AFF INDUSTRY INSIGHT WEEKLY(#E05)

A weekly round-up of reported startup, fintech, digital economy, emerging technology and innovation news from Nigeria and Africa, curated for Africa Fintech Foundry and Access Bank audiences.

OPay plans to list on the Nigerian Exchange after all

OPay is planning to list its shares on the Nigerian Exchange, which is potentially the most significant technology listing in the history of Nigeria’s capital market. It is not yet clear whether this runs alongside the planned $4 billion US IPO or follows it as a dual listing. The case for listing at home is in the numbers: $358 billion in gross transaction value in 2025, revenue up 161% to $536.3 million, and 88.1% of that revenue generated in Nigeria. Read more

Ventures Platform closes Fund II at $84 million, above target

Ventures Platform closed its VP Pan-African Fund II at $84 million on 26 August, beating a $75 million target, with the EBRD, Norfund and the Ashesi University Foundation joining existing backers including the IFC and British International Investment. For scale: the six African venture funds that reached final close in all of 2025 raised roughly $107 million between them. An early backer of Paystack, Moniepoint and PiggyVest, the firm will write cheques of up to $3 million and has already funded five companies in Kenya, South Africa and Egypt. Read more

ThriveAgric raises ₦5.3 billion in its first commercial paper issue

Y Combinator-backed agritech ThriveAgric raised ₦5.3 billion ($3.93 million) on 25 August in the first series of a SEC-approved commercial paper programme that could reach ₦50 billion. Oversubscribed against a ₦5 billion target, it marks the company’s first entry into Nigeria’s debt capital markets and widens its lender pool beyond banks. “This is why it’s not equity; it is debt to expand our business in Nigeria,” chief executive Uka Eje said. The proceeds fund commodity aggregation rather than crop production. Read more

Nomba and Synafare commit ₦2 billion to solar financing for SMEs

Nomba and renewable energy financier Synafare announced a ₦2 billion ($1.4 million) lending commitment on 28 August, to be deployed over 24 months to help about 300 SMEs buy solar panels, inverters and batteries. Synafare pre-qualifies businesses; Nomba runs its own credit assessment and disburses directly to the merchant. It targets two constraints at once; more than 80% of Nigeria’s 40 million MSMEs have no formal credit access, and solar is just 1.5% of the energy mix. Read more

Askya opens an AI accelerator that takes no equity and no fees

Askya Investment Partners opened applications on 24 August for a six-week programme for African AI startups, with a minimum commitment of $200,000 to at least one of the ten participants and no cash or equity required to join. Founder Babacar Seck was a founding member of Proparco’s $300 million venture programme and later chief executive of Digital Africa, backing nearly 20 startups including Moniepoint and Jumia. The stated ambition is scale: building “tech Dangotes” rather than a portfolio of small exits. Read more

Moniepoint winds down MonieWorld, ending its first push outside Africa

Moniepoint announced on 25 August that it is discontinuing MonieWorld, its UK diaspora remittance product, less than 18 months after launch and after filings showed $7.39 million earmarked for the London expansion. The decision was not driven by weak usage, monthly transaction volumes among UK users had risen 70%, but by where the capital works hardest. Moniepoint is redirecting the infrastructure it built toward Nigeria, where it processed $294 billion in annualised transactions in 2025, and Kenya. Read more

Lisk shuts down its blockchain, cutting a funding line for African Web3

Swiss blockchain company Lisk announced on 25 August that it will discontinue its blockchain on 31 October and wind down its DAO, pivoting to financial software for businesses. The African consequence is the funding pipeline: Lisk had backed Nigeria’s Azza and ClapMi, South Africa’s LovCash and Rwanda’s Afrikabal through its EMpower Fund. It lands hard on a sector where African blockchain funding already fell 26.6% to $90.1 million in 2025. Read more

Three operators now hold nearly 70% of Nigeria’s ISP market

NCC data released on 25 August shows active ISP subscribers rose 19.6% in six months to 420,989. Spectranet leads with 111,384, followed by Starlink on 98,642 and FibreOne on 56,486, nearly 70% of the market between them, from a register of more than 200 licensed providers. Smaller ISPs are squeezed by rising costs and 4G and 5G networks that now deliver comparable speeds. The wider perspective is starker: licensed ISPs account for just 0.27% of Nigeria’s 156.4 million active internet subscribers. Read more

NITDA urges CBN to extend oversight to fintechs, cloud and telecoms

Speaking at the CBN Committee of Departmental Directors retreat in Lagos on 24 August, NITDA Director-General Kashifu Inuwa argued that supervising banks alone is no longer enough, calling for an end-to-end view covering fintechs, cloud providers and telecom networks. His warning: a failure at an external provider could spread across the financial system even while the affected bank stays operational. The CBN has begun tightening; acquirers and processors must now maintain dual connections to NIBSS and Unified Payment Services. Read more

