Collins Muriuki
Kenyan fintech builder Collins Muriuki turned a KSh 20,000 stake and a borrowed laptop into Terra Software, an impact engine now wiring African cafeterias and smallholder fields to the digital economy. Founded in 2012, the Nairobi start-up first cracked school feeding: its NFC-based Tap2Eat platform lets parents preload lunch money onto virtual cards, a switch that has already delivered more than 31 million meals to public-school pupils while cutting cash leaks to near zero. Terra then trained its lens on agriculture, rolling out a tea-traceability system that gives 650,000 farmers real-time leaf weights, mobile payouts, and an audit trail prized by ethical buyers.
Muriuki steered Terra through COVID-19 shutdowns, remote-install teams, SMS fall-backs, and a pivot to micro-merchant loans that have since disbursed US $250,000, expanding into five African markets and processing almost US $2 million in low-value transactions along the way. He pairs code with pragmatism, spending Thursdays in factory queues to watch users tap, scan, or abandon the tech he ships. Next on his roadmap: pan-African API rails that will sync Tap2Eat with national school-lunch budgets, carbon-credit scoring for traceable tea, and a youth coding fellowship to secure talent for Terra’s push into francophone West Africa. His wager is simple: small payments, scaled smartly, can unlock outsized social returns.