Ridwan Olalere

Quick Links

Ridwan Olalere

Ridwan Olalere

LemFi, Co-Founder & CEO

What began as a remittance product serving African migrants evolved, under Ridwan Olalere’s leadership, into a full-stack financial infrastructure for people who live between systems: earning in tightly regulated economies and sending money into emerging markets.

In 2025, their focus has been, beyond expansion, about global legitimacy: embedding compliance, banking-grade controls, and trust into a platform designed for cross-border economic mobility. This approach crystallised with LemFi’s launch of Global Accounts for users in Nigeria. People could now open and operate real USD and GBP accounts without worrying about workarounds, giving them direct access to international earnings, the ability to hold value in multiple currencies, and a control over when to convert funds. While other products provide this offering, this deepens LemFi’s moat in a product ecosystem with users already navigating multiple systems.

In May 2025, LemFi reinforced its institutional ambition through the acquisition of UK-based credit fintech Pillar. The move was strategic: importing credit rails and addressing immigrant credit visibility inside the UK system itself. LemFi followed with the launch of a credit card, a Send Now, Pay Later product, and a regulated savings offering paying up to 3.92% annual interest via a partnership with ClearBank; further proof that the company was building for permanence.

By the end of the year, the platform served more than two million customers across over 27 countries; anchored in African corridors, yes, but no longer defined by African identity alone. Beyond scaling LemFi, Olalere has proved that African-led fintechs can still find growth inside the world’s toughest systems, and is driving players to take that path seriously.

In 2025, Olalere’s LemFi stopped being just a remittance app; it’s quickly becoming infrastructure for immigrants, diaspora communities, and anyone forced to navigate the gaps between where they earn, where they live, and where their money needs to work.

How We Selected

Building anything of value is hard anywhere in the world. In Africa, it is harder. The Builders’ List recognises people doing it anyway.

Beyond shipping products, Africa’s technology ecosystem constantly navigates unreliable power, fragmented logistics, weak public infrastructure, and regulatory uncertainty—often all at once. Progress is rarely linear, and success is usually hard-won.

Founders alone do not make the industry. It is sustained by people doing a variety of work, some of it invisible but critical to the industry’s success. To recognise them, TechCabal is launching The Builders’ List: an annual index of the most consequential people shaping Africa’s technology ecosystem in the calendar year. It is a record of who’s building, and what their work reveals about the system they are building within.

For the inaugural edition, our selected Builders are grouped across five categories:

Operators: Those who make systems work at scale.
Innovators: Those creating new products, models, or technical possibilities.
Enablers: The individuals and institutions lowering the cost of building for others.
Organisers: Those connecting people, capital, and opportunity.
Keepers: The stewards of trust, continuity, and institutional memory.

Together, these roles offer a more complete map of how the ecosystem functions.

The Builders’ List is an editorial project led by the TechCabal newsroom, informed by independent reporting and conversations with founders, operators, investors, policymakers, and long-time ecosystem observers across the continent and the diaspora.

Our selections were based on our assessment of what materially changed within the calendar year, from infrastructure to policy or scale, rather than reputation or momentum alone. Where work is still emerging, progress was evaluated within the realities of the sector, market, and country in which it occurred.

Candidates were assessed comparatively and contextually. Starting from over 600 deeply researched names spanning all 54 African countries, we weighed outcomes against each builder’s operating environment—geography, regulation, capital access, impact and institutional maturity. Context that applies in Lagos doesn’t automatically translate to Kigali or Dakar.

Final decisions were made through editorial review. While external perspectives informed our reporting, the list reflects TechCabal’s independent editorial judgment.

This process, as our first, has been a critical learning curve. It reminded us that Africa’s technology ecosystem is far broader than funding headlines suggest—spanning hardware engineers in Cairo, beekeepers in rural Kenya, ministers rewiring infrastructure, and documentarians building institutional memory.

We learned that in 2025, the builders who matter most are no longer defined by capital raised or growth velocity, but by what they’ve made durable. This list revealed an ecosystem maturing past obsessions with scale and spectacle, toward the quieter work of building things that last—profitable businesses, regulatory frameworks, talent pipelines, and infrastructure others can build on.

The Builders’ List will return in 2026, and the patterns will shift. But the commitment remains: to document not just who is building, but what their work reveals about the system taking shape.

Africa’s technology ecosystem is firmly in its endurance era

Temitayo Jaiyeola, Senior Reporter and Lead Curator, The Builders’ List