Author: Solomon King

Ayo Sopitan tells a version of his origin story that most founders would edit out. He didn’t set out to build a mining company. He set out to build a trading company — which is why, years later, the name on the door still reads Metalex: metal exchange, not metal extraction. “If I thought I was starting a mining company, I probably wouldn’t have started,” he says now, running the operation from a schedule that splits between remote mine sites across Africa and his family’s home in Houston, Texas. The company operates as Metalex Commodities globally, and as Metalex Africa…

I was in Aba recently to speak about startup investing when the conversation moved somewhere more consequential. An experienced eye-care professional — twenty years in business, more than 7,000 clients through his clinics — asked a direct question: how much is all of that worth? Not the chairs, the equipment, or the building. The twenty years. The reputation. The referrals. The trust. The name. Then someone told me about Emeka. He had built a sizeable business and was in talks to combine it with an older, smaller company in the same industry. The talks progressed well until the smaller company’s…

The instinct with a ranking like this is to lead with the order — MNT-Halan first, Swvl second, MaxAB third — and let the totals do the arguing. That instinct is wrong. A funding total tells you who raised the most. It doesn’t tell you why roughly the same amount of early capital, chasing roughly the same opportunity, produced a unicorn in one case and a fraud investigation in another. That question has to be answered before any number gets to make its case. The Split Start with Swvl and Capiter. Swvl raised $116 million in disclosed private capital before…

I had Ire Aderinokun on Angel’s Lounge a few weeks ago, and somewhere in the middle of that conversation I caught myself doing the thing I always do with guests I respect — asking a question I already half-knew the answer to, just to watch how they’d get there. Ire is not short on credentials. Nigeria’s first female Google Developer Expert in front-end web. Co-founder, COO, and VP of Engineering at Helicarrier, formerly BuyCoins, a Y Combinator company. An INSEAD MBA she just finished, which she’s now using to formalize what has quietly been five, almost six years of angel…

Burundi has fifteen commercial banks. The BRB’s — the official sector directory published by the Bank of the Republic of Burundi — lists them all with their capital, creation dates, and managing directors. BANCOBU sits at BIF 151.1 billion. BCB at BIF 15.5 billion. IBB at BIF 50.2 billion. The register is current as of 2024–2025, and it is the only public document that gives you every bank’s capital in one place. Most market commentary treats these fifteen as a single shallow pool — small, concentrated, government-influenced. That is true at the aggregate level. But for anyone deploying capital, opening…

Four new universities, backed by a sovereign wealth fund and a state bank’s private equity arm. Read at face value, this is Egypt using public capital to build higher-education infrastructure the state can’t build alone — the standard sovereign-fund-meets-social-need story, told the way every press release about it wants to be read. It’s not quite that. The Egypt Education Development Fund — a sub-fund of The Sovereign Fund of Egypt (TSFE) — didn’t buy into a university operator. It signed into a joint venture of joint ventures. A Joint Venture of Joint Ventures TSFE’s fund partnered with Al Ahly CIRA…

There are between 8,000 and 10,000 family offices worldwide today. Africa’s share of that number, according to Deloitte Private’s 2024 Family Office Insights Series, is 60 — a figure the report itself states plainly on page three of its executive summary, sourced to data compiled by Wealth-X, an Altrata company. North America alone has 3,180. Asia Pacific has 2,290. Sixty offices on a continent this size isn’t a rounding error. It’s close to a null result. And the strange part is that it doesn’t look like a wealth problem. The Africa Wealth Report 2025, published by Henley & Partners, estimates…

Poverty can make you look disciplined. I remember a conversation about fitness with a friend. He silently gloated about walking 20,000 steps daily. I smiled and acknowledged his walking prowess. 😃 But I thought to myself: if you walk 20,000 steps every day because you can’t afford a car, let’s wait till you get one. Let’s see if you’d still be getting that exercise. Because a lot of people mistake necessity for discipline. The Discipline You Didn’t Choose There are two kinds of fitness. The one imposed by circumstance. And the one chosen through discipline. The test only arrives when…

Somewhere inside PenCom’s May 2026 numbers sits a figure most people scroll past: ₦361.53 billion. That’s what pension funds currently hold in state government securities — 1.15% of the industry’s ₦31.32 trillion in assets. In Q4 2025, the same line item was 1.35% of a smaller ₦27.45 trillion pool. Total pension assets grew by roughly ₦4 trillion in five months. The slice going to states didn’t grow with it. If anything, it shrank. The instinct is to call this a risk story — a pool this lopsided must mean pensioners are exposed to one or two states’ fortunes. That’s…

Angel investing is an active sport. The crowd around the field is large. The players are few — and they know exactly who they are. The DNA Ayobami Ishola told me to speak with Bola, our mutual friend. Said she should join the network. It was well-meaning advice — the kind that comes wrapped in genuine enthusiasm for what Lagos Angel Network is building. And I tried. I genuinely did. But there is a conversation you can have with someone and know, mid-sentence, that the DNA simply isn’t there. Not because the person lacks intelligence or ambition or even capital…