Young African Entrepreneur

Sam Gikandi is the CEO and co-founder of Africa’s Talking, a pan-African mobile technology company empowering developers across the continent. Prior to Africa’s Talking, Sam worked for Morgan Stanley, the investment bank, in the US and Hong Kong. In the Asia office, he helped build the high frequency trading platform and led a team trading hundreds of millions of dollars per day. In 2010, intrigued by the burgeoning tech scene in his home country of Kenya, he set up with a co-founder Africa’s Talking. While it started as a side hustle, two years later, Sam took on a full-time COO/CTO role in the company, developing the software developer-facing part of the business. As demand for business APIs in Kenya exploded with the strong growth of tech startups and mobile money payment solutions, Africa’s Talking software developer business took off. The company turned profitable after only 1 year of operations. Africa’s Talking helps the growing software developer community across the continent integrate into the telec