Three years. One continent. One mission.
From Stacks Nigeria to Africa's venture engine for digital financial infrastructure.
How we got here
Three years of groundwork. One continent. One mission. A pipeline ready to activate.
We began in 2022 with a simple belief: Africa should not only consume digital infrastructure but create it. That belief led to Stacks Nigeria.
In 18 months we onboarded more than 300 developers across Africa, Asia and Australia, raised $2,800 from Artizen S4 and Community DeGrant, ran our first cohort, and delivered real infrastructure into the Stacks and Bitcoin ecosystems.
We demonstrated a small but vital truth: our builders can compete globally when the right pathway exists. We also recognised the ceiling. Training developers is not the same as cultivating founders. Grants run out. Cohorts conclude. Without a system to convert technical talent into investable companies, we were building capacity without building ventures.
In 2025 we became Let Africa Build, carrying the same conviction into wider ambition. Today LAB is Africa’s venture engine for digital financial infrastructure, powered by a developer ecosystem that trains the founders it produces.
We have onboarded over 800 developers, secured our first institutional backing from the Stacks Foundation, and hold active partnerships with eight Nigerian universities alongside standing relationships with Lions Club International and the NYCN. We launched the LAB Open Source Builder Fund on Artizen, supporting Bitcoin developers across five infrastructure tracks. And we are preparing Cohort 1, our first founder cohort under the venture engine model.
Seven milestones
Three years of ground work, in the order it happened.
Dr. Eniola Samuel Olawunmi
Three years building African developer ecosystems in Bitcoin infrastructure. Onboarded 300+ developers to Stacks before founding LAB. Trained across smart contract engineering, DeFi infrastructure, and autonomous agent design.
Delivered institutional grants. Structured formal partnerships across corporate, university, civic, and government relationships. Built and shipped 15 open-source autonomous DeFi agent skills, five of which won the AIBTC × Bitflow Skills Competition, with the Stacks Alpha Engine approved upstream into aibtcdev/skills.
LAB is not a first attempt. It is a refined one, built on the operational lessons of what actually works when forming African founders and connecting them to global infrastructure.
Africa should build Africa’s digital financial future.
Five principles hold the model together.