The Lagos Thesis

I spent eight weeks in Yaba and Lekki interviewing founders, engineers, and investors building AI-native companies in Nigeria. What I found contradicts almost every Western narrative about African tech.

Three Observations

1. Talent density is real: The concentration of senior ML engineers per square kilometer in Yaba now rivals parts of Bangalore circa 2015.
2. Capital is the bottleneck, not ideas: Founders are shipping production systems with three engineers and zero seed funding.
3. Policy is the silent variable: The CBN's stance on digital assets in 2026 will determine whether Lagos becomes the next Bangalore or the next missed opportunity.

The Founders to Watch

• A team building Yoruba-native LLM evaluation benchmarks
• A two-person company shipping fraud detection used by three of the top five Nigerian banks
• A research collective publishing open-source African language datasets at scale

What the West Gets Wrong

Western coverage frames African AI through a charity lens or a leapfrogging narrative. Both are wrong. What's happening in Lagos is industrial-grade engineering executed under capital constraints that would break most Silicon Valley teams.

If you're an investor or operator interested in this thesis, my full field notes (78 pages) are available on request.