Ken Njoroge is the Co-founder and Co-CEO of Cellulant, a leading multinational digital payment company in Africa. Before setting up Cellulant, Ken served as Co-founder and Solution Design Director of 3Mice Interactive Media from 1998 to 2003. In 2001, Ken Njoroge met with Bolaji Akinboro to discuss a business idea that was eventually scribbled down on a serviette paper in a restaurant at the Intercontinental Hotel in Nairobi. The year 2004 hallmarked the birth of Cellulant, a product of that brainstorm session.
Cellulant is a pan-African tech company which provides payment gateway for buyers and sellers alike, merchants, banks, mobile network operators, institutions and government organizations. The platform which started as a mobile music streaming platform, metamorphosed into a single digital payment solution that connects millions of consumers across Africa to digital payment services.
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In 2011, Ken Njoroge and Bolaji Akinboro were tasked with transforming payments in the Nigerian agro sector. After conducting research, the duo put together a team to redesign the value chain around an e-wallet solution to automate solutions and link multiple players in the agricultural sector. By the end of 2014, they brought 14.5 million farmers into the Agrikore platform, grew the average farmer income from $768 to $1800, and dropped the Nigerian food import bill by 60%.
In 2018, they raised the sum of $47.5 million in a Series C round from TPG Growth Rise Fund. Fifteen years after inception, Cellulant now employs a team of 400 staff across 11 countries and serves over 500 million consumers, about 120 banks, and 40 mobile network operators across the continent.
In 2017, Ken was named the first Sub-Saharan and Kenyan Global Endeavour Entrepreneur for his commitment to train and advise the next generation of African entrepreneurs. Cellulant got listed in the 2018 KPMG Fintech 100 report among 50 emerging firms. Just last year, Ken received the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award in the Emerging Entrepreneur category.
