Agosta Liko is a Kenyan entrepreneur who founded Pesapal in 2009, one of East Africa's longest-running and most resilient financial technology companies. In a Silicon Savannah ecosystem often defined by dramatic fundraises, rapid scaling, and spectacular failures, Liko represents an alternative model of tech entrepreneurship: patient, revenue-focused, and built to last rather than to exit.
Liko launched Pesapal during the same period that iHub Nairobi was opening its doors and the Kenyan tech ecosystem was beginning to coalesce. The company's founding thesis was that M-Pesa had solved person-to-person payments but left a gap in business-to-customer transactions. Kenyan merchants needed tools to accept online payments - aggregating M-Pesa, card networks, and bank transfers into a single checkout. Liko built that infrastructure, targeting the growing number of Kenyan businesses venturing online.
What distinguished Liko from many of his contemporaries was his approach to growth. While peers raised venture capital and pursued rapid expansion - often burning through cash faster than they generated revenue - Liko grew Pesapal methodically, relying primarily on organic revenue growth. The company raised modest external funding compared to companies like Cellulant, Tala, or Twiga Foods, and expanded to Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda on a timeline dictated by market readiness rather than investor pressure.
This patience allowed Pesapal to survive the cycles of hype and disillusionment that characterised Kenyan tech. Companies that raised aggressively during boom periods often struggled when the capital markets turned - as happened in the 2022-2024 funding winter that killed Sendy, Copia Global, and others. Pesapal, with its conservative financial management and positive unit economics, weathered these storms without existential crisis.
Liko also expanded Pesapal's product line beyond pure e-commerce payments. The company moved into point-of-sale hardware, providing card terminals and integrated payment systems for physical retail. This omnichannel approach - serving both online and offline merchants - reflected Liko's understanding that African commerce was not going to move entirely online anytime soon. The future of payments in Kenya was hybrid: digital and physical, card and mobile money, online and in-store.
Within the broader narrative of Kenyan fintech, Liko's career provides a counterpoint to the dominant startup mythology. The most celebrated founders in Silicon Savannah raised the most capital, generated the most headlines, and often experienced the most dramatic outcomes - both positive and negative. Liko built a profitable, sustainable company that served thousands of businesses and processed billions of shillings in transactions, without the drama. His approach was less likely to produce a billion-dollar exit but far less likely to produce a bankruptcy.
See Also
Sources
- Jackson, Tom. "Pesapal Founder Agosta Liko on Building a Sustainable Fintech in East Africa." Disrupt Africa, 2019.
- Mulupi, Dinfin. "How Pesapal Is Quietly Winning Kenya's Payments Market." How We Made It in Africa, 2018.
- Hersman, Erik. "The Case for Patient Capital in African Tech." White African (blog), 2019.