dear Innovator…

If this is your first time reading our newsletter, welcome. Now you know what we’re all about.

If you’ve been here for a while, consider this a reintroduction 💙

We’d also love to hear what you think.

If there’s something you’d like to see more of in this newsletter, a topic you think we should explore, or another way we can support you as an innovator, we’re always open to your feedback 👇

Leave a comment

Until we meet on the 24th, keep innovating!

How have you been?

We can all agree, this is how most tech events usually go….

• You listen to a panel for a couple of hours

• You collect a tote bag or whatever merch that’s available at the time

• Exchange a few LinkedIn profiles you’ll probably never revisit

• And at the end of the day, go home exactly as you came.

It's neither a good nor a bad experience, but somehow you can never quite place how you feel afterwards.

Enter: Consonance Connect Lagos

Is it a party?

Is it another tech event?

Short answer: We can’t tell you, you’ll have to experience it yourself 🤫

What we can tell you is this:

Having spent quite some time around the innovation space, we’ve come to the conclusion that innovators aren’t just looking for another event to be lectured to (Cynthia, we get it, building is hard, you’ve recently raised funding, and…? 😒)

Innovators are looking for a place where they can feel seen, heard and understood.

Where they don’t have to perform because an investor might be watching.

Where they can be around other people who really get it.

Consonance Connect Lagos isn’t your typical owambe, or friday evening rave, but it isn’t a panel event either.

It’s intentionally unstructured. It’s fun. And you can come exactly as you are. No questions asked🤝

We’ve hosted four Connect events like this across London and Lagos, and every edition has reminded us of the same thing: when innovators find their people, they keep coming back!

If you’re a deep thinker, a “crazy” builder, a passionate systems person, or a techie who just loves solving problems, we have a ticket with your 🫵 name on it.

It’s happening on the 24th of this month.

» Get yours here «

See you soon at Consonance Connect Lagos III!

That’s it. That’s the post.

I wasn’t playing, go back and get your ticket 👆

Hello Dear Innovator 👋

Braiding hasn’t changed in thousands of years, not since it was invented. And yet Yinka Ogunbiyi, who’s worn braids her whole life, says a single session can eat six hours and $200 to $300 of her day, every eight weeks, for the rest of her natural life.

Stylists, meanwhile, are racking up carpal tunnel and early arthritis by their twenties.

To fix this, she and David Afolabi, two Nigerian Harvard alumni, built HaloBraid, trained it on 450-plus prototypes and thousands of test braids, and walked off with $75,000 and the grand prize at Harvard’s President’s Innovation Challenge!

To top it all, a few weeks ago, they raised $7 million in seed funding, led by none other than Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six, with AlleyCorp and Bling Capital riding along. Ohanian, for what it’s worth, has sat through marathon braiding sessions with his own family for years , so this was more than a cold pitch to him; it was a lived grievance finally getting funded💰

Naturally, some people online are thrilled about this development. While others have been side-eyeing the prospect of a robot near their barely-there edges 😅

Either way, nobody can deny the fact that an African-founded hardware startup just got backed to go after a $42 billion market!

Robots In Chemistry Classrooms

While the rest of the world debates whether AI will take our jobs, a 21-year-old in Nairobi named Maxwell Opondo built AI a job nobody else wanted: standing in a classroom, all day, translating a chemistry lesson into sign language in real time.

Innovation doesn’t get cooler than this 😎

His startup, Zerobionic, builds 3D-printed robotic arms out of recycled plastic waste that watch a teacher talk and sign it back to deaf students, live, at 92% accuracy!

A typical science class runs 40 minutes. For a deaf student working through an interpreter, if one’s even available, the same lesson can stretch to two hours.

Opondo was mentoring kids through an organisation called Young Scientists Kenya and kept watching deaf students fall behind 🥺 in competitions where every second mattered. So the team built something to help.

