Africa's biggest opportunities have always been friction problems.
The capital just takes twenty years to notice.
In 2006, Opeyemi Awoyemi was a first-year student at OAU, trying to get a website online.
It took him three days. He had to source a virtual card, go to the bank, scan the receipt, send it to the card provider, take the card to a café, buy the hosting, then actually host it. Three days. For a simple website.
His response was not to complain about the infrastructure gap (maybe he did). It was to build GO54 (formerly Whogohost), now Nigeria’s number one domain registrar, and eliminate the friction for everyone who came after him.
I thought about that story, and my conversation with Ope on my podcast, a lot this week when the Anthropic and Gates Foundation announced a $200 million partnership, with part of the work focused on improving AI performance in African languages. Better open-data collection. Better labelling. Making AI actually usable across the continent.
It’s a meaningful commitment, but it’s all too familiar. I’ll explain.
The friction was always there. Getting online in 2006 was a three-day ordeal. Navigating Nigeria’s job market in 2009 (before Ope founded Jobberman Nigeria) was fragmented and paper-based. Accessing credit, processing payments, moving goods across borders - every one of these was a friction problem hiding in plain sight. The capital didn’t create those opportunities. It just eventually followed the founders, who were already solving them.
What $200 million in language AI funding tells me is that language access is the current version of the same problem. AI tools built primarily on English and Western data don’t work properly for most of the people on this continent. That gap is not a niche. It’s foundational infrastructure, the same way domain hosting was foundational infrastructure in 2006. The founders who are building in that layer right now, before the capital fully arrives, are the ones worth watching. It’s also what excites me about one of my portfolio companies, ToumAI.
This is the part that gets missed in the week’s headlines. The Africa Forward Summit mobilised €23 billion. The FT just released a new list of Africa’s fastest-growing companies. New seed funds launched in Namibia and across the continent. Lots of activities happening in the ecosystem.
But capital that arrives from the outside, through channels designed for different markets, on timelines set by foreign priorities, is not the same as local founders building local solutions from first principles.
Microsoft announced a $1 billion data centre project in Kenya in 2024. This week, Reuters reported it had stalled, talks broke down over guaranteed payment terms. Cloud infrastructure that East African startups were counting on was delayed because a foreign company and the national government couldn’t agree on the commercial structure.
That’s not a criticism of Microsoft or the Kenyan government. It’s an illustration of what dependency looks like in practice. The infrastructure you don’t control moves at someone else’s pace.
Ope’s entire thesis, the reason he built Fast Forward Venture Studio as a studio rather than a conventional fund, the reason he talks about backing “fundamentals-fluent” founders before venture-fluent ones, is a version of the same argument applied to capital. Don’t wait for the foreign model to arrive and fit itself to your context. Build the local layer. Build it before the money shows up. Build it so the money has somewhere worth going when it does.
The Anthropic and Gates Foundation funding is good news. The new seed vehicles are good news. The FT rankings are good news.
But the founders who will build the most enduring companies from this moment are probably not the ones waiting for the $200 million to land. They’re the ones who already spotted the friction, decided it didn’t make sense, and started building anyway.
Just like a first-year student did in 2006 with a virtual card and a three-day problem.
Listen to the full conversation I had with Ope last week on The Grinders Table podcast for more insights that he shared.
I loved reading this! A conversation I’ve been having is on the ways that AI has lowered the barrier to building apps but people still miss the fundamentals that’s critical to building a business in Africa. And it begins from being able to identify frictions in the way it truly occurs in your market and then building a solution for it.