CBN sandbox closes 31 August, with an open banking track alongside virtual assets

Applications for Cohort 2 of the CBN Regulatory Sandbox close on 31 August, and the less-discussed half of it matters most. Alongside the Virtual Asset Service Provider track, there is a Data-Enabled Financial Services track built around permission-based data sharing; effectively a supervised testing ground for open banking, fraud prevention and real-time risk analytics. Nigeria has had an open banking rulebook for years without much open banking to show for it; this is the first structured route to test it live. Read more

SEC’s proposed ₦30 million crypto fee could price startups out of the market

The SEC is proposing tougher requirements for digital asset businesses, including a ₦30 million registration fee and minimum capital of up to ₦2 billion for exchanges, custodians and virtual asset platforms. Stronger oversight is the intent, but the cost of entry is the effect: for an early-stage Nigerian crypto startup, the question stops being whether it can meet the rules and becomes whether it can afford to enter the regulated market at all. Read next to the SEC’s sandbox admissions, the direction is clear; a supervised path in, priced for companies with balance sheets behind them. Read more

FTSE Russell confirms Nigeria’s return to Frontier Market status

FTSE Russell confirmed on 27 August that Nigeria’s reclassification from Unclassified to Frontier Market status takes effect from the open of trading on 21 September, having found no material settlement or funding issues since the June move to T+1. Nigerian equities snapped an 11-day losing streak on the news. For fintechs weighing a domestic listing, OPay among them, the timing is not incidental: index inclusion brings passive flows and foreign institutional attention to the NGX. Read more

MTN has 5 million fintech users in Nigeria and wants 30 million

MTN wants around 30 million fintech users in Nigeria, up from five million today. Group-wide the business already has scale: MoMo monthly active users rose 12.1% to 70.8 million in the six months to June, with transaction value up 33.8% in constant currency to $330.5 billion. MTN is bringing in technology from Alipay and Ant International and preparing to lend off its own balance sheet, pointing to an MSME financing gap the IFC puts at $32.2 billion in Nigeria alone. Read more

Nigeria picks Thales Alenia Space and IAI to build two new satellites

France’s Thales Alenia Space and Israel Aerospace Industries have been selected to build NIGCOMSAT-2A and NIGCOMSAT-2B, beating Airbus, China Great Wall and Turkish Aerospace Industries. The timing is tight: NIGCOMSAT-1R launched in 2011 on a 15-year design life, and careful fuel management extends it only to 2028, with launches planned for late 2028 and 2029 or 2030. The cost has not been disclosed. Read more

Intron’s Sahara v2.5 follows African speakers who switch languages mid-sentence

Nigerian voice AI company Intron launched Sahara v2.5 at the Deep Learning Indaba in Lagos on 26 August, adding code-switching speech recognition across 12 African languages plus what it says is the world’s first African trilingual model, moving between Kinyarwanda, English and French. Total coverage now reaches 31 African languages, with average word error rate at 34.3% against 53.8% for Google’s Gemini 3.6. The commercial case is direct: contact centres, hospitals and banks stop requiring customers to change how they speak in order to be understood. Read more

Africa’s data sovereignty push is reshaping the AI race, and AWS wants in

From Nigeria to Kenya and South Africa, regulators are requiring sensitive data to stay within national borders or imposing stricter conditions on transferring it abroad; a response to data becoming the raw material of AI. That creates a real tension for global cloud providers: AI systems need volume, while the same data is increasingly governed by rules on where it can be stored and processed. AWS is betting it can hold both sides, offering access to AI and global infrastructure while leaving control of sensitive data local. Read more

MTN targets 150MW in the first phase of an AI data centre push

MTN is targeting 150MW of capacity in a first phase spanning South Africa and Nigeria, developed through Africa Data Hub Holding, a venture with a UAE-backed investment platform in which MTN will hold only a minority stake. The partner provides most of the capital and technical expertise; MTN brings the footprint, land and power arrangements. It is a capital-light route into the compute layer at the moment sovereignty rules are making local capacity a requirement rather than a preference. Read more

AFF publishes The Fundability Architecture, its H1 2026 whitepaper on why African startups stall

AFF published The Fundability Architecture, its H1 2026 whitepaper. Its argument: African startups no longer fail for lack of money, but for lack of fundability. Funding fell from $4.6 billion in 2022 to about $2.2 billion in 2024; capital did not leave, the terms changed. Drawing on AFF Ecosystem Roundtable 7.0, the paper sets out six findings on what now separates startups that raise from those that stall. Free and ungated. Download the whitepaper