So far, Zerobionic has piloted in schools across Garissa, Machakos, and Kirinyaga counties in Kenya, and has recently landed one of ten spots in Qualcomm’s 2026 Make in Africa cohort, beating out over 1,200 applicants from 45 countries.

They were the only Kenyan startup to make the cut, by the way! 👏

Cars Can’t Fly Yet, But Umbrellas ☂️ Can

It’s not an African innovation, we’ll admit it upfront, but it was too delicious to leave out.

A Canadian engineer, John Tse, has built an umbrella with a literal drone hidden under the canopy. It comes with propellers, a depth camera, and enough onboard computing to hover a few feet above your head and follow you through the rain, leaving your hands completely free.

He calls it Flying Umbrella 2.0, and after nearly a year of trial, error, and one thoroughly bricked Raspberry Pi, it actually works!

Is it practical? Debatable. The battery lasts maybe 15 minutes, and a strong gust could ruin your whole afternoon, but somebody looked at the most boring object in existence, the thing that almost everyone forgets in an uber, and thought: what if this could fly? 🤔

There’s A Lesson Here..

Dear Innovator, if you’re building something right now that feels a little embarrassing to say out loud, a little too weird for you to put on a pitch deck, or talk to an investor about it, take this as your sign 🌚

People are literally giving life to your childhood fantasies!

Someone’s already building that thing that you think is too weird to work. Don’t let ‘em beat you to it.

Have you seen other “weird” innovations lately? Tell us about it

Leave a comment

If the calendar is to be believed, half the year is already behind us.

Do you think you handled it well though? 👀

Would the January version of you be proud of everything you’ve accomplished so far?

Hold on, while you’re thinking of an answer, we have an announcement...

Lagos, Are You Ready?!

Consonance Connect Lagos III – Summer Edition is here!

We've already hosted two amazing editions in Lagos and London this year, bringing together founders, builders and curious minds. Now, it's time to do it all over again!

📅 July 24, 2026
🕔 5–9 PM (GMT+1)

Registration is now open.

🎟️ Click below to get your ticket:
• Luma (Pay with Mastercard)
• PartyVerse (Pay with card or bank transfer)

Give your laptop a break. Come and let your hair dada down (or your bone-straight wig, if that’s more your speed). See you in Lagos. 🚀

How did the rest of the year go?

One of the best ways to make the next six months better is to look honestly at the last six.

As a very wise person once said, the best way to plan for the future is to look at the past and use the lessons to correct the present.

- Source: (we go lie for you)

On our end, from January to March, we kicked off a series of Build Along posts, where innovators walked us through how they built their products, the thinking behind them, and where they're headed next.

Going by readership stats, this was everybody’s favourite 😍

In the months that followed, we also posted a number of Sector Snapshots, unpacking some of the most interesting innovations happening across the continent.

Judging by readership stats and engagement, everybody loved this one! 👇

What did we learn from all this? 🤔

Apparently, you people really enjoy seeing how things are built 😂 Good thing we have plenty more coming.

Now it’s your turn.

As you look back on the first half of 2026, ask yourself:

• What’s one win you’re genuinely proud of?

• What’s one lesson you’ll carry into the second half of the year?

• Lastly, what’s one thing you’ll double down on before 2026 wraps up?

If you’re feeling bonita 💫 you can always share your thoughts with us, here 👇

Leave a comment

Cheers to the rest of the year!

Tech News For You:

1. Why is Google building Africa’s AI future from South Africa?

2. Meta is developing plans for a cloud infrastructure business

3. Bango thinks food prices shouldn’t depend on which trader you ask

4. Have you heard? Anthropic is doubling its rate for Claude in Nigeria

Coming This Saturday:

Innovation has a funny habit of making people laugh first. Then, it quietly becomes something everyone can’t do without.

This Saturday, we’re doing a deep dive into some ideas and innovations that looked strange, unnecessary, or downright ridiculous at first... until they just made sense.

