Every Wednesday night 88mph sets up a dinner with guests that range from entrepreneurs to investors. It’s an opportunity to learn a bit about other businesses in Kenya and primarily to ask for advice and tips.
Tonight we had Dylan and Ben come in from Kopo Kopo. They are two guys from the U.S. (Seattle and Arkansas) that developed a product to help merchants receive payments from mobile phones. People here pay for everything with their phones. The system is called M-pesa. You go to any number of locations across the country to deposit cash into your M-Pesa account. You can then send and receive money in this manner.
They felt that the east African market was the best place to implement due to the high usage of mobile payments. Now they both live here and are almost 2 years old as a company. A very interesting story and certainly was a big risk, but sounds like it’s paying off for them.