Communiqué 62: Techpoint is building Africa’s Industry Dive

In its first decade, Techpoint cemented itself as the definitive voice of Africa’s tech ecosystem. Now, it seeks to extend that influence into Africa’s broader business landscape.

1. Old employees, new directions

In September last year, Emmanuel Paul received a call from Múyìwá Mátùlúkò, his former boss, asking him to return to his previous company. It had only been nine months since he left his job as managing editor of Techpoint Africa, one of the continent’s leading tech publications, for a storytelling role at fintech unicorn Moniepoint.

At Moniepoint, Paul had helped develop some of the company’s most important communication efforts. But by the time the call ended, he knew his time at Moniepoint would be short-lived. Mátùlúkò had made him an offer he could not refuse: return with the industry experience he had gathered at Moniepoint to lead the company’s new finance publication.

Paul had played an important role in Techpoint’s first decade, rising through the ranks from an internship program to leading the newsroom. Now, for the next decade, he would once again play a key role in executing the company’s editorial strategy.

After his notice period expired at Moniepoint, Paul resumed as the managing editor of Finance in Africa, one of the two publications Techpoint’s new parent company, Businessfront, was launching.

2. Not just another tech blog

Before the unicorns, the multi-million dollar fundraises with sky-high valuations, and the sold-out conferences, Nigeria’s tech ecosystem consisted mostly of true believers. Adewale Yusuf was one of them. What he lacked in coding talent, he made up for in enthusiasm, photography, and writing, attending events at the ecosystem watering hole, CcHub, and taking pictures and writing stories about those events for tech publications like the now-defunct Otekbits.

Adewale began to develop a growing discontent with the way tech was covered. The few available publications at the time wrote about tech with an insider’s voice, excluding a lot of people who were not familiar with the industry language. “The voice was not for everybody. The conversation was focused on a few people,” Adewale said in a documentary.

On January 1, 2015, he launched Techpoint.ng to solve this problem. Odunayo Eweniyi, Piggyvest’s COO, and Daniel Orubo, Zikoko’s editor-in-chief, were some of the first employees. A month later, Múyìwá Mátùlúkò, a journalist who had been the first employee at TechCabal, joined Yusuf as his co-founder.