“Three weeks in Beijing and Shanghai,” I tell April Long before the mics come on for our podcast chat. “When?” she asks. “2011,” I reply. “Oh,” she laughs, “different country.”
No kidding. I wasn’t a car person then, and I’m still not now, but I couldn’t help but be floored by Xiaomi’s recently unveiled YU7 SUV.
Long gets it, though. She’s spent 12 years watching East Africa transform, but her journey from a “no-name Chinese town” (her words, not mine) to co-founding an Africa-focused fintech called Pyxis tells quite a story about transformation.
Listening to her share gave me a fresh appreciation for what it must be like building in Africa while Chinese, and what locals might tend to overlook in our own backyard.
Presidents and pictures
Long’s Africa story began rather fortuitously. She was 23, fresh from a master’s in Guangzhou – the pulsing Chinese tech hub of 19 million people, nearly three million more than Zimbabwe’s population. An International Student Exchange Center (ISEC) exchange program plonked her in Tanzania for what was supposed to be a brief stint.
Two weeks in, she’s somehow playing tour guide for President Xi Jinping’s state visit, her face sneaking into a corner of a photo seen by millions back home.
“Zero chance that happens in China,” she tells me, and her parents’ utter shock was probably audible from Dar es Salaam. In Guangzhou, she was nobody special. In Tanzania, she was receiving presidents.
But Long says she stayed because at 20, reading Eric Simanis’s 2012 Harvard Business Review article “Reality Check at the Bottom of the Pyramid” during a previous Taiwan student exchange, she’d decided she wanted to “make money and make a difference.” Most people say that. Long actually meant it enough to turn down some prestigious appointments at Ogilvy China, twice (albeit gigs with relatively uninspiring remuneration attached).
Humbling times
Fast forward to 2021. Long, now married to a Singaporean named George Chan and fully rooted in Kenya, co-founds Pyxis with him (with her at the helm). Named after a southern constellation visible from Nairobi but faint from Beijing, the company aimed to tackle the $286 billion Africa-China trade gap. How apropos.
Their first move? A platform for Nairobi SMEs to pay Chinese factories in yuan. “I made an MVP in two, three months and thought it was going to be a game-changer,” she recalls ruefully.
It flopped spectacularly.
They found no demand for the product despite Long spending six months embedding herself in Nairobi’s wholesale markets – Gikomba, Luthuli, River Road – chasing interest that never materialised. The onboarding friction was too high, ticket sizes too small. “My cost didn’t justify my LTV [customer lifetime value] at all.”
But after struggling to raise money to burn through the problem as was the fashion at the time, she pivoted. Hard.
Following the money
She reckons the market taught her something uncomfortable: “We sometimes want to build the future…but we forget we are in the present tense.” When she went to wholesale markets, traders would shout, “China, China, what are you selling?” The demand wasn’t for payment rails but for access to suppliers.
So she tried e-commerce, even partnering with Alibaba for dropshipping. Another lesson: small-volume imports doubled or tripled costs. She realised it came down to economies of scale. As she puts it: “90% of African trade is still happening in a more traditional way.”
The reality stung. SMEs weren’t ready for her vision of social commerce. Infrastructure, consumer habits, and economics didn’t align with her Silicon Valley-inspired dreams.
So Pyxis shifted to serve Chinese bulk traders shipping containers to African distributors, handling currency exchange and settlement. Long admits being unhelpfully stubborn. “I was like, no, we have to work with SMEs.” Because, of course, ‘impact’. But the numbers didn’t lie: 10% of her time on bulk traders sustained her team, while 90% on SMEs drained cash.
Mirror reflections
Long’s story reflects our tech scene’s growing pains. We do love our fintech fairy tales. Unicorns, million-dollar raises, Silicon Valley playbooks transplanted to Lagos, Nairobi or wherever. But Long’s experience cuts deeper. She flipped from chasing an aspirational middle class to grappling with price-sensitive realities.
That humility: admitting she misread demand, unlearning her assumptions, pivoting when data contradicted vision. To me, that’s the real crux of the story. “It has been really, really hard for me the past two years,” she admits. “Every day I have to remind myself of my mission to keep myself going.”
Her willingness to admit missteps, unlearn assumptions, and rebuild from scratch – perhaps more so in Africa than elsewhere – separates builders from dreamers. Nevertheless, Long hasn’t ditched her vision. “I still believe SMEs will dominate,” she says. “Pyxis will help make that happen.” Playing by today’s rules while eyeing tomorrow.
Note to self
Impact often starts exclusively before it scales. Awkward? Sure. I would know. At 630 000+ plays and counting after over a decade, The African Tech Roundup Podcast hosting my conversation with Long isn’t mass media, but it’s carved out something sustainable by leaning into specificity rather than chasing radio’s democratised reach or the internet’s alluring promise of hyperbolic audience scale.
Long’s pivot to bulk traders isn’t sexy, but it’s real revenue funding her SME dreams and creating room to establish whether there might be VC-backable venturing worth pursuing.
The 12-person team she indicates spans China, Kenya, Australia and Singapore isn’t the next unicorn, and she isn’t claiming it will be. But her willingness to evolve, admit failure, and rebuild from first principles is admirable.
For now, Long’s relying on the bulk traders, the aggregators, the messy reality of how trade actually flows to deliver interim sustainability. But, make no mistake, her eyes are trained firmly on the horizon where SMEs drive the next wave.
Andile Masuku is Co-founder and Executive Producer at African Tech Roundup. Connect and engage with Andile on X (@MasukuAndile) and via LinkedIn.
** The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Independent Media or
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