Afridigest Executive Brief: Changing of the guard
Strategic Intelligence for Senior Executives | Week 38: Sep 14-20, 2025
The Afridigest Executive Brief delivers essential intelligence to busy executives.
A summary of this week’s key trends:
• If Africa’s digital economy is a gold rush, digital identity is among the picks and shovels
• CEOs in Africa Tech’s Class of 2013 step aside as the continent’s startup ecosystem matures
• The 2025 Global Innovation Index shows SA, Botswana, & Senegal as SSA innovation leaders; Nigeria trails but leads the world in unicorn valuation relative to GDP
Deal of the Week
🇿🇦 Contactable, a South African digital identity, biometrics, and eKYC platform, raised $13.5M from Venture Capitalworks (lead), Fireball Capital, Ke Nako Capital, and Mavovo.
The round will fund the company’s African expansion and the commercialization of additional digital identity technologies.
About Contactable: Founded in 2012 with support from South Africa’s Technology Innovation Agency, Contactable provides enterprise identity solutions to blue-chip clients across the financial services, insurance, telecoms, retail, online gaming, healthcare, and public sectors.
The AI-driven cloud SaaS platform, which works across the customer lifecycle from pre-registration to onboarding to transaction monitoring & fraud reduction to ongoing compliance & engagement, processes between 25 to 30 million API calls monthly and completes between 150,000 and 200,000 KYCs every month.
Key personalities:
Shaun Strydom, Founder & CEO, Contactable
Brent Shahim, Managing Partner, Venture Capitalworks
In the Founder’s words: “Contactable operates at the nexus of technology, regulation, and inclusion. This [investment] marks a pivotal moment in our mission to democratize digital identity across Africa [and] build the digital identity infrastructure that supports Africa’s growing digital economy.” — Shaun Strydom
In the Investor’s words: “We believe Contactable is a regional leader in digital identity management, with a world-class founder driving its vision. Digital identity is at the heart of financial inclusion and digital transformation and our strategy is to partner with proven leaders like Shaun and his team.” — Brent Shahim
Go deeper: Africa’s digital identity solutions sector is projected to reach $3.4B by 2028 with firms like Contactable, Smile ID and iiDENTIFii at the center of a massive market transformation.
Deal Digest
Announced this week: Over $53M in new funding to fifteen African startups, plus two new M&A deals and one PIPE. Here’s the full list: