Make VC cool again

Daniela Debebs is a customer experience (CX) expert and Product Specialist at Clay, a unicorn startup, and a rising voice in CX and product strategy. With a career journey that spans law, sales, go-to-market (GTM), product operations, and customer experience, she brings a rare blend of perspectives to scaling product-led growth.

Drawing on insights from 5,000+ customer interactions, she helps companies translate customer signals into practical steps for product and engineering teams, driving adoption, retention, and renewal. An expert communicator known for simplifying complexity, Daniela speaks and mentors on scaling CX initiatives, product-led growth, and career transitions into tech.

• Explain your job to a 5-year-old.

I help people use technology without feeling lost or frustrated. When something doesn’t work or feels confusing, I figure out how to make it easier. My job is a bit like solving a jigsaw puzzle. You hand me a bag of jigsaw pieces, and I help you figure out how to connect them (tools, data, and workflows) in a way that fits together and matches your business goals.

• What drew you to customer experience and product strategy?

I love solving challenges; I get a lot of fulfillment from digging into problems. I’ve been in the tech industry for a few years, and one of the most rewarding and challenging experiences I’ve had was working at an early-stage startup and helping launch its first product. I worked on market discovery and realized I constantly needed to clearly explain the problems we wanted to solve and why people should care. I spent time on discovery calls and setting up demo environments, which increased my curiosity about how people interact with products, not just how they work but how they use them.

CX gave me a front-row seat to those human moments and helped me better understand why they matter. Product strategy, on the other hand, gave me the tools to turn those insights into action. The blend of both lets me bridge what users need with what teams build.

• How did your early career in law and sales influence the way you approach product and CX today?

Law trained me to think critically and find structure in complexity. One of the most defining experiences in my career was working in the legal department of a financial institution. I had an incredibly smart manager who taught me how to pull insights from ambiguity, communicate with precision, and work through complex problems. That experience helped me build a lot of muscle, and the skills I honed there became the foundation for everything I’ve done since.

Sales, on the other hand, taught me to listen for what people aren’t saying and to see the role of empathy in communication. Clear, thoughtful communication is an underrated skill, and it’s at the heart of great customer experience and product strategy.

• If you could give one piece of advice to someone transitioning into tech from a completely different field, what would it be?

Experience is never irrelevant and can often be your biggest differentiator. Unconventional backgrounds often become the very thing that makes your perspective unique and your value recognizable in any space. Seeing your experience as a limitation only holds you back.

The key is learning to translate what you already know into new environments. Once you adopt that mindset, your background stops feeling like a weight and starts becoming your advantage. If you pair this with curiosity and a passion for learning, you will be unstoppable.

• What’s the hardest part about turning customer feedback into actionable product decisions?

Separating signals from noise is key. As your customer base grows, feedback can get loud and messy. In a high-growth phase, it’s easy to get caught up in more “exciting features” or “initiatives” and overlook smaller problems that actually matter a lot to your customers.

The solution is having a clear system for spotting patterns and sharing them internally. When you can identify and communicate recurring themes across your customer base, your roadmap and customer journey can align fully.

Without that clarity, you end up chasing low-priority work that benefits no one—not your team, not your customers.

For the first time, the Nigerian government is doing something we’re not used to seeing them do. They’re putting real money directly into startups. The first beneficiary? Ventures Platform, the African VC firm known for backing early winners like Moniepoint, LemFi, Raenest, and SeamlessHR.

The firm announced a $64 million first close for its second fund, VP Pan-African Fund II, targeting $75 million, and Nigeria’s Investment in Digital and Creative Enterprises (iDICE) programme, launched in 2023 with $617 million to boost tech and creative industries, joined as a Limited Partner. Ventures Platform plans to use the fund to deepen seed investing, back more Series A rounds, and expand across the continent.

While this is the federal government’s first time, Lagos has been using this playbook for a while. The state wants to back local founders with plans to spend 1.5% of its annual capital budget on innovation, according to the draft Lagos Innovation Bill. That move signalled that governments can support ecosystems with more than just speeches.

What this means now: Startup funding in Nigeria may shift from being entirely dependent on foreign confidence to something anchored at home. Government capital tends to draw in foreign capital, and having equity in startups can help smooth regulatory friction.

Safaricom, Kenya’s biggest telco, reported a strong half-year performance driven by a surge in M-PESA usage and improvements in its Ethiopian unit. Profit after tax rose sharply to $331 million, while total revenue climbed to $1.58 billion in H1 2025. The standout driver remains M-PESA, its mobile money subsidiary, which grew 14.1% to $681.8 million, cementing its role at the core of Kenya’s financial infrastructure.

What caused this growth? The increase in earnings can be attributed to the deeper penetration of digital financial services and improved operational efficiency. Safaricom has been able to push more value-added services on top of its connectivity network, turning mobile money and data into higher-yield revenue streams. This is evident by the launch of the Ziidi money market fund (MMF) in January, giving customers an option to invest and grow their wealth using M-Pesa. In March, the company decided to start investing over $309 million annually in M-Pesa for functionality, stability, and resilience.

In Ethiopia: Since entering Ethiopia in 2022, Safaricom has nearly doubled its subscriber base to 10 million, and finance costs eased to $76.9 million in H1 2025. Cash generated from its Ethiopian operations also dipped 8.4% to $714.3 million.

Zoom out: Its competitor Airtel Africa reported higher revenue and margins across mobile money and data, as it posted net profit of $376 million in H1 2025, up 375% year-on-year. Still, Safaricom remains Kenya’s dominant telecoms operator, commanding about 65% of the mobile market.

This week, Ventures Platform, a Nigerian early-stage venture capital firm, secured $64 million in its second fund round. The round was led by the Nigerian Government, with participation from International Finance Corporation (IFC), Standard Bank (South Africa), British International Investment (BII), Proparco through its EU-backed Choose Africa VC programme, Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises Development Agency (MSMEDA), and AfricaGrow. (Nov 6)

Here are the other deals for the week:

• Enzi, a Kenyan mobility startup, raised $3.5 million in a partnership with blockchain investment firm Kula PCC. The deal comprises $2 million in equity and $1.5 million in support for blockchain technology. (Oct 31)
• Farm to Feed, a Kenyan Agrictech startup, raised $1.5 million in a seed funding round that includes $1.27 million in equity led by Delta40 Venture Studio with participation from DRK Foundation, Catalyst Fund, Holocene, Marula Square, 54Co, Levare Ventures, and Mercy Corps Ventures, and $230,000 in non-dilutive funding from the DeveloPPP Ventures programme. (Nov 3)
• Angolan startup company Anda raised $3.4 million in seed funding co-led by European venture capital firms Breega and Speedinvest. (Nov 3)
• nextProtein, a Tunisian-based agritech startup, secured $20.7 million in a series B funding round. The round was co-led by SWEN Capital’s Blue Ocean Fund and British International Investment (BII), with an additional $4.36 million in debt financing. (Nov 4)

• Sawa Energy, a Ugandan cleantech company, raised $2.8 million in equity investment to expand solar energy solutions in Uganda. The funding was led by the EU-funded Electrification Financing Initiative. (Nov 4)
• Pan-African venture fund startup, First Circle Capital, raised $6 million from IFC to aid its investments in early-stage fintech startups. (Nov 5)

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