Deepankar Rustagi | TechCabal

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Deepankar Rustagi

Deepankar Rustagi

OmniRetail, CEO

Deepankar Rustagi’s OmniRetail is turning informal retail—often too fragmented to finance and opaque to scale—into something manufacturers, lenders, and logistics partners can finally trust.

An outstanding signal for this in 2025 is the participation of 64-year-old manufacturing titan, Flour Mills of Nigeria, in its $20 million Series A funding round in April. The round, led by Norfund and Timon Capital, signalled deep industry confidence in the B2B e-commerce platform simplifying a convoluted but critical market. Legacy industry is no longer just watching, but betting on it.

Founded in 2019, OmniRetail is on the path to reshaping West Africa’s notoriously unwielding informal retail sector with tech-enabled logistics and financing solutions. It connects 145 manufacturers, including Flour Mills, to 150,000 retailers and with 85 partner warehouses and 1,100 third-party trucks, delivers goods directly to retailers’ doorsteps. Its collateral-free financing model allows cash-strapped vendors to stock up, ensuring consistent demand for manufacturers’ products. Beyond logistics, the startup’s real-time data on demand trends, stock levels, and retailer preferences enable manufacturers to find and meet demand.

In 2025, OmniRetail acquired the payment solutions provider Traction Apps, a move that immediately scaled its financial ecosystem. The combined entity is now positioned to process over ₦2 trillion in annual transactions and facilitate ₦200 billion in loans for an expanded network of 160,000 retailers across wholesale and retail sectors.

Further validating Rustagi’s profitable model, Silverbacks Holdings partially exited its stake in June 2025, securing a robust 5x return on its investment. This milestone underscored the success of OmniRetail’s strategy of digitising the supply chain, a platform that connects 150,000 retailers and disburses approximately ₦19 billion in Buy Now, Pay Later credit monthly.

In 2025, Rustagi shook up the B2B retail market and built an indispensable, profitable financial and logistics engine ready to accelerate retail digitisation across Nigeria, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire.

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