Mounir Nakhla | TechCabal

Mounir Nakhla

Mounir Nakhla

MNT-Halan, Founder & CEO

Mounir Nakhla is the founder and chief executive officer of MNT-Halan, Egypt’s first fintech unicorn and one of the Middle East and Africa’s most influential financial technology companies. In 2025,…

Mounir Nakhla is the founder and chief executive officer of MNT-Halan, Egypt’s first fintech unicorn and one of the Middle East and Africa’s most influential financial technology companies. In 2025, Nakhla cemented his reputation as a builder of a globally scalable fintech platform rooted in emerging markets, steering MNT-Halan through a year defined by international expansion and strategic investment.

A major focus of 2025 was global growth. Following its 2024 acquisition in Pakistan, Nakhla announced an aggressive expansion plan, committing up to $10 million to scale operations. The company outlined plans to open 100 new branches and business units, serve 200,000 customers, and deepen access to credit for Pakistan’s large unbanked population. In the Gulf, MNT-Halan’s UAE operations, launched in late 2024, continued to gain traction, with the company on track to reach 250,000 customers and disburse more than AED 350 million ($94.5 million) in loans by year-end. Its strategic acquisition of Turkey’s Tam Finans further strengthened its footprint as a leading non-bank financial institution.

Nakhla’s leadership also earned global recognition. The company was named to the Forbes Middle East Fintech 50 list for 2025 and continues to receive global acclaim for innovation.

By late 2025, MNT-Halan had served over 8 million customers and disbursed more than $13 billion in loans, powered by its AI-driven Neuron core banking system, central to Nakhla’s vision of scalable, inclusive finance.

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