Don’t miss it! 💫

“Agriculture is the backbone of Africa’s economy” 🙄 is something we’ve all heard so many times that it’s basically lost its meaning.

And yet, here you are, eating three times a day, and very possibly not thinking about a single thing that had to happen for that food to reach you.

In 2026 though, a couple of Agritech founders have put their foot down and decided that being the “backbone” in theory isn’t enough. It’s time to add substance and results to it.

In this snapshot, we’re getting into all of it.

Follow the hand! 👇

The Agronomist Problem

Here’s something most people outside agriculture don’t know: Africa has a catastrophic shortage of agronomists.

They are the soil scientists, plant pathologists, and crop specialists that farmers need to diagnose disease, optimise fertiliser, and protect crop yields.

With the rate at which food is needed in Africa, you simply cannot train enough agronomists fast enough to serve a continent where 33 million smallholder farms produce up to 70% of the food supply.

So, some founders decided to stop trying to replace agronomists with more agronomists, and started building AI that thinks like one instead (genius, right? 😎)

KaraAgro AI, founded in Ghana, is a good example of this. It started with a simple mobile app that let farmers photograph their crops to detect disease. By 2025, they had evolved into a full aerial intelligence platform.

Through this solution, farmers in Ghana, Nigeria, and across the continent are now getting something that would have seemed like science fiction five years ago: instant, personalised, predictive farm intelligence, generated from a drone flight and processed by AI within hours. It’s as simple as a red circle on a tablet that says “this tree is diseased” or rows of crops being flagged because they need nitrogen.

The model has gotten serious institutional traction too. KaraAgro's tools are now being used by Ghana's Ministry of Food and Agriculture. In one project, they trained extension officers across every cashew-growing region in Ghana to fly drones and interpret the data. As their founder Darlington Akogo explains it: "The farmer does not have to be the user of the AI system. They are the beneficiaries of the insights"

In Nigeria, Integrated Aerial Precision (IAP) takes it even further 🥺. Their drones don’t just detect problems, they treat them!

From Olam Agri's 4,000+ hectare rice operations in Nasarawa State to smallholder cassava farmers in Oyo State, IAP's custom drones spray pesticides, broadcast seeds, and spread fertiliser with surgical precision, with farmers cutting input costs by 30% while increasing yields.

This is end-to-end aerial farming, hardware, pilot training and AI analytics all rolled in one!

Carbon is Now a Crop

(…hear me out)

This one is new and genuinely worth paying attention to. Who knew carbon tracking could be a thing in Africa! 🥳

Here’s how it works: African farmers who adopt sustainable land practices like agroforestry, cover cropping, and reduced tillage can have the carbon their soil absorbs verified by satellite and sold as credits on global voluntary carbon markets. Corporates in London, Frankfurt, and New York buy those credits to offset their own emissions.

And no, this isn’t just theoretical.

In Kenya’s Embu and Tharaka Nithi counties, smallholder farmers who interplanted fruit and nitrogen-fixing trees saw better soil, higher yields, and generated over 150,000 carbon credits over five years.

In Nigeria, a startup called Tourba is already running agroforestry pilots across Niger and Nasarawa states, covering over 15,000 hectares and training farmers for carbon certification over an 18-month programme, with ambitions to reach 1 million hectares of smallholder participation by 2030.

Think about what that means for you, Dear Innovator. The infrastructure layer for verifying, aggregating, and monetising carbon credits from fragmented smallholder farms across Africa is wide open. The farmers are ready. The buyers are ready. The gap to leverage is everything in between.

Funding For Everyone! 🤑

In June 2025, the Kenyan government announced a curriculum overhaul at the Kenya School of Agriculture to include AI, drones, and Big Data, as a strategic step to modernise agricultural education.

And in April this year, Ghana launched its National AI Strategy 2025–2035, with an initial national AI fund of $450 million to 2030, scaling to $1.4 billion from 2030 to 2035, with agriculture explicitly named as a priority sector.

