Last month, I read Antifragile by the mathematical statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and I have been thinking about it ever since, which is not necessarily a recommendation, as Taleb has a habit of taking a simple idea, attacking everyone who disagrees with it, and then spending several hundred pages proving why he is right.
Still, the central argument has stayed with me, particularly when I think about African startups, which operate in markets where uncertainty is less an occasional interruption than part of daily operation.
According to Taleb, some things are fragile and break under stress; others are resilient and absorb the stress without changing very much (obviously!). Then there are things Taleb calls antifragile, systems that do not merely survive disorder, but can, under the right conditions, become stronger because of it.
The question I have been turning over since reading the book is whether some of Africa’s most successful startups are doing exactly that, not because they enjoy volatility or somehow predicted it, but because they have learnt to build businesses in markets where expecting things to go according to plan would be the stranger assumption.
Startups, by their nature, operate with incomplete information. Founders make decisions without knowing what customers will do, what competitors will build, whether investors will keep funding the sector, or what unexpected event might render their carefully prepared forecasts irrelevant. The instinct, naturally, is to reduce uncertainty wherever possible. But Taleb’s argument is that there is another way to think about it: rather than trying to predict every possible disruption, build something that can survive being wrong and, where possible, benefit from surprises.
At the same time, venture capital itself works this way. The entire model is built around the power law, an uncomfortable mathematical reality that says most investments in a portfolio will not produce spectacular outcomes, and many will fail altogether. The investor accepts those losses because the downside is limited to the money invested, while a small number of companies can produce returns so large that they cover everything else.
You do not need every company to work but one or two to work extraordinarily well.
Taleb would probably describe this as a convex payoff. The downside is known and limited, while the upside can be disproportionately large. It is also why trial and error can sometimes be more valuable than careful prediction. If you can afford many small failures and remain exposed to the possibility of a very large success, randomness becomes less frightening.
However, the interesting question is what it looks like when companies are exposed to real disorder.
Airbnb offers one of the clearest examples. When the COVID-19 pandemic brought global travel to a near standstill in early 2020, borders closed, flights were grounded and bookings evaporated. For a company built around people travelling and paying to stay in strangers’ homes, it was hard to imagine a more direct threat to the business.
Airbnb reported a $3.9 billion loss in the fourth quarter of 2020. But the shock also created a new type of customer.
As offices closed and remote work became widespread, some people stopped thinking about travel as a short holiday and began looking for somewhere else to live and work for several weeks or months. Airbnb leaned into that behaviour to promote longer stays and properties suited to remote work.
The company did not benefit from the pandemic in any straightforward sense because its business took a severe hit. Thousands of employees lost their jobs, and its future looked uncertain for a period. But the business was flexible enough to find new demand inside a disruption that had initially threatened to destroy it.
By 2022, Airbnb’s revenue had risen to $8.4 billion, and it reported net income of nearly $1.9 billion. The point is not that every shock contains a hidden business opportunity. Most do not, at least not for everyone. It is that some companies are better positioned to discover new opportunities because they are not so tightly organised around the assumption that tomorrow will look like yesterday.
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The advantage of being built for disorder – Moniepoint
Africa offers a harsher environment in which to test this idea. Startups here deal with many problems like currency depreciation, unreliable infrastructure and capital markets that can disappear almost as quickly as they arrive. A business built around the expectation of stability can find itself in trouble without necessarily having done anything wrong.
But those same conditions can also create opportunities for companies whose products become more useful when the rest of the system is under pressure.
Nigeria’s cash crisis in early 2023 is a good example. The Central Bank’s currency redesign programme created an acute shortage of physical cash that left businesses and consumers struggling to complete normal transactions.
Digital payment companies were suddenly dealing with a surge in demand. Moniepoint was one of the beneficiaries because it had already spent years building a network of point-of-sale (POS) terminals and agents across Nigeria’s informal economy. When cash became difficult to access, merchants who might otherwise have continued accepting physical currency needed alternatives.
