Building a billion dollar startup
Digitize a million by 2030
It’s 00:46am and am thinking how am l going to make this vision “Digitize a million by 2030” come through. As am typing a thought comes up. Its not my battle, it’s the Lord’s.
10 months ago l moved from Russia to build Kayibay. In my mind l had one goal → help SMEs in Africa make more online. The vision was clear and still is.
A little bit of stats
Africa has one of fast growing economies in the world. As highlighted by Strive Masiwa in 2000 when he founded Econet, 75% of the people in Africa had not head a phone ring. Fast forward 2025, ~75% have smart phones.
From 2000 to 2025 the African population doubled from ~800M to 1.55B. The internet penetration surged from 0.5% to 43.75%. With the African population expected to increase by almost a billion by 2030. We have something here!
These are not just numbers this is evidence of the impact the past generation had on the continent. Hard work and determination from the old generation is undeniable. But what now?
The AI era?
A study by Mastercard and Genesis
A 2025 study by Genesis and Mastercard showed that the African digital economy is going to grow to a staggering ~$1.5 trillion by 2030.
According to the study the growth is going to be mainly influenced by the by rising internet access, expanding financial inclusion and a surging demand for secure and reliable digital financial services, this growth signals a new era of economic opportunity for millions of people and businesses across the continent.
The vision
Kayibay’s vision is to digitalise 1 million businesses by 20. Small busineses in Africa face 4 major problems.
Distribution (Visibility)
Inefficient manual operations
Payments ( Broken banking system)
Logistics (Fragmented Systems)
Our vision at kayibay mainly focuses on two problems payments and operations. With main goal of making it easy for businesses to do business online and at the same time opening their businesses to the global economy.
This include helping partially digitized and non digitized businesses operate more digitally.
We will focus more on integrating reliable solutions to the platform. With the goal of bringing solutions closer to the MSMEs so that they can focus on the main thing.
I think we are going to build the unified ecosystem. Unifying banking aand business perations for MSMEs.
Building an AI first company
Its undeniable that if we have what is going to enbale us to be able to digitize these business it going to be the velocity of innovation from AI and the mass adorption of our solutions from the small busineses. Both these factors have not been possible before and this is big breakthrough and a miracle that we living at this crossroads where we are reimaginining commerce in Africa and drawing a line which is going to be commerce before and after AI in Africa.
This is an intresting journey for us from seing how these MSMEs are going to be leveraging previsiouly expensive technology at much cheaper price. What has been really in my mind is how as founders in Africa we will get to build/ model real solutions to transform of communities to be more productive within the context of of cultures, and enviroments.
A journey of faith
Its nothing at the end than a journey of faith. Reimagining how people are going to be working in the next five to ten years is a journey of struggle and obstacles. To be able to go through this and still stay focused on the vision, l do believe that l and the people who are going to be buidling kayibay need to be grounded on faith.
As a christian i reminded of Hebrews 11: 1 "Now faith is the substance of things not seen the evidence of things hoped for”. As i build Kayibay l will keep on looking unto Jesus who is the author and finisher of my faith because one thing i know is “I can do all things through Christ who streghten me” - Phil 4:13
Peace✌️