Over his decades in the international business world, he has launched many ventures but, through DizzitUp, the most recent one, he wants to leave a strong social impact on the African population.

Solofo Rafenombolatiana (photo) is a Malagasy telecom engineer and entrepreneur. He is also the co-founder and CEO of DizzitUp, a startup founded in 2018, in Togo.

The said startup offers an international marketplace through which Africans, wherever they are, can finance, sell and buy essential renewable energy, food, health, education, tech, and financial products and services anywhere on the continent.  

The marketplace was initially built to facilitate access to energy and financial services. In 2021, during an interview with French media Paris Singularity, its CEO explained that the idea germinated in mid-2017, when he noticed that Mada, a small village where he has been a teacher, still had no access to electricity thirty years after he left.  

For the businessman, now in his fifties, poor access to energy and financial services is hampering development in Africa. So, apart from its energy-as-a-service business, DizzitUp also developed a decentralized and secure digital infrastructure based on blockchain and stablecoin for instant transfers and payments. The infrastructure allows users to pay or send funds anywhere in the world without being burdened by any constraints.  

On October 28, 2022, Solofo Rafenombolatiana was honored, in Lome, Togo, for DizzitUp, which was among the six finalists of the fifth Ecobank Fintech Challenge. Nevertheless, DizzitUp is just one of the many ventures launched by the serial entrepreneur.

In 2000, in Paris, he founded Mobiligense SA, a SaaS mobile value-added services editor and operator. Eight years later, he launched Beezbox SAS, a Paris-based social customer relationship management service provider. In 2014, he also founded Sunny Live Music, a jazz concerts and festivals organizer.

He started his international professional career in 1986, working as a sales support engineer for Wang France. Two years later, he joined Hewlett-Packard as a sales and marketing manager.

After a stint, between 1997 and 2000, as the vice president and general manager at Bull Information Systems, he founded his first company. Concurrently, from 2003 to 2004, he was the vice president and director of Technicolor’s (formerly knowns as Thomson) mobility business unit.  Between 2011 and 2013, he was the marketing and digital media director of  AFM-Telethon, a French non-profit organization against muscular dystrophy.

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By digitizing the pharmaceutical industry, the serial entrepreneur and angel investor wants to facilitate access to health products, therefore contributing to development goals. Over the past five years, his actions have earned him the trust of several investors.  

Bryan Mezue (photo) is a Nigerian entrepreneur and investor. He is the co-founder, president, and CEO of Lifestores Healthcare, a healthtech startup that aims to improve access to quality health products and streamline pharmacy management.  

With PharmaIQ solution, his startup offers two main services that effectively fulfill its core ambitions. The first service is OGApharmacy, an online B2B pharmaceutical marketplace that lets hospitals and pharmacies source authentic and affordable healthcare products. It combines the supply needs of hundreds of healthcare providers and negotiates with manufacturers and importers on their behalf.

The second solution is an ERP package specifically designed for Nigerian pharmacies. It takes care of the key aspects of pharmacy management, including sales, inventory, acquisition, and expiry notifications.  

Bryan co-founded Lifestores Healthcare, in 2017, with Andrew Garza as its chief operating officer. About five years on, on October 4, 2022, he announced the close of a US$3 million pre-Series A round to continue to democratize “access to quality and affordable primary healthcare in sub-Saharan Africa.”

In 2016, he had already founded  Banyi Group, an advisory and investment holding group. In 2018, he was one of the members of the inaugural Obama Foundation Leaders program.  Some five years earlier he co-founded West Africa Vocational Education (WAVE) Academy, an academy supporting skill development for increased income.

The serial entrepreneur started his professional career, in 2006, as an investment banking summer intern at Barclays Capital. He later joined the London-based consulting firm Bain & Company as a consultant. Between May and October 2011, he was the Director of Operations and Business Development at d.light Design, a renewable energy semiconductor manufacturing company. The following year, he was hired into MyTime's operations, sales, and marketing department. The same year, he completed a professional internship at Actis as a private equity associate before becoming the manager of the management consulting firm Bain & Company.

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In Nigeria, she is one of the pioneers of extended, augmented, and virtual reality. She sees those tech tools as interesting opportunities to offer innovative solutions to the population.

