Tech leaders urge resilience as funding tightens

CEO, Techcabal, Tomiwa Aladekomo

Amid macroeconomic volatility and tightening venture capital, leaders of Africa’s digital economy stressed the need for structural resilience, local adaptation and homegrown capital at the opening of the 2026 Moonshot Conference.

Speaking at this year’s Moonshot Conference, themed “Courage and Conviction” and organised by TechCabal in Lagos on Wednesday, OPay Chief Operating Officer and Chief Technology Officer, Dotun Adekunle, reflected on the company’s evolution since its initial strategy sessions in Nairobi in 2018.

In a keynote address titled “Markets That Refused to Break”, Adekunle addressed the challenges of navigating regulatory shifts, currency devaluations and social media panic, including a false rumour last September that threatened a run on the platform. He emphasised that endurance was a prerequisite for survival in Nigeria.

“Stubbornness is a business model in Africa. If you are going to survive in Nigeria, you have to be stubborn,” he noted.

Recalling the severe cash crunch of 2023, the OPay executive defended the role of agency banking networks and pushed back against what he described as mischaracterisations.

“Our agents are not demons… They are actually the infrastructure that powers cash and financial inclusion in Nigeria,” he asserted.

He stressed that fragile markets do not break businesses; rather, fragile assumptions do. Founders must design for the worst-case operational day, treat regulators as collaborative partners rather than adversaries, and recognise that while companies can compete on products, they must cooperate on security and resilience.

Setting the tone for the conference, TechCabal CEO, Tomiwa Aladekomo, said African startups raised $2.2bn across 275 deals between January and August, representing a 1.4 per cent increase compared with the same period last year.

According to him, while mega-deals continued to draw attention, early-stage funding had contracted sharply, with the number of small cheques at its lowest level since 2021.

He added that capital had become increasingly expensive and selective, placing greater emphasis on clear paths to profitability and corporate acquisitions.

“Our markets have proven a bit more complex than a lot of people expected or hoped,” the TechCabal CEO noted, pointing to high-profile exits and the departure of some global players from the region.

“No one is coming to solve our problems on the continent. We are going to solve it.”

The Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency, Dr Kashifu Abdullahi, represented by the agency’s Director of Special Duties, Dr Aristotle Onumo, argued that Africa must move from being a consumer of foreign technologies, such as imported artificial intelligence and cloud services, to becoming a creator of homegrown intellectual property.

“The true measure of our innovation ecosystem is not the number of startups we celebrate, but the number of sustainable enterprises it helps to create,” he stated.

He highlighted NITDA’s upcoming corporate innovation initiative, the Builders Festival, which is designed to bridge the gap between problem owners, local startups and investors through a targeted N3bn investment pipeline.

The Director of the Nigeria Country Office at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Uche Amaonwu, cautioned that AI risks widening existing inequalities if it is not deployed with deliberate attention to equity.

Pointing to the newly launched Nigeria AI Scaling Hub hosted by Lagos Business School, Anizor stressed that the ultimate test of technology adoption was not the volume of AI products launched, but whether they measurably improved maternal health outcomes, classroom learning and smallholder farmers’ yields.

“We can’t add trust after AI has scaled,” he said. “We need to build it as a condition to scale.”

Moonshot 2026 is a two-day event at which stakeholders are expected to focus on unlocking local pension and corporate capital, expanding cross-border trade rails, and establishing institutional frameworks to help African innovation move from regional potential to global prominence.