Cellulant is a pan-African payments technology company founded in 2003 by Ken Njoroge, a Kenyan, and Bolaji Akinboro, a Nigerian. What began as a scrappy mobile content business selling ringtones and music downloads to East African mobile subscribers became one of the continent's most consequential fintech companies, processing billions of dollars in payments across 35 African countries through its Tingg platform. The Cellulant story captures the arc of Kenya's Silicon Savannah - resourceful founders who spotted an opportunity in Africa's mobile-first economy, pivoted when the market shifted, and built enterprise-grade infrastructure that governments and multinational corporations came to depend on.
Njoroge graduated from the University of Nairobi with a degree in computer science and initially explored the mobile value-added services space that was booming across Africa in the early 2000s. Mobile network operators like Safaricom were generating significant revenue from ringtones, caller tunes, and SMS-based content services. Cellulant carved out a niche as a technology intermediary, building the platforms that connected content providers to telcos. By 2006, the company was operating across several African markets. But Njoroge and Akinboro recognized that the real opportunity lay not in content but in payments - the fundamental plumbing of African commerce that remained fragmented across mobile money systems, banks, and card networks.
The pivot to payments accelerated after M-Pesa demonstrated the transformative potential of mobile money in Kenya from 2007 onward. Cellulant built Tingg, a payment aggregation platform that unified hundreds of payment methods across African markets into a single API. This was technically complex work - each country had different mobile money providers, banking systems, and regulatory frameworks. Cellulant's platform allowed businesses and governments to accept payments from any source without building separate integrations for each market.
The company's most high-profile contract came through Agrikore, a blockchain-based platform built for the Nigerian government's agricultural subsidy program. Agrikore enabled the Nigerian government to distribute subsidies directly to millions of farmers via mobile wallets, cutting out layers of corruption and middlemen that had historically siphoned off agricultural support funds. The contract demonstrated Cellulant's capacity to handle government-scale payment infrastructure in Africa's largest economy.
Cellulant's fundraising trajectory reflected growing international investor confidence in African fintech. The company raised a landmark $47.5 million Series C round in 2018 from The Rise Fund, the impact investing arm of TPG Growth. This was one of the largest fintech funding rounds in African history at the time and valued Cellulant at a level that placed it on the unicorn-track - a rare distinction for a Nairobi-headquartered company. Earlier rounds had included investments from Velocity Capital and the Endeavor Catalyst.
In 2020, Njoroge stepped down as co-CEO, and the company underwent leadership transitions that reflected the growing pains common to African startups scaling beyond their founders. Cellulant's significance to the Kenyan tech ecosystem extends beyond its own operations - it proved that a company born in Nairobi could build pan-African payments infrastructure at scale, predating the wave of Nigerian fintechs like Flutterwave and Paystack that later attracted global attention. Alongside Ushahidi and M-Pesa, Cellulant belongs to the first generation of Kenyan technology ventures that demonstrated Africa could produce globally competitive technology companies.
See Also
- M-Pesa
- Safaricom
- Silicon Savannah
- Fintech Kenya
- Digital Economy Kenya
- iHub Nairobi
- Mobile Phone Revolution Kenya
Sources
- Bright, Jake. "Cellulant Raises $47.5M to Scale Its Pan-African Payments Platform." TechCrunch, May 31, 2018.
- Kazeem, Yinka. "Africa's Oldest Fintech Is Quietly Building the Continent's Payment Infrastructure." Quartz Africa, June 4, 2018.
- Hersman, Erik. "The Story of Cellulant: From Ringtones to Pan-African Payments." White African (blog), 2019.
- Adegoke, Yinka. "How Cellulant Built a Payments Empire Across 35 African Countries." Rest of World, March 2021.