Black Swan, a Mauritius-based Fintech startup, has emerged as the winner of the MEST Africa Challenge (MAC) 2025. This follows the grand finale of the competition held at Innovation City in Cape Town on November 26, 2025.
In a statement released on Tuesday, as seen by Technext, MEST Africa said the 2025 edition focused on fintechs that deploy strategic innovations to bridge financial inclusion. The Grand Finale featured 10 finalists showcasing real, scalable solutions that tackle challenges across payments, credit, insurance, and trade finance.
As the 2025 winner, Black Swan will receive $50,000 in equity investment, entry into the MEST Portfolio, and the opportunity to pilot commercial solutions with Absa business units across Africa.
Reacting to the development, Ashwin Ravichandran, Portfolio Advisor at MEST Africa, explained that Fintech is making a lasting impact by championing other sectors such as agriculture, energy, and trade. He added that the pitch competition shows a clear shift towards building for scale and founders’ readiness for cross-border operations.
“At MEST, we’re inspired to see entrepreneurs building solutions that are deeply local yet globally adaptable. It reflects a new maturity in African innovation; grounded in customer realities, and ambitious enough to scale across borders,” he said.
Championed by the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST Africa) and powered by Absa Group, the MEST Africa Challenge is one of the continent’s leading Pan-African pitch competitions. The event aims to spotlight early-stage startups and guide them along their growth path.
This year’s edition saw hundreds of entries from across Absa’s eight priority markets: Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Seychelles, Uganda, and Zambia. Absa Group Limited is a major pan-African bank based in South Africa with a presence in 10 African countries, formerly a part of Barclays Africa.
After scrutiny, 20 startups advanced to the semifinals, and 10 startups moved on to the Cape Town finale, where they pitched to a panel of judges comprising investors, Absa executives, and industry leaders.
Since 2008, the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) Africa has trained and supported over 2,000 entrepreneurs and invested in over 90 startups. The MEST Africa Challenge (MAC) is its flagship pan-African pitch competition designed to identify, support, and scale high-potential technology ventures.
Also Read: Meet the 20 fintech startups selected for MEST Africa Challenge 2025 semifinals.
Meet Black Swan
Co-founded by Derick Kazimoto, Black Swan uses artificial intelligence and alternative data to build credit scores for Africa’s unbanked population. The company uses AI models to analyse alternative data such as mobile-money transactions and utility-bill payments to generate credit assessments for individuals and SMEs with little or no formal credit history.
Explaining the gap Black Swan aims to bridge, Kazimoto said that Africa’s financial system cannot ascertain the true creditworthiness of millions of consumers and Micro, Small, and Medium-sized Enterprises (MSMEs), as these data are invisible to traditional lenders.
“This invisibility locks out capable borrowers, limits credit growth, and slows economic mobility. Our mission is to make Africa bankable. We believe Africa is shifting from informal, collateral-heavy lending to data-driven credit. A transformation that’s changing how banks and FinTechs trust, lend, and grow,” Kazimoto added.
The Mauritius-based startup is on a mission to bank the unbanked by turning fragmented data into instant credit intelligence. The company rebranded from Tausi to Black Swan in April 2025.