 Judith Okonkwo (photo) is a Nigerian business psychologist and the founder of Imisi 3D, an extended reality creation lab based in Lagos, Nigeria.

Through the creation lab, launched in 2016, Judith nurtures an African community of augmented and virtual reality content creators. She also creates virtual and augmented reality solutions and provides “educational and engagement experiences with AR/VR.” She aims to “change the technology narrative so that [Africans] become creators and not just consumers of technology.” 

In line with that mission, she recently partnered with Meta and Black Rhino VR to launch the Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa AR/VR metathon, on October 24. Through this event, one of the first of its kind in Africa, the young woman wants to find and support African innovative augmented, extended and virtual reality solution creators.

The business psychologist places high hopes in the metathon, slated for mid-August 2022- April 2023.  Imisi 3D “is our biggest and most ambitious event yet, providing even greater access for XR. […] This year’s AR/VR Africa Metathon brings together our AR/VR Africa pre-hackathon training, hackathon, and Bootcamp in one program,” Judith Okonkwo explains.

Since August 2022, she is a visiting global scholar at Harvard University. From 2017 to date, she has led AR/VR Africa, an African community of augmented, virtual, and mixed reality creators and enthusiasts that she founded. From 2016 to date, she is also a member of the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on VR/AR. She is also a co-founder of We Will Lead Africa, a global network that creates platforms to share experiences and inspire leadership in Africa.

Since 2013, Judith Okonkwo is the Director of the European Organisation Design Forum. She is also a visiting lecturer and researcher at the Centre for Business Psychology at the University of Westminster, since 2005. In 2008, she founded the leadership development center Oriki Leadership Coaching and co-founded the international facilitation and consulting firm Tomorrow by Design in 2014.

Her professional career began in 2000, as a press release and recruitment officer for the 31st Nigerian Artillery Brigade. In 2001, she was recruited to the Human Resources Department of the United Bank for Africa (UBA) before joining Insights Learning and Development in 2007 as a corporate psychologist. She later worked for British Airways (2011 to 2016) as an organizational intelligence consultant. While still working for British Airways, in 2014, she joined the global placement network Andela as Director of People and Professional Development.

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He launched his fintech startup after a rich professional experience accumulated while working for national and international firms. His ambition, through the startup, is to streamline payments in Africa. 

Nader Abdelrazik (photo) is the co-founder and CEO of MoneyHash, a fintech startup founded in 2020. With MoneyHash, he built an API that allows large organizations operating in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) to collect payments. 

He explains that “MoneyHash’s main goal is to give businesses in the region the ability to upgrade their tech especially regarding such a sensitive piece: payments.”  

“We aim to be the leader when it comes to building and maintaining a payment infrastructure, and to do so, our impact has to be empowerment and growth of companies that use us,” he adds. 

In February 2022, Moneyhash secured US$3 million in pre-seed financing, to expand in Sub-Saharan Africa. On October 20, 2022, it announced the launch of its digital solutions in new markets, including Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa.

Nader Abdelrazik, who nurtures great ambitions for the fintech startup, wants to support that growth plan by contributing his rich professional experience, which started back in 2008. That year, he was a summer trainee in the quality department of the pharmaceutical technology company GlaxoSmithKline. Two years later, he joined Siemens as a trainee business developer before being hired, in 2011, as an entrepreneurship head coordinator by the Egyptian non-profit organization INJAZ Egypt.

From 2012 to 2014, he was a research assistant at the Nile University and a strategy project manager for Meshka Co-Learning Space, from 2014 to 2015. In 2016, he worked as a business designer for Conservation International Suriname and the global expansion consultant for  Kiron Open Higher Education. Then, the following year, he taught systems thinking at the University of Berkeley. 

He later became a diversity and inclusion consultant for Microsoft before joining Think.iT as the head of product innovation. From 2018 to 2019, he worked as a strategy lead hardware builder Elkrem. He then became the interim executive director of the Global Fellow Network of the American Middle East Network for Dialogue at Stanford (AMENDS) from August to November 2019.

He also worked as a business manager for fintech startup Xpay, until 2020, before getting recruited as a business design consultant, by Kiron Open Higher Education. 

Melchior Koba