Recently, Meshack Alloys stood before a Silicon Valley audience pitching TABB, his credit infrastructure startup designed to modernize trade finance for small and mid-sized businesses. For those tracking African tech, the moment carried particular weight: Alloys was perhaps last seen presiding over the 2023 collapse of Sendy, one of East Africa’s most prominent logistics companies.
His return marks the latest in what is shaping up to be an unusual year for the African startup ecosystem. While 2025 has seen continued shutdowns — fintech experiencing the most closures — it has also witnessed a striking pattern of high-profile founder comebacks that defy established exit behaviors in the region.
Data compiled from recent African startup failures shows that once a founder experiences a shutdown, 68.3% never return to launch new ventures. Only about one-third demonstrate what researchers call “unwavering entrepreneurial spirit” by founding again. This makes 2025’s wave of serial entrepreneurs particularly noteworthy.
The Comeback Cohort
The returns this year span sectors and geographies, creating a distinct pattern of strategic reinvention.
From Logistics to Fintech Rails: Alloys’ new venture, TABB, represents a complete sector pivot. The Silicon Valley–based startup is building an “instant-acceptance trade credit network” that allows banks to issue revolving credit lines to SMEs. This shift from managing physical vehicle fleets to providing digital financial infrastructure reflects a move away from operational complexity toward software scalability.
E-commerce to Physical Retail: William McCarren, former co-founder of failed Kenyan e-commerce platform Zumi, resurfaced in South Africa in Janaury with FARO, a recommerce startup that recently secured $6 million in funding. Unlike Zumi’s digital marketplace, FARO operates physical stores that repurpose unsold inventory from global fashion brands — a deliberate shift from Kenya’s challenging e-commerce landscape to South Africa’s developed retail environment.
B2B Marketplace to Neobank: Tesh Mbaabu and Mesongo Sibuti, founders of the collapsed B2B e-commerce platform MarketForce, launched Cloud9 Money in October — a neobank targeting young Africans. Their pivot from physical goods logistics to digital financial services suggests founders are applying hard-won operational lessons to sectors with potentially better unit economics.
Agritech to Wellness Premium: Simon Hazell, former CEO of insect protein startup Inseco, has returned as CEO of Bioshroom, a functional mushroom producer in South Africa. His transition from low-margin commodity agriculture to premium wellness products represents a strategic migration toward higher-margin categories with less infrastructure dependency.
E-commerce to Data Monetization: The founding team behind Copia Global — Timothy Steel, Michael King, and Tracey Turner — have launched Stahili, a survey and rewards platform. Their pivot from capital-intensive rural e-commerce to data-driven consumer insights reflects a move toward lower operational risk and faster monetization cycles.
The Pivot Patterns
Analysis of these comebacks reveals consistent strategic shifts that suggest founders are applying a shared playbook — whether consciously or through parallel learning:
From Complexity to Clarity: There’s a clear retreat from asset-heavy, operationally complex models. Sendy managed fleets, driver networks, and cross-border logistics; TABB builds software that integrates with existing systems. MarketForce coordinated physical inventory across five countries; Cloud9 operates purely digitally. The exception proves the rule: McCarren’s FARO chose South Africa specifically because its developed retail infrastructure could support physical operations.
The Margin Migration: Every new venture targets dramatically improved unit economics. Founders are abandoning thin-margin sectors (logistics at 5–15%, commodity agritech, low-ticket e-commerce) for models with inherent leverage. TABB captures transaction fees on trade finance. Bioshroom sells premium wellness products at 10–20x commodity prices. Stahili monetizes consumer data with near-zero marginal costs. FARO achieves 45% margins after reconditioning costs — a controlled structure impossible in marketplace models.
“The commodity game is unforgiving,” a Lagos-based ecosystem expert told Launch Base Africa. “You learn that scale without margin just means losing money faster. These founders are all chasing margin before scale now.”