In addition, UNDP’s timbuktoo AgriTech Hub, hosted in Ghana and backed by the Japanese government, has launched a Pan-African Incubation Network specifically for agritech startups, with cohorts kicking off from this month. The Katapult Africa Accelerator 2026 is also writing cheques between $150,000 and $500,000 for agritech and climate tech founders with validated products.

All this is to say that there’s been so much going on in Africa’s agricultural sector, and interested innovators (aka, you 🫵) only need to be pointed in the right direction.

The innovation in African agritech in 2026 is no longer about apps telling farmers it might rain. It’s also definitely way bigger than tractors and specialised tools.

The innovation and opportunity is in AI encoding the knowledge of agronomists who don’t exist yet; in drones becoming the field technician, the sprayer, and the analyst in one flight; and in turning the carbon a farmer’s soil absorbs into an asset class, among other things.

If you've been looking to get into a sector with real infrastructure gaps, real capital moving in, and real problems worth solving, the farm 🌱 might be where you need to plant your roots after all (all the pun intended 😉)

Do investors invest because they’re investors, or do they become investors because they invest? 🤔

Anyhoo, it’s been a minute since you got a newsletter from us (did you miss us?🥺), and while we’ve been away, a lot of things have been brewing in the innovation space.

Last week, SpaceX became the largest IPO in history!

With shares priced at $135, a whopping sum of $75 billion was raised and now, its valuation is sitting at roughly $1.8 trillion (fyi, don’t try to convert it to naira, you’ll faint like i did 👀😅)

Employees who’d held equity for years walked away changed, and for the ones who got in early enough, it was life-altering money. Those lucky cleaners 🥺

But SpaceX is just the opening act, because 2026 is shaping up to be the year for IPOs and some of the biggest names in tech are getting in line.

An IPO is when a private company opens itself up to the public to buy shares for the first time

OpenAI, last valued at $852 billion, is one of the companies investors are watching closely for a potential public listing. Anthropic, valued at $965 billion, is another name that keeps coming up in IPO conversations. And there’s also Canva too, the design tool your whole team already lives in 👀

These three companies, which have become part of how modern work gets done, are among the names most frequently mentioned whenever people talk about the next wave of tech IPOs. I don’t know innovator, but if you have enough time on your hands, now seems like a pretty good time to pay attention, don’t you think?

There are others too. It won’t pop up on your feed but we’ll tell you about it, ‘cos we’re fancy like that 💅

You might want to check out: Databricks, Stripe, Discord, and Revolut 🤫

If even a handful of these companies make it to the public markets this year, 2026 could end up being one of the biggest IPO years the tech industry has ever seen!

(note: this is not a financial advice)

Lately In The Consonance Community Of Innovators…

On the 12th of June, 2026, we did a thing at Consonance Connect London II (full recap is on LinkedIn)!

It was an unforgettable evening. Innovators connected, had fun, exchanged ideas, played a few games, and showed us exactly why we’re excited about the future they’re building.

By the end of the night, we had ourselves some winners 👇

1. 🏆 Adekunbi Ajai, founder of Relian, won the Money Moves game!

Ever lent money to someone and then completely forgotten about it until three months later? Relian helps people track loans to friends and family, monitor repayments, and keep a private record of who borrowed what and when.

So clean, so easy.

Go check out what she’s building 👉 here

2. 🥈 Our second runners-up, Kehinde and Taiwo Olawuwo, are the co-founders of Scan AI Slop.

As more developers rely on AI to write code, they’re building tools that help teams catch low-quality, AI-generated code before it reaches production. Their platform scans codebases for common AI-generated coding patterns, helping engineering teams maintain quality as AI-assisted development becomes more common.

Check them out 👉 here

A huge congratulations 👏 to all our winners, and thank you to everyone who joined us and made the evening what it was.

There’s another Consonance Connect in the works. Will you attend? Where do you think it’ll take place?

