Ibrahim Sagna | TechCabal

Ibrahim Sagna

Ibrahim Sagna

Silverback Holdings, Exec. Chairman

Ibrahim Sagna and Silverbacks Holdings spent 2025 doing what remains rare in African venture and growth investing: exiting, repeatedly, and with disclosed returns. In May, Silverbacks recorded its eighth profitable…

Ibrahim Sagna and Silverbacks Holdings spent 2025 doing what remains rare in African venture and growth investing: exiting, repeatedly, and with disclosed returns. In May, Silverbacks recorded its eighth profitable exit, selling part of its stake in LemFi during the company’s $53 million Series B, generating a 29x return on capital invested.

Just weeks later, the firm announced its ninth profitable exit through a partial divestment in OmniRetail, following the startup’s $20 million Series A round, which included Flour Mills of Nigeria. That transaction returned 5x capital on Silverbacks’ investment, adding to a growing list of realised outcomes rather than paper mark-ups.

More unusually, Silverbacks paired these exits with performance disclosure. In 2025, the firm reported that its Nigerian exits had averaged 10.7x MOIC and 81.5% IRR over roughly two years and eight months, while exits from Egypt averaged 9.7x MOIC and 339% IRR over one year and seven months—numbers aimed squarely at institutional LP scepticism around African liquidity.

In 2025, Sagna published evidence of the exits, reinforcing Silverbacks’ positioning as one of the few Africa-focused platforms with a visible, repeatable exit record.

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