A tech success story. How Africa's Talking equips African software developers with APIs

The East Africa Business Podcast: African Start ups | Investing | Entrepreneurship | Interviews

In this episode I speak with Bilha Ndirangu who is the CEO of one of Africa's most successful tech start ups.
Started in Kenya nearly 10 years ago, Africa's Talking now serves over 5000 customers and has operations in 18 African countries.
Most of this growth has been self-generated, though last year they took on investment of around $10m to fuel the company's expansion.
For those who have not worked in the tech space, an API (or Application Program Interface) is a way that software developers connect up different bits of technology.
Without APIs things get tricky because if, for example, you want to build an app that sends an SMS to users you need to negotiate directly with the telco to allow them to send messages on your behalf.
This comes with heaps of technical complexity (and sometimes regulation to conform to) which mean it's incredibly painful to do.
Africa's Talking takes away all of that complexity by doing the hard work on behalf on developers.
They go across Africa and complete of the headache stuff of integrating with telcos and banks, and then allow developers to seamlessly plug in so their apps/ businesses can easily begin accepting payments and sending SMSes.
It's a great business model which gets better with the network effects of them expanding to more countries.
In this episode Bilha and I talk about the company's formation, how it's changed upon its recent growth spurt, and how the bigger the company gets, the more it becomes defensible against outside competition.
I really hope you enjoy this episode with Bilha.
READ MORE AT:
https://theeastafricabusinesspodcast.com/2019/10/03/a-sexy-tech-success-story-how-africa's-talking-equips-african-software-developers-with-apis/