👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – Yadea joins Kenya’s e-bike race

TGIF. ☀️

Let’s dive in.

Somtochi Onyekwere is an open-source maintainer and a Senior Software Engineer with over five years of experience building reliable, scalable systems that help developers deploy applications at global technology companies. At Fly.io, she works on Corrosion, the open-source distributed system behind the networking layer. Before Fly, she was a Developer Experience Engineer and maintainer of FluxCD, an open-source project for GitOps on Kubernetes that powers enterprise developer platforms at companies like Microsoft and ControlPlane.

• Explain your job to a five-year-old.

I work on the tools that let other people run their websites and apps, the ones you use on your phone every day. It’s a bit like building houses for people. Normally, if you wanted a house, you’d have to buy the land, gather the materials, and put it all together yourself. The companies I work with handle all of that for you. You just show up with your stuff and move in.

• What do you love about your job, and what frustrates you?

What I love about my job is the kind of problems I get to solve and the people I get to solve them with. Fly.io has some of the most outstanding engineers I’ve had the opportunity to work with. On the problem side, I enjoy working on distributed systems and figuring out how to scale them while keeping them reliable.

What both frustrates and excites me is Murphy’s Law: anything that can break will break. We work on systems that can fail but still need to be reliable enough to meet user needs. 

I remember sitting through my first incident and watching everyone move with urgency, fixing what was broken, and making sure things returned to normal. Now that I’ve had my own share of incidents, I’ve become better at debugging under pressure and learned to think about different failure modes from the start.

• Did your 16-year-old self ever imagine she’d end up in software engineering?

Sixteen-year-old me had a lot of interests: maths, physics, engineering, writing, and teaching. A lot of paths seemed exciting and viable back then. I’d just finished secondary school and was watching movies to pass the time. I always found myself drawn to the ones with a hacker at a computer, typing furiously, solving impossible problems, and helping the rest of the crew pull off the mission.

Just a day after Uber said it wants to double its electric boda (motorcycle) fleet in Kenya, a new competitor arrived with ambitions of its own.

On Thursday, Yadea, the Chinese manufacturer that said it has sold over 4.82 million electric bikes and scooters globally in 2025, announced its entry into Kenya through a partnership with local distributor KIFA. With Yadea’s expansion, more companies are converging on the same bet: that Kenya’s next generation of motorcycle transport will be electric.

State of play: Yadea will compete directly with manufacturers and operators such as Spiro, while sitting adjacent to ride-hailing platforms like Uber. The companies occupy different positions in the value chain, but they are ultimately chasing the same outcome: getting more riders onto electric motorcycles.

Uber does not manufacture bikes; it works with partners such as Spiro and fleet operators like Greenwheels Africa to put electric motorcycles on its platform. In fact, if Yadea gains traction in Kenya, it could one day become a supplier or partner rather than a rival.

Between the lines: Yadea’s first model, the KIFA, is aimed at boda boda riders. It is built to carry passengers and cargo, last a full day on a single charge, and stay affordable for working riders rather than target the premium market. Sales began this week.

Here’s where it gets interesting: Yadea generated RMB 37 billion ($5.4 billion) in revenue in 2025, up 31% year-on-year, but over 90% of that came from China. Africa is where it needs to find its next growth story. 

Zoom out: Kenya had 35,000 registered EVs by the end of 2025, almost all motorcycles. Spiro, Ampersand, Roam, Arc Ride, and now Yadea are all competing for the same boda boda rider. The market is real; what’s still being decided is who gets to own it.

Interswitch, a Nigerian payments company that powers card payments, interbank transfers, and digital commerce across Africa, has spent the last two decades as infrastructure; the pipes through which banks, fintechs, and merchants move money. 

Verve cards, Quickteller, and the interbank switching network that processes millions of transactions daily. What it hasn’t been, until now, is a banking technology vendor.

That changes with a new partnership with Temenos, the Swiss company whose core banking software runs in over 1,000 banks across 150 countries. 

Under the deal, Interswitch will use Temenos technology—covering core banking, digital banking, payments, wealth management, and financial crime management—to offer managed services to African lenders, both on the cloud and on-premises. The initial target markets are Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, and Kenya.

Why now: African banks are modernising, and the spend is real. Six Nigerian banks alone spent ₦268.7 billion ($171.5 million) on IT infrastructure upgrades in 2024. The banking-as-a-service (BaaS) market across the Middle East and Africa is projected to reach $27.1 billion in 2026. Interswitch is betting that African banks facing complex technology migrations would rather work with a local partner that already knows their systems than manage a global vendor relationship alone.

The competition is already there. CWG Plc distributes Infosys’s Finacle core banking application to major Nigerian banks including First Bank and GTBank. And Temenos itself is playing catch-up in Nigeria; it lost Sterling Bank in 2024 after the lender switched to SEABaaS, a custom-built local alternative. Interswitch’s existing relationships across the continent are the asset Temenos is really buying into here.

Zoom out: Verve crossed 100 million cards issued in December 2025. Interswitch has spent two decades earning trust at the infrastructure layer of African finance. The question is whether that trust transfers when it shows up not as the payments company, but as the company telling your bank how to run its core systems.

Spiro, a Beninese e-mobility startup, raised $215 million in funding from Impact Fund Denmark and Equitane. (June 1)

Here is the other deal for the week:

• Agriarche, a Nigerian agrictech startup, raised $1.8 million in catalytic funding from Cascador. (June 4)
• Koolboks, a Nigerian cleantech startup, raised $1.5 million in catalytic funding from Cascador. (June 4)
• Powerstove, a Nigerian cleantech startup, raised $1.3 million in catalytic funding from Cascador. (June 4)
• Stears, a Nigerian data and intelligence startup, raised $450,000 in catalytic funding from Cascador. (June 4)
• First Electric, a Nigerian e-mobility startup, raised $365,000 in catalytic funding from Cascador. (June 4)
• Fortics, a Nigerian healthtech startup, raised $146,000 in catalytic funding from Cascador. (June 4)
• Indigenius AI, a Nigerian AI startup, raised $250,000 in catalytic funding from Cascador. (June 4)
• Riwe, a Nigerian insurtech startup, secured undisclosed funding from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB), and the Islamic Solidarity Fund for Development (ISFD). (June 3)
• Dawar, an Egyptian cleantech startup, raised an undisclosed debt funding from GlobalCorp, Tawassou, and Commercial International Bank (CIB). (June 3)

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more funding announcements. Before you go, what is the future of African innovation? Find out here.