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From Cyber Cafes to Y Combinator: Building Africa's Financial Future
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In this episode, we sit down with Wale Akanbi, one of the co-founders of Aella. Aella became the first African lending fintech admitted to Y Combinator in 2017 and has since served over 2 million users across Nigeria and the Philippines.
Wale's journey, from teaching himself programming in Nigerian cyber cafes to building AI-powered financial inclusion tools, is a masterclass in persistence, vision, and purpose-driven entrepreneurship.
He's currently building solutions at the intersection of AI and blockchain to solve cross-border trust challenges.
What we cover:
- The pressure and lessons from being one of YC's first African lending fintech
- Why every engineer doubled as customer service for their first 500K users
- The evolution from rule-based credit scoring to AI models predicting "willingness to pay"
- Building cross-functional teams in the age of AI
- His current work at the intersection of AI and blockchain for cross-border trust
- Why helping people matters more than power, fame, or money
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