Moniepoint’s business did not become successful because the cash crisis happened, but because it had already built the distribution network, technology, and relationships required to serve small businesses. But the crisis exposed the value of those capabilities at a moment when millions of people needed them.
Between 2022 and 2023, the number of transactions on Moniepoint’s platform rose from 1.7 billion to 5 billion, while the value of transactions processed increased from about $100 billion to more than $150 billion. This is what makes the idea of antifragility interesting in business.
The company did not predict that Nigeria would experience a cash crisis, and honestly, it did not need to. It had built a business that became more useful when one of the country’s existing systems stopped functioning properly. But Moniepoint is now one of Africa’s largest fintech companies, and there are smaller examples that may say even more about how younger businesses deal with uncertainty.
M-KOPA
M-KOPA started by financing solar energy products for households that could not afford to pay the full price upfront, using small instalments collected over time. It has since expanded into smartphones and other financial products and built its business around consumers who are often excluded from traditional credit because they do not have the formal income records or collateral banks typically demand.
M-KOPA’s model has been tested repeatedly by economic pressure. When household incomes are squeezed, customers become more likely to need financing. But the same conditions can also increase the risk of missed payments. M-KOPA has had to operate within that tension for years and has built credit models around alternative data and using the assets it finances as part of its approach to managing risk.
The company is not immune to the economies in which it operates. Currency depreciation and weak consumer spending can hurt it like any other business. But its underlying model addresses a problem that often becomes more acute when traditional financial systems fail to serve large parts of the population.
It is a more complicated form of antifragility than simply growing during a crisis. A company can be exposed to the same economic pressure as its customers while still finding that its product becomes more necessary under those conditions.
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LemFi
LemFi provides another example, particularly because its business has had to deal with the unpredictable nature of regulation across the markets where it operates.
The remittance company, which serves immigrants sending money across borders, has grown by focusing on people moving money between countries where banking systems, currencies and regulations often create friction. That alone means its business is tied to a world in which disruption is fairly normal.
When Ghanaian regulators suspended the company’s operations in the country in 2023, it was a reminder of how quickly the operating environment can change for a financial startup. But the company continued expanding elsewhere, including into new markets outside Africa and reducing its dependence on any single geography. That does not mean regulation is somehow good for startups. It is not.
A regulatory suspension can cost a company customers, revenue and trust. But a business spread across several markets, products or customer groups may have more room to absorb the consequences than one built around a single jurisdiction. In this case, the point is optionality.
A startup does not always know which part of its business will work best or which market will become difficult. The more expensive it is to change direction, the more dangerous being wrong becomes.
What the funding drought exposed
The venture funding boom allowed African startups to defer an existential question: what happens when the capital stops coming? Investors routinely financed expansion on the assumption that a fresh round would land before the current runway expired. When global interest rates rose and venture investment dried up, that assumption collapsed.
Some companies adapted by slashing burn rates and improving monetisation across existing accounts. Others discovered, to their detriment, that their entire operating models had been engineered for a market context that no longer existed.
The shutdown of numerous startups across markets like Kenya should not be oversimplified into a narrative about poor business models. Each faced distinct operational challenges, particularly in logistics, a sector notoriously tough across emerging markets.
However, capital-intensive ventures possess far less margin for error when growth cools and funding stalls: fixed costs remain unyielding, and a delayed funding round rapidly turns into a fatal crisis.
This capital crunch has also fundamentally changed how founders evaluate financing. Venture equity is no longer viewed as the default solution for every business, especially in asset-heavy sectors like mobility, clean energy, and trade finance, where structured debt can support growth far more sustainably.
The defining lesson of the funding drought is that a business built on the assumption that cheap capital will always be there is, almost by definition, fragile when it suddenly isn’t.
Read smart insights about Francophone Africa’s tech ecosystem—weekly.
Kenn Abuya
Kenn Abuya is a senior reporter at TechCabal. He leads the Startups Desk.
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