When you hear that African tech startups have collectively raised $1.3 billion, it is easy to nod and move on. Folarin Aiyegbusi, Google’s Regional Lead for Startup Developer Ecosystem in Sub-Saharan Africa, wants people to stop and actually think about what that number means in practice.
Aiyegbusi, speaking at a media briefing titled Founders Conversation that brought together technology executives and journalists, said that capital volume alone fails to reflect actual value creation. He pointed out that when you hear $1.3 billion raised or thousands of jobs created, it becomes abstract, and what people need to understand is what these numbers actually mean for economic prosperity.
The briefing brought together startups including Termii, Bani, Lendsqr, E-doc Online, Scandium, and Emergency Response Africa, all of which have received support through Google’s continental accelerator programmes and funding vehicles.
Aiyegbusi argued that capital deployment across emerging tech markets functions primarily as stabilised foreign direct investment, building underlying digital infrastructure while driving systemic employment network effects. A single venture, he explained, scales from a direct footprint of 20 to 50 core corporate roles into broader economic opportunities across secondary vendor networks, operational dependencies, and local services.
This reframing is deliberate. Rather than measuring success by how much money a startup has raised or how many unicorns Africa can claim, Aiyegbusi and the founders in the room are pushing a different benchmark: is the money actually building infrastructure that makes the broader economy work better?
One of the clearest examples of infrastructure that still needs building came from Rodney Jackson-Cole, co-founder and CEO of Bani, a payments infrastructure provider.
Drawing on a decade of institutional and consumer digital banking experience across Kenya, Ghana, Senegal, and Nigeria, Jackson-Cole highlighted a persistent structural disconnect: while domestic real-time settlement rails within individual African markets are among the most advanced globally, cross-border commercial transactions between neighbouring markets remain prohibitively complex.
He framed the problem simply. If you are a merchant in Nigeria, how do you easily accept payments from a customer in Ghana or Senegal? Before Bani came in, most solutions depended heavily on traditional card transactions. But in most African markets, people do not have traditional bank accounts or cards. Everything is done via mobile money and digital wallets.
This is the gap Bani is trying to close. The company established a unified API architecture designed to aggregate disparate regulatory frameworks, local banking schemes, and mobile money protocols across West, East, and Central Africa into a single corporate treasury endpoint.
Having secured integration across major enterprise and retail footprints, including global brands like Levi’s, Nike, and Adidas, the platform is expanding its settlement capabilities into major Asian manufacturing and export hubs, with primary focus on China.
Jackson-Cole also cautioned against the common mistake of overestimating software and underestimating compliance. Despite regulatory complexities, the executive team maintains a long-term strategic target of positioning its unified settlement infrastructure to process up to 80 percent of commercial trade flows across African markets over the next 15 years
Termii’s general manager for Nigeria, Olajuwon Abayomi, made the case for his company’s contribution to Nigeria’s digital economy in the most direct way possible.
He said that if you have sent somebody money today and needed a one-time password, or received a notification to confirm that the funds went through, that notification or OTP was delivered in less than 10 seconds, and Termii was responsible. That is what the company has been doing for the last nine years.
It is a quiet but important point. The infrastructure that makes Nigerian digital payments feel safe and trustworthy, the instant confirmation message, the OTP that stops a fraudulent login, is being built and maintained by Nigerian startups that most users never think about. Termii is one of them.
The shift in conversation happening among these founders is not accidental. It reflects a wider reckoning in African tech investing.
The venture capital boom that flooded African startups with money between 2019 and 2022 has slowed significantly. Funding rounds are harder to close. Valuations are more scrutinised. And startups that built on growth-at-all-costs models, chasing user numbers to satisfy VC benchmarks rather than building sustainable revenue, have struggled to survive the tighter environment.
What Google-backed founders like those at this briefing are saying is that the metric that should have always mattered most is whether the product is solving a real problem that the economy actually needs solved. Cross-border payments that work. OTP delivery that is instant and reliable. Credit infrastructure that reaches businesses that banks ignore. These are not glamorous problems, but they are the ones that determine whether Africa’s digital economy functions at scale or fragments into isolated national markets.
The most valuable technology infrastructure is often the least visible. Nobody sees the API that routes a cross-border payment. Nobody notices the Termii system that delivers an OTP in under 10 seconds. But when these systems fail, everyone notices immediately.
The founders in the room at this briefing are making a deliberate choice to build that invisible infrastructure rather than chase the kind of headline metrics that look good in a funding announcement. Whether that approach attracts the kind of patient capital it requires is the challenge they all still face. But the direction they are pointing in, away from abstract billion-dollar figures and toward measurable economic impact, is one Nigerian tech needs more of right now.
