When Marjorie Saint-Lot joined Uber in 2019 as Country General Manager for Côte d’Ivoire, she was tasked with launching the ride-hailing giant’s first West African operation outside Nigeria. The vision was ambitious: use Abidjan as a beachhead to dominate Francophone West Africa, a market of over 180 million people.
Six years later, that vision lies in ruins. On September 24, 2025, Uber officially shut down its Ivorian operations, admitting in a final message that the decision would be “disappointing” for users. The market was left to France’s Heetch and Dubai-based Yango — both better adapted to local conditions Uber never quite mastered.
But Saint-Lot didn’t retreat with her former employer. Earlier this year, she launched Fanga.io, an electric mobility and digital services ecosystem specifically designed for African conditions. The startup deploys battery-swapping stations, partners with suppliers of affordable electric motorcycles, and provides financial services for professional riders — addressing precisely the infrastructure gaps that contributed to Uber’s struggles.
She’s not alone. Across Africa’s rapidly growing tech ecosystem, a pattern is emerging: when global tech companies fail in African markets, the local operators they trained are founding startups that succeed where their former employers couldn’t. These “refugee founders” — armed with corporate resources, market knowledge, and hard-won lessons from expensive failures — represent an unintended consequence of Big Tech’s African ambitions.
The Uber Alumni Network
Egypt tells the story in miniature. Uber entered the market in 2014 with typical Silicon Valley confidence, deploying playbooks that worked in São Paulo and Mexico City. The company captured market share but never achieved profitability, eventually acquiring Careem in 2019.
The operation’s legacy, however, extends far beyond its market exit. Ahmad Yousry, who served as head of marketing and later General Manager of Uber Egypt, co-founded Rabbit in 2021. The quick commerce startup has since raised funding from Lorax Capital Partners, Global Ventures, Raed Ventures, and Beltone Venture Capital, building precisely the local delivery infrastructure Uber struggled to create.
Ahmad Hammouda, another Uber Egypt General Manager, took different lessons from the experience. He co-founded Thndr, Egypt’s first regulated mobile investment platform, which secured $15.7 million from Netherlands-based Prosus Ventures. The company democratizes stock market access for Egyptian millennials — a pivot from mobility to fintech enabled by understanding what Egyptian consumers actually wanted.
The pattern repeats. Mostafa Elmasry, who worked at Glovo, which left Egypt in 2020, founded FinCart.io, attracting investment from Plus VC and Plug and Play. These weren’t junior employees gaining résumé padding — they were senior operators who ran African businesses for global companies.
When Exits Create Opportunities
Safeboda’s Kenya story offers perhaps the clearest example of how corporate retreats birth entrepreneurial advances. The Ugandan motorcycle taxi platform expanded to Kenya in 2018 with substantial funding and regional ambitions. By 2020, facing unit economics that never quite worked and intense competition from established operators, the company quietly exited the Kenyan market.
Kaoru Kaganoi, the Japanese VP of Expansion who led Safeboda’s Kenya operations, faced a choice: return to Uganda with a failed expansion, or stay and apply those lessons to a new venture. He chose the latter, co-founding Peach Cars with Zachary Petroni, another Safeboda alumnus.
Peach Cars, focused on used vehicle sales, recently raised $11 million from Japanese investors including Suzuki Global Ventures, JBIC, Gogin Capital, and UTEC. The company addresses mobility through asset ownership rather than ride-hailing — a pivot informed by watching Safeboda struggle with driver retention and vehicle maintenance.
Can Corporate Failures Create Better Founders?
The refugee founder phenomenon reflects several structural advantages that corporate alumni possess over traditional entrepreneurs.
First, they learned on someone else’s dime. Unlike bootstrapped founders who must validate every assumption with limited capital, corporate operators had resources to test hypotheses, analyze data, and iterate on models. When those models failed, they didn’t face personal bankruptcy — they gained invaluable negative knowledge about what doesn’t work.
Second, they built networks that persist beyond employment. Marjorie Saint-Lot’s 17-year career across financial services, development work, and tech created relationships with government officials, investors, and potential partners that Fanga.io can leverage. Ahmad Yousry’s time at Uber connected him with logistics operators, fleet managers, and consumer insights that inform Rabbit’s quick commerce strategy.
Third, they identified genuine market gaps versus Silicon Valley assumptions. Global companies often enter African markets with playbooks designed for different contexts. Uber’s driver incentive structures worked poorly in markets where vehicle ownership models differed. M-Pesa’s agent-light approach failed where bank partnerships were mandatory, as in South Africa. The operators who watched these mismatches play out daily developed nuanced understanding of local market mechanics.
Fourth, they gained credibility with investors who might otherwise doubt African operators. A founder who ran Uber’s Egypt operations or managed Vodacom South African M-Pesa launch carries implicit validation. International VCs comfortable backing former Google or Facebook employees extend similar trust to former Uber or Vodacom managers.
The Sector Pivot Strategy
Refugee founders rarely compete directly with their former employers. Instead, they pivot to adjacent opportunities informed by their corporate experience.
Mobility operators become fintech founders (Ahmad Hammouda’s move from Uber to Thndr) or e-commerce founders (Ahmad Yousry’s shift to Rabbit). Telecom operators become payments infrastructure builders (various Vodafone alumni) or proptech founders (Mostafa El-Beltagy’s Nawy).
The logic is sound: direct competition with former employers risks legal complications and forces founders to execute better versions of strategies that already failed. Adjacent pivots allow founders to apply transferable skills while avoiding competitive overlap.
Marjorie Saint-Lot’s trajectory exemplifies this strategy. Rather than building another ride-hailing platform to compete with Heetch and Yango in Côte d’Ivoire, Fanga.io addresses the infrastructure layer — electric motorcycles and battery swapping — that ride-hailing platforms require but struggle to provide. She’s selling to her former competitors rather than competing with them.
The Bottom Line
Joseph Schumpeter’s creative destruction typically describes how innovative firms destroy incumbent businesses. The refugee founder phenomenon represents an inversion: failed innovations from powerful incumbents inadvertently create the conditions for genuinely innovative local companies to succeed.
When Uber spent millions trying to make Abidjan work, it ultimately failed — but it trained Marjorie Saint-Lot. In 2020, at the heart of the coronavirus pandemic when Safeboda retreated from Kenya, it seemed like failure — until Kaoru Kaganoi built Peach Cars.
Africa’s case isn’t entirely unique. Silicon Valley’s ecosystem strengthened each time talented operators left failed startups to found new ones. Europe’s tech hubs emerged as American companies established — and sometimes shuttered — European operations. Asia’s giants benefited from training talent at international firms before they built local champions.
As more international tech companies attempt African expansion — and as some inevitably retreat — the refugee founder pipeline will strengthen. The question isn’t whether this pattern will continue, but how quickly it accelerates and whether ecosystem builders recognize it as a feature, not a bug, of healthy tech economy development.
Marjorie Saint-Lot, now building electric mobility infrastructure in the markets Uber abandoned, put it succinctly in describing her journey: “I am a creator at heart and I love building from scratch… It’s been an amazing 17 years journey of discovering myself, my strength.”
That journey happened to include watching a Silicon Valley giant struggle in West Africa. Now she’s building what might actually work — informed by everything that didn’t.