2026
What emerging market founders can teach Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley likes to talk about founder resilience. I think it should spend more time in Lagos, São Paulo and Jakarta.
In April 2023, when war broke out in Khartoum, Sudan’s e-banking system became dysfunctional overnight. Fintech Cashi launched a peer-to-peer system that bypassed it, using voucher numbers exchanged for cash at kiosks, so people could still pay for food, electricity, and their own evacuation.
Around the world, growth-stage founders already have to build the same core skillset to get from product-market fit to scale: tight unit economics, a repeatable go-to-market motion, an org that can 10x without breaking, a product cadence fast enough to stay ahead, and enough capital markets fluency to run a board through a raise.
Founders in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia build all of that, plus a second stack most Silicon Valley operators rarely have to touch:
- Currency risk, especially when your P&L is still denominated in a currency that can move 40% in a year.
- Political instability and capital controls: you often have to build for vs. around them.
- Fragile payment rails and thin credit files, which make settlement and underwriting themselves part of the product.
- Physical security for staff, cash, and servers.
- An unpredictable regulatory map that resets at every border.
- Infrastructure workarounds for power and bandwidth gaps no term sheet accounts for.
This is what many founders across emerging markets are building through. They are growth-stage founders with an extra operating system.
When Wave entered Senegal in 2018, incumbent mobile-money providers were charging roughly 6-10% on transfers. Wave came in at 1%, built its own agent network, used an app plus QR cards for feature-phone users, and eventually prompted incumbents to cut prices. By 2021, more than half of Senegalese adults were active Wave users.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, account ownership reached 58% in 2024, up from 49% in 2021. Globally, 1.3 billion adults still have no financial account - yet around 900 million of them already own a mobile phone.
And “banked” is not binary.
Nubank ended 2025 with 131 million customers. Its disclosed cohort data show monthly average revenue per active customer rising from about $0.80 in month one to $30.20 by month 96, while monthly cost-to-serve sits around $0.80 per active customer. The opportunity is not only acquiring the unbanked. It is moving people from payments into savings, credit, insurance, investments and business services.
By 2030, BCG projects fintech revenues to reach roughly $65 billion in Africa and $125 billion in Latin America, with Africa growing about 13x from 2021 levels. Payment volumes are also scaling rapidly. Southeast Asian digital payments are expected to grow from about $1.1 trillion in 2024 to $2.1–2.4 trillion by 2030.
Constraint does not automatically create great founders, but it does create a brutal training ground. Silicon Valley may have something to learn about operating when the rails themselves still need to be built.