Tala cuts jobs again

TGIF ☀️

Hang in there, the weekend’s almost here.

TechCabal is heading to Nairobi. Road to Moonshot is making a stop in Kenya on July 2nd. If you're in Nairobi and building something in tech, we'd like to meet you. Reach out to my colleagues, Adonijah and Kenn. See you there.

—Zia

Sarah Idahosa is the founder of Women In DeFi, a pan-African non-profit that has reached over 8,000 women through blockchain education and decentralised finance (DeFi) since 2022. She also serves as Africa Partnerships and Sales Lead at MANSA, the Tether-backed stablecoin liquidity provider.

Beyond her organisational roles, Sarah is a Web3 educator and speaker who has worked with Cassava Network, Myth of Money, Africa Tech Summit, and Mara. Her focus is on making blockchain and DeFi accessible, particularly for women and newcomers to the space.

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

When mummy and daddy want to send money to granny in another country, sometimes it takes too long or becomes too expensive for them, so I help build an easy and affordable way for them to send the money. In addition to that, I teach young girls so they are also able to use and build roads like that for themselves, so they are not left out.

• What did your path into Web3 look like, and what would you be doing if you'd never found it?

My path into Web3 wasn’t the usual “Oh, I heard about it and wanted to learn more.” It was more of, “Covid is here; we have to look for how to earn cash while at home.” I got into the space through an affiliate marketing platform someone had told me about. 

It was a means to earn Ethereum (which I didn’t exactly know what it was); I just wanted to earn some cash during the pandemic. From there, I decided to learn more, and I went down the rabbit hole but never got out. What exactly pulled me in was the community spirit and the fact that it was a new route in the tech space.

• You said Women In DeFi has reached over 8,000 women since 2022. Why is it important to you that more people (especially women) understand DeFi?

I’d say it’s because Web3 presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rewrite the story of how women have historically been excluded from conversations around technology, finance, and access to credit and capital, especially in Africa.

When I entered the space, I realised women were still being left out of many of these conversations, and I felt compelled to do something about it while the technology was still new—before the bias became embedded in the systems we were building.

The 8,000 women in the community today aren’t just generic numbers. They represent hope and the possibility of a new reality where women are no longer bystanders, but active participants.

• MANSA is trying to fix payments in emerging markets. How close is stablecoin infrastructure to actually doing that at scale?

I’d say this is a lot closer than most people think. We’re already seeing many traditional payment processors integrate stablecoins to create cheaper, faster, and more efficient payment rails.

For an active trade corridor like China–Africa, we at MANSA have built a solution that enables transactions to happen seamlessly without businesses, especially SMEs, having to pay a premium.

While getting these solutions to the last mile remains a challenge due to regulatory restrictions, local liquidity constraints, and off-ramp infrastructure gaps, the ecosystem is far more receptive than it was a year or two ago.

Gather round. We have a mystery: Back in 2021, several publications reported that customer experience company Ajua had acquired WayaWaya to strengthen its AI business. The story travelled, and the continent cheered and welcomed it as another sign that acquisitions (still rare at the time) were finally becoming part of the continent's startup success stories. There is only one problem, though. WayaWaya founder Teddy Ogallo insists his company was never sold.

So... what did happen? According to Ogallo, he signed on as a consultant at Ajua, taking up the role of Vice President for Product APIs and Integrations. As part of that arrangement, he transferred software he personally owned, not WayaWaya itself, and received consultancy compensation alongside stock options.

The plot thickens: TechCabal's investigation found no evidence of shareholder negotiations, board approvals, company valuations or ownership transfer agreements that would typically accompany the sale of a company. Yet, documents reviewed show internal communications materials describing the relationship as an acquisition before media interviews even took place. PR briefing notes reportedly encouraged executives to "sell the acquisition side" of the story.

What's Ajua's stance in all this? The company says a transaction did exist but was cancelled in 2023, though it has not elaborated on exactly what that transaction involved. 

It remains a cold case: WayaWaya maintains it was never acquired, Ajua says there was a transaction that was later cancelled, and the internet mostly says the acquisition happened. What this ordeal is is a lesson that once a story escapes onto the internet, proving what didn't happen can be harder than proving what did.

Tala, the US-based digital lender that has served over 13 million Kenyan customers since 2014, is cutting fewer than 10% of its roughly 85-person Kenya workforce as it centralises global operations at its headquarters and shifts toward an "embedded services" model.

What’s the backstory? Tala built its business by lending directly to Kenyans who couldn't get loans from banks through its own app, marketing, and customer support teams. The new model is different. Instead of going directly to customers, Tala wants toplug its credit engine into other companies' platforms, such as insurance companies, device financing schemes, and motorcycle loan programmes. Those partners find the customers. Tala provides the loan in the background. When your distribution runs through someone else, you need fewer people of your own.

It’s the second round of layoffs: In April 2025, itcut 28 employees from its customer operations team—3% of its workforce—saying fewer loan defaults had left parts of the business overstaffed. That was a trim. This is a restructure.

Nairobi's tech workforce is watching a pattern form.Samasource laid off 1,108 employees weeks ago after losing a Meta contract. Microsoft, Google, and Meta have all cut Kenyan staff in the past two years. The common thread isn't that Kenya is underperforming; it's that global companies are centralising work that used to be done locally.

One last thing: Tala says Kenya operations continue uninterrupted. But the embedded model means its next phase of growth here runs through partners, not headcount. For a company that built its name by showing up directly for customers no one else would lend to, that's not just a restructure; it's a different company.

Spiro, a pan-African electric mobility startup, raised $55 million in equity funding from NewTrails Capital. (June 22)

Here are the other deals for the week:

• RoboCare, a Tunisian agritech startup, raised a six-figure investment in a funding round from 216 Capital. (June 23)
• EdenCare, a Rwandan digital health insurance startup, raised €250,000 in funding from Proparco. (June 23)
• Daya, a Nigerian fintech startup, raised $2.4 million in a pre-seed funding round from Hivemind Capital, Lattice Fund, Alliance DAO, Aptos Foundation, and Globelink Investment. (June 24)

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more funding announcements. Before you go,Who Owns Africa's Sky?. Find out here.