Samuel Kamochu
Kenyan software engineer-turned-founder Samuel Kamochu has built a career around the conviction that Africa’s digital backbone should be engineered on home soil. As a young systems architect at Safaricom he helped steer the landmark “Bring M-Pesa Back Home” project, migrating the mobile-money giant’s core servers from Germany to Nairobi and slashing latency while handing Kenya full control of its flagship fintech rail. The success earned him industry buzz and, in 2015, the confidence to co-launch Meliora Technologies, a solutions firm that stitches secure messaging, workflow automation, and data-analytics layers into the communication stacks of banks, telcos, and regional blue-chip corporates.
Under Kamochu’s watch Meliora has deployed platforms that now route millions of API calls daily, cut incident-response times for client call centers by up to 40 percent, and anchored cross-border expansion for a half-dozen East African enterprises. Equally committed to talent as to code, he runs a graduate boot camp that has funnelled more than 150 junior engineers into full-time roles across the ecosystem. Next on his roadmap: integrating generative-AI assistants into Meliora’s service desk suite and opening a West Africa hub, moves aimed at proving that Kenyan ingenuity can set the standard for enterprise software across the continent.