Geographic and Infrastructure Arbitrage: Founders are treating infrastructure as a selection criterion rather than a solvable problem. Alloys built TABB from Silicon Valley to transcend regional limitations. McCarren moved from Kenya to South Africa’s mature retail landscape. Hazell located Bioshroom in a UNESCO biosphere with stable environmental conditions — a direct response to Inseco’s collapse due to power outages. This represents a pragmatic shift from “building for Africa despite constraints” to “building where constraints allow.”
From Blitzscaling to Sustainable Growth: The growth philosophy has fundamentally changed. MarketForce expanded to five countries in rapid succession. Copia built extensive rural agent networks. These new ventures emphasize validation before scaling. As Hazell reflected on Inseco’s failure: “We scaled too quickly and pivoted too slowly.” The current approach inverts this — testing models at smaller scale before committing to growth.
Risk Redistribution: New models systematically transfer risk away from the startup core. TABB places credit risk on banking partners, not the platform. FARO’s inventory risk is minimized through ultra-low purchase prices of surplus goods. This represents sophisticated ecosystem thinking: in volatile markets, survival depends on minimizing exposure to uncontrollable external factors.
Taken together, these pivots suggest founders aren’t just learning from their own failures — they’re developing shared heuristics about what works in African markets.
The emphasis on margins over scale, infrastructure awareness over infrastructure ambition, and controlled risk over comprehensive solutions points to a maturing ecosystem. These aren’t founders who got unlucky once and are trying the same thing again. They’re applying expensive lessons systematically.
The Data Behind Defiance
The scale of this year’s comeback activity stands out against historical data. According to compiled statistics of notable startup failures across Africa by Launch Base Africa. The analysis shows that once an African founder faces failure, a majority (68.3%) never return to pursue new ventures throughout their career history. Only a resilient 31.7% demonstrated an unwavering entrepreneurial spirit by founding new startups. This highlights a notable trend of perseverance within the African startup ecosystem, where a significant portion of founders leverage their learnings and experiences to navigate new entrepreneurial paths despite previous setbacks.
The 31.7% who eventually launch again represent a minority, making 2025’s concentration of high-profile returns statistically significant. This year’s cohort suggests a growing resilience — or necessity — among African founders to persist despite ecosystem challenges.
Ecosystem Implications
Investors appear cautiously supportive of these second acts. FARO’s $6 million raise from prominent international investors indicates that failure alone doesn’t disqualify founders from future backing, provided they demonstrate clear learning and strategic evolution.
However, critics question whether some pivots represent genuine innovation or simply safer bets in more fashionable sectors. Of the major 2025 comebacks, three of five involve financial services — TABB, Cloud9, and Stahili all monetize through financial infrastructure or data. Only FARO and Bioshroom operate outside fintech-adjacent spaces. The concentration in fintech and consumer apps raises questions about whether founders are pursuing opportunity or avoiding the harder problems they previously tackled.
This clustering could indicate where real opportunity lies. Or it could suggest founders are following fashionable sectors rather than pursuing differentiated visions. The coming years will reveal whether these pivots represent strategic evolution or simply the path of least resistance.
The comebacks occur against a backdrop of persistent ecosystem challenges. Power infrastructure issues, like those that contributed to Inseco’s collapse, continue to plague hardware and manufacturing ventures. Funding availability remains uneven, particularly for Series A and beyond.
Yet these returning founders may be better equipped to navigate such challenges. Their experiences with shutdowns, downsizing, and investor relations provide practical knowledge rarely gained in success stories.
The Bottom Line
In the coming years, the performance of these second-act ventures will be closely watched. Their success or failure could influence investor attitudes toward previously failed founders and either reinforce or undermine the current comeback trend.
For now, the narrative is one of resilience. Founders like Alloys, McCarren, and Mbaabu are testing whether African entrepreneurship allows for — and even rewards — reinvention after very public setbacks. Their journeys suggest that failure, once considered a career-ender in many emerging ecosystems, may be evolving into a difficult but acceptable phase in the African founder’s path.
The coming months will reveal whether these comebacks represent genuine turning points or temporary respites in Africa’s demanding startup landscape. What’s clear is that a growing number of founders are unwilling to let their first endings dictate their final chapters.
