From Cyber Cafes to Y Combinator: Building Africa's Financial Future

In this episode, we sit down with Wale Akanbi, one of the co-founders of Aella. Aella became the first African lending fintech admitted to Y Combinator in 2017 and has since served over 2 million users across Nigeria and the Philippines.

Wale's journey, from teaching himself programming in Nigerian cyber cafes to building AI-powered financial inclusion tools, is a masterclass in persistence, vision, and purpose-driven entrepreneurship.

He's currently building solutions at the intersection of AI and blockchain to solve cross-border trust challenges.

What we cover:

• The pressure and lessons from being one of YC's first African lending fintech
• Why every engineer doubled as customer service for their first 500K users
• The evolution from rule-based credit scoring to AI models predicting "willingness to pay"
• Building cross-functional teams in the age of AI
• His current work at the intersection of AI and blockchain for cross-border trust
• Why helping people matters more than power, fame, or money