Africa Built

How Jumia Went Left

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From a 75 percent IPO pop to fraud allegations, cash bonfires and a new fight for profitability — the conclusion of Jumia’s story.

Jumia: Africa’s First Unicorn

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

At 9:26 a.m. on April 12, 2019, Jumia rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. Shares opened at $18.95 and closed the day up around 75 percent. The company had never made a dollar of profit and had lost roughly $965 million since 2012. Three weeks later, a short seller called it an obvious fraud. This episode tells the story of how it got there. Jumia launched in Lagos in 2012 as two Rocket Internet clones called Kasuwa and Sabunta, five months after fuel subsidy protests shut the country down, into an economy whose national accounts would not officially count e-commerce for another two years. There were no payment rails. Pay on delivery was not a feature. It was the only arrangement Nigeria could support. Along the way: the Samwer brothers’ Berlin clone machine, the founding nobody can agree on, the war with Sim Shagaya’s Konga and the leaked letter that called Jumia “destructive foreign competition,” the phone price war that handed the continent to Transsion, and Leo Stan Ekeh, the man who was too early in 2008 and came back in 2018 to buy Konga for scraps. Fourteen years and more than $1.6 billion in cumulative losses later, Jumia trades below its IPO price and is still chasing its first profitable year.

Introducing Africa Built

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Hello and welcome to Africa Built

A podcast on the stories and history behind some of Africa's most important mature companies. Brought to you by Olumuyiwa Olowogboyega, writer of the Notadeepdive newsletter, and Nnanna Ijezie, writer of the Fintech is Easy newsletter.

Why does this exist

Every company eventually acquires an official history.

It is told on conference stages, in anniversary posts and investor slides. In the retelling, uncertainty becomes strategy and lucky breaks become foresight.

African business and technology now have enough history to analyse properly. Companies have raised billions, listed on global exchanges, collapsed in public and changed how entire markets work. But the record is scattered across prospectuses, court files, regulatory disclosures, old interviews, news archives, conference panels and the memories of people who were there.

Africa Built brings that record together.

We put the official story beside the documents, the people who lived through it and what happened next.

Over the years, we've collaborated on multiple media projects and reports in various forms, and in the process identified the need to tell larger, more detailed stories of some of Africa's most successful companies. This is our attempt to finally step into the arena and plug a gap we have identified in African corporate storytelling.

By going deep on the companies that built Africa's tech and business landscape, from founding to IPO and beyond, we're telling a researched story of how these companies actually got built: the strategies, pivots, competition, successes, and failures along the way.

Occasionally, we'll have friends, guests, and insiders join us to add more detail to these stories.

African startups of today are standing on the shoulders of giants before them. It's time to tell their story.

We hope you enjoy this.

Cheers,

Muyiwa and Nnanna

Disclaimer, Corrections and disclosures: These stories are built from the best record available, not an omniscient one. If we get a fact wrong, write to us at africabuiltpod@gmail.com. We will correct it publicly in the episode notes and on this site. Africa Built is for information and entertainment, not investment, legal or tax advice. The views are ours and do not represent our employers, sponsors or guests.