Marième Diop

Quick Links

Marième Diop

Marième Diop

Dakar Network Angels, Co-Founder

Before Marième Diop co-founded the Dakar Network Angels (DNA) in 2018, Francophone Africa lacked a structured mechanism for local business leaders to provide a “first check” and mentorship to tech founders.

Often described as the “Architect of Francophone VC,” Diop’s work through the Dakar Network Angels (DNA), her work managing a €50 million fund at Orange Ventures, and her current role overseeing the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation’s venture capital activities have channeled much-needed investments into early-stage startups in the region.

In 2025, Francophone Africa emerged as the continent’s “resilient frontier.” While global venture capital experienced a significant “funding winter,” this region—spanning 29 countries—actually increased its funding by 15% in recent years, defying the broader 30% decline across Africa.

Diop’s DNA contributed to this traction. Most notably, the network participated in the $1.8 million pre-seed round for REasy, a Cameroonian real estate tech startup. This was a landmark “cross-border” syndicate involving DNA and the Cameroon Angels Network (CAN). The platform uses blockchain and AI to streamline property transactions and management in Central Africa, addressing a massive transparency gap in the region’s real estate market.

This deal resulted in landmark policy advancements. REasy became the first fintech in the region to co-design an official foreign exchange framework with the Bank of Central African States (BEAC), which unlocked compliant cross-border payments for SMEs operating across borders in the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC) zone.

Also in 2025, Diop launched Leapstage Capital, a pre-seed and seed stage venture firm that creates a “funding conveyor belt” where DNA provides the initial validation through angel investments and Leapstage provides the follow-on capital needed to scale across the continent.

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