Leave a comment

Coming This Saturday:

Every day, you depend on it.

Most people never think about it.

Buttttt, a growing number of smart innovators are starting to wake up to the possibilities in this sector.

Be back on Saturday for a snapshot on this sector. You might be surprised by where the next wave of innovation is taking root 🌱😉

Three days.

That’s how long one of the world’s most powerful AI models was publicly available before a government stepped in.

On June 9, 2026, Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5. Three days later, the US government ordered the company to suspend access to both models for foreign nationals — including Anthropic’s own foreign national employees.

Naturally, Anthropic complied by disabling both models immediately.

Earlier this year, China also blocked Meta’s $2 billion acquisition of Manus, an AI agent company, on national security grounds. Beijing described the deal as a conspiratorial attempt to hollow out the country’s technology base.

Hmmm!

These are two separate governments, two separate continents, but somehow, both of ‘em are treating their AI like strategic assets, and are restricting exports of what they consider significant technologies.

We’ve seen all this before, with oil fields and nuclear programmes, and more than anything else, it should make African innovators pay close attention.

We May Have Been Looking At The Wrong Thing

Everyone has been talking about their latest model, AI agent, and who will build the next OpenAI, but it goes without saying that none of these things can actually function without…. you guessed it, electricity!

When historians look back on eras of economic transformation, they rarely focus on the thing that received the most attention at the time, which in our case, is AI.

The Industrial Revolution wasn’t really about factories, it was about coal. The twentieth century wasn’t really about cars, it was about oil. The internet age wasn’t really about websites, it was about telecommunications infrastructure.

This AI age seems to point towards power because every AI breakthrough eventually runs into the same physical reality: compute requires electricity.

Lots of it!

According to the IEA, data centres consumed around 415 terawatt-hours of electricity globally in 2024 (about 1.5% of total global consumption) and that figure is projected to roughly double to 945 TWh by 2030. That’s more electricity than Japan consumes in an entire year.

This is also probably why the world’s largest tech companies have quietly started behaving less like software businesses and more like utilities.

Here are a few examples, to give you context:

• Microsoft has been pursuing nuclear energy partnerships

• Amazon is signing long-term power agreements

• Google is investing heavily in energy procurement

• Some data centre operators are locking in electricity contracts years ahead of demand.

It’s not random and they’re not just doing this because it’s new and sounds exciting. They can see the bottleneck that’s coming.

Africa Hasn't Even Started

Today, let’s focus on Kenya.

In May 2024, Microsoft and G42 announced a $1 billion AI-focused data centre investment in the country. It was supposed to be geothermal-powered and was positioned as a flagship for East Africa’s cloud future.

We’d even written about and celebrated it but then, reality showed up.

Kenya’s national electricity grid currently runs at about 3,000 megawatts of installed capacity. The proposed data centre alone would have consumed roughly a third of that. According to President William Ruto: “To switch on that one data centre, we would need to shut off power for half the country. That’s when I knew there was a problem.”

Essentially, an innovation (and a really big one at that) was paused, not because of a funding, tech or a customer problem, but because of an infrastructural gap.

Hmmm! (again)

Dear Innovator, for years, conversations about technology on the continent have revolved around funding gaps, talent shortages, startup ecosystems, regulation, and market access. All important, of course, but AI is forcing another question into the room.

👉 Can the current power infrastructure support Africa’s AI ambition? 👈

Because if the answer is no, then the biggest opportunities of the next decade may not be where everyone is currently looking.

The obvious opportunity is building AI products (sure, by all means, please build one), but it’s also important to point out the less obvious opportunity, which is enabling the African companies that build AI products by providing the power infrastructure that they need!

You can do this through power generation, energy storage, grid optimisation, industrial cooling, microgrids, transmission infrastructure, power financing and even demand forecasting.

The opportunities are endless!

Dear Innovator, if you decide to take on one of these, what do you think your biggest blocker will be? Tell us 👇

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