How this Kenyan software engineer is transforming blockchain infrastructure across Africa.
Meet David Makuku Nandwa, founder and CTO of Honeycoin, a fast-growing fintech platform bridging traditional finance and blockchain infrastructure across Africa.
Nandwa founded Honeycoin in 2020 after a frustrating experience as a young Nairobi-based software engineer. When he received a $5,000 payment for freelance work through PayPal, the platform froze his funds for three months, labeling his country a high-risk jurisdiction. The then-19-year-old turned that setback into motivation, channeling his frustration into launching his fintech startup during the height of the pandemic.
“It was a wake-up call,” Nandwa told Business Insider Africa. “Here I was, a developer building global systems, and I couldn’t access my own money. I realised Africans weren’t just excluded from opportunities, we were excluded from access. And I had the skills to do something about it.”
Since its launch, Honeycoin has experienced rapid growth, now handling over $150 million in monthly transactions across 40 markets and redefining how Africans send, receive, and manage money. Backed by partnerships with Tether, Binance, and others, the platform aims to reach $1 billion in monthly transaction volume within the next six months.
“It’s about giving businesses and people financial control,” Nandwa said.
With a strong foundation in software, sparked by a passion for gaming and guidance from his father, an engineer, Nandwa built and exited two startups before founding Honeycoin. One of these ventures, an e-commerce platform in Dar es Salaam, grew to nearly $1 million in annual revenue before being acquired by Zapata. He then spent two years at Flutterwave, the African payments unicorn, where he gained hands-on experience developing integrations and building payment rails across the continent, knowledge that would lay the groundwork for Honeycoin.
“Flutterwave was my classroom,” Nandwa said. “I saw how hard it is to scale financial infrastructure in Africa, how much you depend on third-party systems that can fail at any time.”
During his time at Flutterwave, Nandwa recognized a critical issue: treasury and liquidity systems in emerging markets relied on fragmented and unreliable infrastructure. He realized the solution required a fundamentally different approach, building on blockchain rails designed for speed, resilience, and global accessibility.
Today, Honeycoin functions as the operating system for money in emerging markets, offering a unified platform where businesses can issue stablecoin wallets, access banking infrastructure, send cards, and connect to global blockchain payment rails through easy-to-use APIs.
“Africa’s financial systems have been built on imported infrastructure, SWIFT, Visa, PayPal, often inaccessible or unreliable,” Nandwa said. “Honeycoin’s model flips that. By merging stablecoins, blockchain, and traditional rails, we offer a resilient alternative that works whether banks are online or not.”
