Kaushik Burman

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Kaushik Burman

Kaushik Burman

Spiro, CEO

By 2025, Africa’s electric mobility conversation had outgrown pilots. Kaushik Burman was already building at scale.

As CEO of Spiro, Burman spent the year turning electric two-wheel transport into a functioning, pan-regional system. Since taking on the role in 2023, his focus has been consistent: scale the infrastructure first, then let adoption follow. In 2025, that strategy reached a critical threshold.

Spiro expanded its electric motorcycle and battery-swapping network across six core African markets, with pilot rollouts in Tanzania and Cameroon, converting what had once been isolated deployments into a connected regional footprint.

The company surpassed 60,000 deployed electric motorcycles and built more than 1,200 battery-swapping stations, enabling tens of millions of low-carbon kilometres of daily transport. By year-end, Spiro was on track to exceed 100,000 deployed vehicles, a scale few clean-mobility startups on the continent have ever reached.

In October, Spiro raised $100 million, but capital was a consequence of execution, not its driver. What distinguished the company’s 2025 was how that capital was deployed: into dense, repeatable infrastructure rather than cosmetic expansion.

Under Burman’s leadership, Spiro also deepened local manufacturing, scaling assembly operations in Kenya and tightening the feedback loop between production, deployment, and maintenance. This reduced supply-chain fragility and anchored the company more firmly within local economies — a necessary condition for any mobility system built to last.

By the end of 2025, Spiro had moved decisively from proof of concept to system-level execution. Burman’s contribution is proving that electric mobility can work in Africa and demonstrating that infrastructure determines who scales. In doing so, he forced the market to move past whether electric mobility was viable and reckon instead with how fast it could grow.

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