Portrait No. 001
Erica Kaze
Co-Founder & CEO
Baza Analytics
Raised — Bootstrapped, raising
During my time at PayPal building an internal data tool, I'd return home to Africa and watch Western companies parachute in with solutions that didn't work, built without input from the people who'd actually use them. The injustice wasn't just in the products, it was in who got to build them. African talent was relegated to implementation, never innovation. The turning point came through talking to my father about his role at the Africa Insurance Organization. I learned how insurers were losing millions because the tools they actually needed weren't being built. Meanwhile, I had the exact expertise needed but was expected to build for Silicon Valley, not for home. I refuse to be another African watching outsiders build for Africa without us. We deserve to build solutions for our own markets.
In her words
“Just as mobile money rewired financial access across Africa, AI and data will redefine how African companies operate and compete globally. Baza is the infrastructure layer that will make it possible. A decade from now, I want to look back and know we built it before anyone believed we could.”
Chapter I
The toughest challenges you've faced as a founder.
The hardest part of building Baza is fundraising while Black, female, and African in an ecosystem where less than 1% of VC goes to Black founders. I can’t lean on friends and family checks, my network back home doesn’t have disposable capital, so every dollar has been a climb. Still, I’ve built Baza and we’re closing customers across multiple countries. The biases that make investors overlook founders like me are exactly why I see opportunities they miss. Then there’s the immigrant reality: I’m on a U.S. green card, constantly calculating whether I can afford to leave for a business trip and risk not getting back in. Last summer, while I was in London, my home country was added to a partial travel restrictions list and I had to decide whether to cut my trip short or risk being stranded. I’ve missed opportunities because the risk of travel was too high. Every flight to Nairobi or Lagos requires contingency planning most founders never think about. Yet here I am, building across borders they want to close, creating opportunities they refuse to fund.
Chapter II
Your vision.
I'm obsessed with ending the data intelligence gap that keeps financial institutions in Africa from competing globally. Today a Nigerian insurer managing billions has less decision infrastructure than a mid-size U.S. firm. Baza is the intelligence layer African financial services have lacked. Think of Bloomberg for capital markets: it created a new operating standard. We're building that for insurance, banking, and fintech across the continent: real-time fraud detection, accurate risk pricing, automated compliance and so. much more. The result: African banks, insurers, and fintechs operating with Western-level sophistication, retaining value instead of losing it to inefficiency and fraud, and ultimately setting the standard for emerging-market financial infrastructure.
Chapter III
The impact you want to leave behind — for your industry, your community, and the women who come next.
Thirty years from now, I want to look back and say Baza reimagined the way the African financial industry operates, just like Apple reimagined personal computing and mobile phones. For women, Black women especially, I want to prove it's possible to have big dreams and build in industries that don't welcome us. Male-dominated, skeptical, underfunded - none of that determines what we can accomplish. They can doubt us all they want, but eventually they won't be able to ignore us.