It’s here: The Builders’ List 2025

Yesterday, we talked about the momentum of 2025: the raises, the acquisitions, and the quiet resilience that defined the rebound. We promised to show you the people behind those headlines.

The wait is over. The Builders’ List 2025 is live.

Explore the Builders’ List.

From 600 to 49

We began this journey in August with a longlist of over 500 names representing every corner of the African tech ecosystem. The TechCabal newsroom applied a rigorous rubric to find the individuals who didn’t just participate in the year but defined it through specific milestones and measurable impact.

Now, we have presented the final 49.

This is not a list of the loudest voices; it is a definitive record of the people, operators, innovators, enablers, connectors, and keepers who created durable value when it mattered most.

A new way to see the ecosystem

We designed the 2025 microsite to be more than a gallery of names. It is an archive of the year’s progress:

• Filter by category: See the Keepers safeguarding policy or the Operators scaling systems in real-time.
• Human stories: Read snapshots that focus on substance over hype, what they actually built, not just their titles.
• The 2025 lens: Every builder included has a concrete achievement or inflection point tied specifically to this year.

Beyond the headlines

Whether it is the product thinkers shaping what comes next or the connectors catalysing collaboration across borders, these 49 individuals represent the full spectrum of African brilliance.

The list is now yours to explore. We hope it surprises you, validates your own work, and changes how you see the future of technology on the continent.

Justice Eziefule is the co-founder of Metastable Labs and one of the builders behind Liquid, a decentralised lending protocol for prediction markets. His path into tech has been shaped by bold career pivots: from walking away from a hairdressing apprenticeship at 19 to taking an unpaid internship at OlotuSquare instead of a traditional corporate placement. That choice led him to Rivers State Tech Creek, where he became an SQL instructor and set the foundation for a career defined by risk-taking and independent thinking.

• Explain your job to a five-year-old.

Imagine you have a big box of Lego, and you can build anything you want with it. My job is like that, but instead of Lego pieces, I use code to build things on phones and computers.

I also help run the team that decides what we should build, kind of like being the person who says, “Let’s go outside and play,” and then helps everyone choose teams and what game to play.

So I’m both someone who creates things and someone who leads the building of new ideas, making sure everything works so people can use it every day.

• What’s the hardest trade-off you've had to make while building a prediction-market lending protocol?

We originally built Liquid as an insurance product for prediction markets. After announcing it on X and spending weeks testing the math, we realized the economics were broken. High premiums were too expensive for traders, but lower premiums caused liquidity providers to lose money and created bad debt.

After a month of work, it was clear the model was unviable. However, during that process, we stumbled upon a way to solve the gap-risk problem that previously made leverage in prediction markets impossible. We chose to abandon our initial work and pivot toward this breakthrough. That decision formed the foundation for the lending layer Liquid is today.

• Prediction markets are still early in Africa; why do you think Liquid can scale when the underlying market is still building (early) momentum?

We designed Liquid for a global ecosystem, so our growth isn’t limited by the maturity of any single region. However, we see Africa—and Nigeria specifically—as a massive opportunity. Nigeria is already a top-five crypto market globally, and users here adopt new financial tools far more quickly than traditional markets expect.

Even though prediction markets are in their early stages, the behavior we see in Africa—comfort with volatility and familiarity with crypto primitives—makes the continent a natural early adopter base for us. By building for a global audience while leveraging a region that embraces innovation this rapidly, we can scale Liquid long before the broader market reaches traditional maturity.

Sun King, a Kenyan cleantech startup, raised $40 million in equity investment from Lightrock. (Dec 12)

Here are the other deals for the week:

• Gigmile, a Nigerian fintech startup, secured an undisclosed funding from Yango Group’s Yango Ventures. (Dec 12)
• Bluworks, an Egyptian HRTech startup, raised $1 million in seed funding. The round was led by A15, Enza Capital, and Beltone Venture Capital, with participation from Acasia Ventures and strategic angel investors. (Dec 12)
• iVoiceUp, an Egyptian AI startup, secured an undisclosed funding from A15, a Cairo Venture Firm. (Dec 15)
• Volz, an Algerian traveltech startup, raised $5 million in a funding round led by a group of private investors, headed by Tell Group, a financial services company, with participation from Groupe Industriel Babahoum Algérie (GIBA). (Dec 16)
• Bildup, a Nigerian AI startup, raised $400,000 in an angel investor round, backed by a group of undisclosed investors. (Dec 17)
• Kayko, a Rwandan fintech startup, raised $1.2 million in a seed funding round. The round was led by Burrow Capital, the Luxembourg Development Agency (LuxDev), Hanga Ignite, and develoPPP Ventures. (Dec 17)

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more funding announcements. Before you go,what is the future of digital health in Nigeria? Find out here.