Adekunle Agbetiloye
Adekunle Agbetiloye is a Senior Reporter at Business Insider Africa covering how money, technology and energy reshape Africa’s economy. His beat spans the African economy, technology, energy transition and climate change, with a focus on concrete deals and data-led stories that show how capital flows into key sectors. His finance coverage connects startup valuations, sovereign wealth fund moves and public investment programs to their wider economic impact on growth, jobs and living conditions.
African startups and funding milestones
Agbetiloye’s reporting on African startups is grounded in hard numbers and comparative context.
He has written on African startups securing about $1.5 billion in equity yet accounting for only 0.6% of global equity funding, showing where the continent sits in the global venture landscape. He follows funding trends over time, including African startups hitting a $3 billion funding milestone in 2025 and surpassing 2023 levels, framing deals within a broader cycle rather than as isolated announcements.
He also covers landmark individual transactions, such as an equity deal in which Ripple backs Africa’s most valuable startup at a valuation of $3.2 billion, treating valuation, investor identity and strategic fit as core components of the story.
His startup pieces blend deal terms, sector focus and regional footprint, making clear which segments of the African economy are attracting capital and how those flows evolve over successive funding rounds. Founders and operators appear not as personalities alone but as actors in a changing capital market, with his work emphasising scale, sustainability and links to infrastructure and energy use.
Sovereign wealth funds and billionaire capital
A recurring strand in Agbetiloye’s work is the role of global investors and high-net-worth individuals in African markets.
He has covered UAE’s $330 billion sovereign wealth fund and a Saudi billionaire family investing in the continent, highlighting how large pools of capital are allocated across African assets. His reporting on Saudi Arabia’s Vision Invest making a $700 million move into Africa tracks both headline figures and sector targets, situating new commitments within a pattern of Gulf investment in African infrastructure and industry.
Agbetiloye also follows corporate and leadership moves that shape capital deployment, such as Egyptian billionaire Nassef Sawiris stepping down as global executive chairman of OCI Global. These stories focus on governance changes, strategic direction and what shifts at major firms mean for African operations and projects. Alongside billionaire activity, he covers multilateral and private investment programs like the $1 billion minerals investment drive by IFC and Appian, mapping how institutional capital supports mining and energy-related ventures on the continent.
Energy transition, critical minerals and Bitcoin mining
Energy transition is central to Agbetiloye’s finance beat, where he links resource projects, power systems and digital assets.
He has reported on Africa’s expected gains from IFC and Appian’s $1 billion minerals investment drive, explaining how critical minerals funding ties into longer-term energy and industrial strategies. In another piece, he covers India’s largest sustainable critical minerals producer shipping its first lithium ore from Zimbabwe and securing ten blocks with an estimated $7 billion lithium deposit, detailing the scale and potential value locked into African resource corridors.
His energy coverage extends to oil and power markets, including Shell’s plans to expand its Angola footprint through an exclusive oil block deal, and Ethiopia cutting power to Bitcoin miners by 75% as El Niño dries up hydropower.
In profiles such as the founder backed by Jack Dorsey who uses Bitcoin mining to provide cheaper services, he connects cryptocurrency mining to energy infrastructure and cost dynamics rather than treating it purely as a digital finance story. Across these pieces, he consistently ties asset development, power availability and regulatory decisions back to energy transition and climate-linked constraints on growth.
Economic policy, living costs and sector snapshots
Beyond deals and investors, Agbetiloye regularly reports on economic policy decisions and their everyday effects. He has covered South Africa rolling out a $135 million fund to curb unemployment, Kenya borrowing $969 million for road projects and planning a fuel levy to repay debt, and Morocco planning a $15 billion boost for health and education after weeks of youth protests. These stories track how governments finance spending, what tools they deploy to manage debt, and how public investment is used to respond to social pressure and labour market challenges.
Consumer costs and fiscal measures form another thread, with pieces on MTN hiking data prices and triggering outrage amid rising living costs, and a junta-led country introducing taxes on mobile phone use to fund the fight against terrorism. He writes sector snapshots such as rankings of the ten best airlines in Africa in 2026 and analyses of the fastest African economies to hit $100 billion GDP since independence, as well as the top five African countries most dependent on tourism by share of GDP. His coverage of health and development metrics, including four African countries accounting for over half of global malaria deaths, shows an interest in how macro indicators, sector performance and social outcomes intersect. Taken together, his work builds a picture of an evolving African economy in which policy choices, corporate strategies and capital flows are closely linked.
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