Mobile money has changed how millions of Africans move value. But for many businesses, the financial system still stops too often at national borders. Payments remain fragmented across markets, making it harder for companies to collect revenue, serve customers, and operate across the continent.
For Claud Hutchful ’06, CEO and Co-Founder of Kowri, that fragmentation points to a deeper problem. “Access isn’t the same as inclusion,” he said. Mobile money got hundreds of millions of people into the system, but a business that collects through it still can’t easily get working capital, insurance, or trade finance against that activity. The rails carry the money; they don’t yet carry the data that unlocks everything else. That’s the gap we’re building for.” Kowri is working to address that gap by building infrastructure that helps financial systems connect and scale across borders.
In three years, the Ghana-based fintech has processed more than $300 million in transactions, with nearly half of that volume recorded in 2025 alone. Today, about 70,000 unique users interact with the platform each month through business clients across sectors including logistics, aviation, education, insurance, and healthcare.
Operating primarily as a B2B platform, Kowri provides underlying systems that allow institutions to move money more efficiently. Its expansion into Côte d’Ivoire has opened access to Francophone West Africa through a single regulatory framework, enabling the company to process transactions for more than 500,000 users in that market. The team is also preparing for entry into Namibia through local partnerships.
For Hutchful, the opportunity is not only about payments. Digital infrastructure can track cash flows and user activity, creating the basis for better risk assessment and financing models such as revenue-based lending. In that sense, financial inclusion is about enabling fuller participation in economic activity.
That kind of infrastructure matters because it shapes what businesses and institutions are able to do. When payments move more reliably across markets, companies can collect revenue with less friction, serve customers beyond one country, and build clearer records of cash flow and activity. In sectors such as logistics, aviation, education, insurance, and healthcare, those systems can affect how quickly services are delivered, how easily customers pay, and how visible economic activity becomes.
Kowri’s roots go back to DreamOval, co-founded in 2007 by Hutchful and fellow Ashesi Computer Science graduates Derrydean Dadzie ’06, Henry Sampson ’06, and Charles Hansen-Quao ’08. In the early years, the team worked out of Ashesi’s computer lab, taking on contract work to stay afloat while pursuing a longer-term ambition: building African digital infrastructure for modern financial services.
Their early projects included MoTech, which used mobile tools to support maternal healthcare delivery, and CocoaLink, which reached approximately 50,000 cocoa farmers in the Sefwi Wiawso area. Built before smartphones were widespread, those projects taught the team to design for real-world constraints: limited infrastructure, limited capital, and trust that had to be earned.
As the ecosystem evolved, DreamOval began building digital layers on top of traditional banking systems, including tools such as e-statements, SMS alerts, and later payment solutions such as SlydePay. That journey eventually led to a corporate restructuring and rebrand to SEVN, with Kowri emerging as the company’s fintech platform after the acquisition of a payments license. Today, Kowri’s growth challenge is no longer only technical. It is also about governance, capital, regulation, and market expansion.
A few years ago, the company was a startup but now, it operates with a team of more than 50 people. Kowri submits monthly reports to the Bank of Ghana, has formalized hiring systems, and is guided by a board of experienced advisors as it grows toward institutional maturity. That next phase brought Kowri into Cohort 6 of the Ashesi Venture Incubator, where the team revisited core assumptions around expansion, investor engagement, and market entry.
For Kowri, AVI was about sharpening a company already in motion. The program helped the team think more deliberately about cross-border growth: how to enter new markets, navigate regulatory environments, communicate value to investors, and learn from other founders building across the continent. Through AVI, Hutchful also engaged coaches such as Adetayo Bamiduro, Co-Founder and CEO of MAX, whose experience offered practical insight into investor pipeline management and the pressures that come with external capital.
Those conversations helped make the next phase of growth more concrete; not only where Kowri could expand, but what kind of capital, partnerships, and operating discipline that expansion would require.
“Our mission is to make modern financial services accessible to everyone everywhere in Africa,” Hutchful said. “And our goal is to become Africa’s leading super app within the next five years.”
He also understands what is at stake if African builders do not shape that future themselves.
“I’ve always thought of failure as ceding the transformation agenda to other players in the system,” Hutchful said. “We like to think about what the future should look like. It’s on us to ensure that we succeed so that we can shape that future.”
