I’ve been mulling over the idea of the Mount Rushmores of various industries lately—the GOATs across sports, technology, and even the Nobel Peace Prize. My research had some interesting findings.

Then, I turned my sights on African tech. Which companies represent the highest levels of achievement, impact, and dominance in this generation? The startups that became scale-ups, the ones with the coveted reputation for moving the industry forward, showing what’s possible and stamping African tech on the global map.

The original Mount Rushmore in South Dakota has four United States Presidents carved into its face: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln.

The presidents were chosen to represent different eras of American democracy: Washington for founding the nation, Jefferson for expanding it, Lincoln for preserving it, and Roosevelt for developing it into a modern world power.

I got to work with my pen, spoke to some OGs, got my research editor ready to carve the Mount Rushmore of African tech. Four undeniable companies, a continent’s technological transformation – who makes the mountain?

I have an answer. You may disagree with some of it. Here are my four, and here is why each of them earned the chisel on granite – in the same order as the Presidents – the pioneer, the expansionist, the preservationist and the one who upskilled the foundations.

M-PESA gets first dibs on that granite. There is no serious conversation about African tech that starts anywhere else.

M-PESA launched in Kenya in 2007 as a mobile money transfer service run by Safaricom, and then quickly expanded into the infrastructure that made financial participation possible for everyone. M-PESA democratised access to money for people who knew their bank managers by name and those who had never seen the inside of a bank branch.

M-PESA commands 92.3% of Kenya’s mobile money market. Before it launched, Kenya had fewer than three bank branches per 100,000 people. Fast forward to the present, and financial inclusion in Kenya has reached 85% of the adult population, up from 27% in 2006, the year before M-Pesa launched.

Since then, M-PESA processes over 100 million transactions a day. It contributes over 42% of Safaricom’s annual revenue, and agents in Kenya account for a significant share of Kenya’s entire GDP.

Its magic is what it did for the rest of the continent. M-Pesa invented the mobile money category, not just for Africa but for the world. At its peak, M-Pesa transactions accounted for a significant share of Kenya’s GDP. Every fintech on the continent that came after it exists in a world that M-Pesa made imaginable.

If Mount Rushmore is about foundational impact, M-Pesa is George Washington.

M-PESA as a Founding Father is not just about Kenya. It is about what M-PESA proved to the world. It proved that the unbanked were not unbanked because they lacked financial sophistication. They were unbanked because nobody had built the right infrastructure. M-Pesa built it on mobile networks, using the phones Africans already had rather than the bank branches they didn’t.

Google, McKinsey, Harvard Business School, the IMF, and others have all written case studies examining how a single product in an East African country changed the global conversation about financial services. That’s the impact the company has had for two decades.

Up, M-PESA! 👏🏾

M-Pesa proved what was possible in a country. Flutterwave proved what was possible across a continent, and repeated that playbook across Africa over and over again.

Founded in 2016, Flutterwave established itself as the infrastructure that connects African businesses to the global economy, processing over $40 billion in lifetime transactions across 35+ countries.

Flutterwave started from a simple observation: moving money across African borders was harder than it should be. The infrastructure for cross-border payments was missing, broken, or so expensive that it was effectively inaccessible. Flutterwave built that infrastructure.

Over $40 billion in lifetime transactions. More than one billion unique payments processed. Over 50 licences across 35 countries, making Flutterwave, at the time it received its Nigerian microfinance banking licence this April, one of the most-licensed non-bank financial entities on the planet. A company founded in Lagos a decade ago is now in the same regulatory class as institutions that took decades and billions of dollars to build.

The Thomas Jefferson argument for Flutterwave is this: Flutterwave expanded the union. It is still the only fintech company in Africa with the most licences – that is a FEAT.

Flutterwave built the connective tissue to stitch together payment service providers and banks, and expanded the payment rails that had not previously existed for its B2B and B2C customers. Before Flutterwave, African commerce moved in fragments. Each country had its own systems, banks, currency risks, and compliance requirements. It did not just make payments faster. It made the idea of a single African market operationally feasible for the first time.

Uber, Netflix, and Microsoft all process payments from Africa through Flutterwave. So does the business in Maputo, getting paid by a customer in the US. The infrastructure that connects African businesses to the global economy, and the global economy to Africa, runs, in significant part, through what Flutterwave built.

