Kenya’s Tech Story: 2016 to 2026
I always knew Kenya had good tech stories.
I mean, I used M-Pesa before I really understood why the rest of the world found it so interesting. I remember seeing headlines about Kenyan startups, iHub and the now-famous “Silicon Savannah” and thinking, well, yes, this is just what people are doing here.
And then there was 2016. Rihanna had just dropped ANTI, Sauti Sol had us whining our waists to Sura Yako, and Nairobi’s tech scene was having a moment.
If you were around then, you probably remember the energy. The meetups, the events, the constant stream of announcements and the feeling that something was happening. Nairobi had become a place where people were building, experimenting and, occasionally, figuring things out as they went.
I was watching it all unfold then. Now, a decade later, I’m at Wimbart and I get to see a very different side of that same story.
I still see the headlines, but now I get to see what happens before they become headlines: the founders shaping their ideas, the teams working behind the scenes, the launches, the journalists asking the difficult questions and the work that goes into turning a good idea into a story people actually want to hear.
And perhaps most interestingly, I get to see just how much has changed.
So, why Kenya?
For me, the answer starts with something quite simple: Kenya has always been good at making technology feel useful.
For me, the answer starts with something quite simple: Kenya has always been good at making technology feel useful.
M-Pesa is probably the easiest example. At first, it was not seen as a revolutionary piece of financial technology. It was just M-Pesa. It was how you sent money to your family and paid for groceries.
But that everyday usefulness was precisely what made it remarkable. By putting mobile money into the hands of millions of people, Kenya created the digital habits and infrastructure that helped pave the way for the tech ecosystem that followed.
And you can see that influence in the companies that came next. M-KOPA, for example, built on this foundation of widespread mobile money adoption to rethink how people without formal salaries or credit histories could access finance; designing a model around how people actually live and earn.
The “Silicon Savannah” era
By the time I was paying attention to the tech scene in 2016, the “Silicon Savannah” label was already well established.
Startups were emerging across fintech, agritech and mobile technology, and investors were increasingly looking towards Kenya.
But there was also a question hanging over all of it: could the momentum last?
Some of the names making noise back then suggest it could. By 2016, iHub had more than 16,000 members, had helped more than 170 tech companies grow and was hosting around 20 events a month. Ushahidi had grown from a platform born out of Kenya’s 2007-08 post-election crisis into a tool used around the world, while Cellulant was taking its payments network across African markets.
A decade on, they are still here, just in different forms. iHub is now part of CcHub, with operations in Nigeria, Rwanda and Namibia. Ushahidi is now a global organisation, and its platform is used for disaster relief, human rights monitoring and election tracking. Cellulant now processes more than 4.5 million transactions a day and turned a profit in 2024.
What does a decade of growth actually look like?
That is what ten years of growth looks like. Not abandoning the industries that got you here, but building an ecosystem capable of tackling a much wider set of problems.
Maturity, it turns out, is underrated. There is always excitement around what is new: the next startup, the next funding round, the next big idea. But there is something more impressive about an ecosystem that keeps evolving.
The Kenya of 2026 is broader than the Kenya of 2016. Fintech is still a major part of the story, but it is no longer the whole story. In 2025, cleantech accounted for 42% of Kenya’s equity funding, compared with around 15% for fintech; a pretty significant shift from the fintech-heavy narrative that once defined the ecosystem.
And you can see that diversification in what Kenyan companies are actually building. There is d.light and BURN working on energy access and clean cooking; SunCulture bringing solar technology into agriculture; Ilara Health tackling access to healthcare; and companies such as Octavia Carbon working in deeptech and carbon removal.
That is what ten years of growth looks like. Not abandoning the industries that got you here, but building an ecosystem capable of tackling a much wider set of problems.
I used to read the stories. Now I get to help tell them.
It was easy to take Kenya’s tech story for granted while it was unfolding around me. When something is happening on your doorstep, it’s hard to see how special it is.
Working at Wimbart has changed how I see it. From the outside, a story can look as though it arrived fully formed. Up close, most of the work happens well before the headline.
Seeing that has made me appreciate how much of Kenya’s progress was earned quietly, not just announced. It has also made me curious about what comes next.
Questions for the next decade
If the last decade proved Kenya could build, the next is about what it builds from here.
How do Kenyan companies continue to scale beyond their home market? Kenya has never been short of good ideas, but a single market only goes so far. The next wave will be expected to build for the continent from day one.
How does innovation turn into lasting business? A great launch and a good headline are not the same as a durable company. The test is whether these ideas become businesses that are still standing in another ten years.
What happens when AI stops being the next big thing and becomes part of everyday life? The interesting part will not be who builds the most impressive AI. It will be who makes it as ordinary as sending money home.
At Wimbart, the job is to help the people behind these ideas reach wider audiences and make their stories heard. The last ten years showed how far Kenya’s ecosystem can come. The next ten might show us how far it can go.
Joy Mumbi, Account Director
