Ashraf Sabry | TechCabal

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Ashraf Sabry

Fawry, Founder & CEO

In 2025, Ashraf Sabry proved that Fawry, Egypt’s largest publicly listed fintech, is no longer just the country’s biggest bill-payment network, but a highly profitable, multi-business financial services group operating at a national scale. As founder and CEO, Sabry oversaw one of the company’s strongest years in its history.

Fawry significantly expanded its customer base, serving 53.8 million users, operating nearly 400,000 point-of-sale (PoS) terminals for informal businesses, and processing 6 billion transactions daily. Financially, this increase translated to new highs. In the first half of 2025, Fawry’s revenue grew 62.6% year-on-year to EGP 3.77 billion ($79.6 million), while net profit almost doubled to EGP 1.26 billion ($26.6 million). By Q3 2025, Fawry was posting gross margins close to 70%—meaning it was making nearly 2x what it spends—and an earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) margin near 59%, among the strongest in the region’s fintech sector.

The company’s growth was not driven solely by bill payments. Under Sabry, Fawry deliberately shifted its revenue mix toward banking services, lending, insurance, and business tools, which now generate more than two-thirds of its revenue. Its loan book, which has disbursed EGP 4.798 billion ($101 million) as of November, more than doubled in 2025, turning Fawry into a significant player in Egypt’s consumer and SME finance space.

Strategically, Sabry pushed Fawry deeper into the business market. The launch of Fawry Business, backed by acquisitions of Dirac Systems, Virtual CFO, and Code Zone, created an integrated platform combining payments with enterprise resource planning (ERP), accounting, payroll, and cash flow tools for SMEs. This moved Fawry into recurring B2B software and financial-operations revenue, critical for long-term defensibility. Fawry also adopted a new holding company structure, designed to manage its growing portfolio of subsidiaries.

Sabry’s leadership sets a new standard for what maturity in African fintech can look like.

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