Kola Aina

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Kola Aina

Kola Aina

Ventures Platform, Founding Partner

Kola Aina and Ventures Platform spent 2025 doing the one thing that matters most in African venture right now: raising institutional capital and deploying it. In November, Ventures Platform raised a second fund of $64 million, with participation that included the Nigerian government alongside heavyweight institutional backers such as IFC, Standard Bank, BII, and Proparco (Choose Africa VC), plus MSMEDA and AfricaGrow, one of the clearest signals yet of state and institutional confidence in local venture managers.

That fund was a signal of how far the firm has come, from a founder-led early-stage shop to a platform now credible to DFIs, banks, and public capital. The 2025 raise also sharpened Ventures Platform’s power in the ecosystem: more ownership at entry, more ability to defend positions, and more leverage to attract co-investors into later rounds.

Deployment in 2025 reflected that shift. The firm continued backing early-stage companies across fintech, enterprise software, healthtech, and climate, while tightening its emphasis on pricing discipline, founder governance, and capital efficiency. Several portfolio companies raised follow-on rounds during the year, benefiting from Ventures Platform’s increased signalling power with later-stage investors.

In 2025, Aina raised the kind of capital that lets African venture behave like an institution.

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