👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – Okra’s off the menu

Nine months after Okra, the Nigerian open banking fintech startup, changed its playbook to operate as a cloud service provider, it appears some cracks are appearing on the wall.

In October 2024, Okra launched Nebula, a cloud platform designed to compete with global providers like AWS and Azure. It offered cloud services to local startups with pricing in naira, a strategy aimed at attracting Nigerian startups and to cushion them from dollar-based costs. But Nebula likely never found a market.

By June 2025, CEO Fara Ashiru had taken a new role as head of engineering at Kernel, a UK-based revenue operations (RevOps) startup. While this is not surprising—many founders take on paid employment to keep the lights on—Ashiru has also left her roles as “founder, CEO, and CTO” of Okra in the same month.

Per Techpoint, both Okra and Nebula platforms are now offline, which may signal the end of the company’s operations. However, Okra’s web platform remains online, signalling this might simply be a pause instead.

Ashiru had earlier pointed out the cost challenges of building a cloud platform in Nigeria. Rising infrastructure expenses and the falling value of the naira made it hard for Nebula to recover its expenses on hardware. With a total funding of $4.5 million and its last raise in 2021, Okra possibly needed more capital to compete in such a demanding space. But without strong signs of traction, investors were likely not convinced to fund the startup’s new ambition.

Looking back, we wonder what could have happened if Okra had remained an open finance startup. The startup shut down key products like Balance, Income, and Transaction due to regulatory uncertainty. Yet Nigeria’s open banking framework is finally set to launch in August, encouraging banks to join in. That change could have helped Okra grow if it had stayed the course.

In the end, the company may have made a pivot too soon, in a market too hard to crack, with too little capital to survive it.

Flutterwave, the African payments giant, has cut half of its workforce in both Kenya and South Africa. This follows its layoff in 2024, where it let go of 3% of its team to focus on enterprise clients. The message is now clear: Flutterwave might be doubling down on profitability and home advantage.

While Flutterwave trims expensive teams in smaller, more complex markets, it is rehiring some of those same roles at home.

This isn’t the first time a top startup has pulled back from multi-country operations. Paystack did this in 2023 when it laid off staff in the UAE and Europe to slow its expansion outside Nigeria. Chipper Cash also did the same. After rapid expansion, the chicken will come home to roost. Growth across African borders is expensive, fragmented and heavily regulated.

Africa’s fragmented regulation is a problem for fintechs trying to be pan-African. Flutterwave’s regulatory struggles in Kenya and South Africa are a good case study. Despite years in those markets, its licencing is still in process. That wait, combined with the rising operating costs has made the company rethink how and where it spends.

The lesson here is that the path to building a pan-African fintech may no longer lie in fast expansion. Instead, it may be wiser to dominate one market—or region where the countries are similar from a regulatory perspective—first, prove profitability, and then grow carefully.

For founders watching this, this could be a reminder: regulatory clarity, strong margins and a focused market strategy matter more than headcount or footprint.

Nigeria’s top internet service providers (ISPs) are losing customers.

According to the latest data released by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), the number of active users across 127 licensed ISPs fell to 289,369 in Q1 2025, down from 307,946 recorded in Q3 2024.

Big names, big losses: Elon Musk’s Starlink, which displaced FibreOne to become the second-largest ISP in Nigeria by number of customers, lost a whopping 6,000 subscribers. FibreOne bled more than 14,000. Even the long-standing market leader, Spectranet, saw its user base shrink by 2,189. 

Something is in the air, and it’s not Wi-Fi.

What’s really going on? Why are Nigerians, a population famous for being a menace online, now cutting back on internet subscriptions?

One word: a crippling economy.

Earlier in 2025, Starlink increased its subscription cost, from $24.76 to $37.14. In March, Spectranet’s data plans increased by an average of 36%. For many households and small businesses, that’s simply unsustainable. And when the economy forces you to choose between feeding, keeping the lights on, and Netflix-ing, browsing takes the back seat.

Plus, with the rise of mobile network operators (MNOs) offering cheaper and more flexible internet bundles, it is clear why users are ditching ISPs for SIM card data.

Will users eventually ditch ISPs for MNOs? Maybe not fully, but if ISPs don’t tighten their strategy to fit into the low-income country they have set up shop in, they may find themselves buffering in a market that’s moving on without them.

MTN is no longer just about calls, texts, and data. 

The telecom giant is branching out, and fast. In Uganda, MTN has partnered with Sanlam to launch Cover by MoMo, a digital insurance product built for people who’ve long been locked out of traditional coverage.

How does it work? Users can sign up directly on the MTN MoMo app or via USSD, with premiums starting from as low as UGX 500 ($0.14) per month. Payments are deducted straight from MoMo wallets, making it easy for users already transacting with MTN. No agents, no queues, and no paperwork. Just a few taps, and you’re covered.

The move follows MTN’s recent diversification efforts. In South Africa, the company launched motorbike delivery to facilitate SIM and internet access. In other countries, it’s building MoMo into a full-on financial ecosystem with payments, savings, loans, and now, insurance.

MTN is taking “everywhere you go” seriously. Whether it’s getting online, getting paid, or getting protected, MTN wants to be the brand you reach for first. And if the company is already powering your payments, protecting your health, and delivering your SIMs, the real question isn’t what’s next. It’s: What’s left?