Jumia was Africa’s first tech unicorn and first NYSE-listed tech company. Jumia has led a turbulent life: questions about its African identity, stock crashes, market exits, and persistent losses.

But its importance to the Mount Rushmore conversation is its flaws and all the times it attempted feats and got burned. It showed the world that African tech could raise capital at scale, go public, and compete on a global stage. It absorbed the hard lessons so that every e-commerce and logistics company that came after it didn’t have to learn them from scratch.

Jumia has since exited multiple African markets, remained unprofitable, seen its founders depart, and spent years in the wilderness of restructuring.

I am putting them on the mountain anyway. Here is why.

Jumia became Africa’s first tech unicorn in 2016, achieving a $1 billion valuation at a time when Flutterwave, Paystack, and Moniepoint were putting on training wheels. Goldman Sachs, AXA, and MTN backed them. They went public on the New York Stock Exchange. Whatever you think of how that story unfolded, they changed what global capital believed was possible on this continent - and also served as a cautionary tale to other startups about listing in the temperamental US market.

Still, it proved that an African tech company could walk into the world’s most prestigious stock exchange and ring the bell. The fact that the stock tanked afterwards was the reward for being the African IPO pioneers, but an A for effort all the same.

Abraham Lincoln is on Mount Rushmore, not because his legacy is uncomplicated. It is because he opened doors, literally.

Jumia opened the door to the idea that African tech could be worth a billion dollars, could trade on global exchanges, and could attract Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and institutional investors who previously had no framework for African tech. The founders who came after Jumia; Paystack, Flutterwave, and Andela – raised money in a world where Jumia had already made the argument that African unicorns were real. They got to walk through a door that Jumia, imperfectly and at great cost, kicked open.

Andela didn’t build a payment product or an e-commerce platform. It built something harder to quantify: a talent pipeline, and unleashed them on the world.

Andela identified African software engineers, trained them, and placed them with global tech companies – and in doing so, it changed the global perception of African technical talent. The engineers who went through Andela built startups and joined unicorns. The ripple effect on the ecosystem is incalculable – they upskilled talent and deployed them globally.

If M-Pesa is George Washington, the prominent Founding Father; and Flutterwave is Thomas Jefferson, the Expansion Father; then Andela is the one who argued that the people on this continent could compete with anyone anywhere and proved it.

Andela built a training programme and a talent marketplace. A $1.5 billion company that has trained over 110,000 technologists across Africa, representing 15% of the continent’s entire engineering workforce, and placed them with companies including Goldman Sachs, GitHub, Mastercard, and ViacomCBS in over 135 countries.

The Andela case for Mount Rushmore is not about transaction volumes, valuations, or market share. It is about who built everything else.

The engineers who came through Andela built the products that power African fintech. They became the CEOs, CTOs, General Managers, and VPs at the companies that raised rounds, shipped code, and served users.

One of Andela’s co-founders, Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, popularly known as E, left to co-found Flutterwave. A clear pipeline from a person who helped build Africa’s talent infrastructure, then went and co-founded Africa’s most valuable payments company.

Andela’s growth reminds me of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Jefferson articulated what the US believed about itself: that it had talent, ambition, and capacity equal to those of any other nation.

Andela did the same thing for African tech. It took the theory that African engineers are world-class and turned it from a belief into a verified, data-backed, institutional fact.

Andela didn’t just train people. It changed what the world believed was possible from this continent. And then it sent those people out to build everything else. The other three faces on this mountain partly owe something to the infrastructure Andela built.

Here is what the four companies have in common, and why it matters for my argument.

They built infrastructure. M-Pesa built the rails for financial participation. Flutterwave built the rails for African businesses. Jumia built the proof of concept for African commerce at scale. Andela built the talent layer that made everything else possible.

Each company is foundational, as the original Mount Rushmore is, because of what it made possible for everyone who came after it.

The obvious honourable mentions: Paystack, whose $200 million Stripe acquisition was the moment that changed what every African founder believed was achievable and which gave a generation of builders permission to dream differently. Interswitch, which built the switching infrastructure that literally every Nigerian fintech still relies on. Moniepoint is still writing its brilliant story.

But four faces. That is the constraint. And within that constraint, those are mine: M-Pesa, Flutterwave, Jumia, and Andela: the foundation, the connector, the door-opener, and the talent layer. Remove any one of them and the mountain looks different. Remove all four, and there is no mountain.

Do you agree or disagree? Let’s discuss.