Lagos Slush’D 2025, held on Thursday at The Podium in Lekki, marked the first-ever Slush event in West Africa, positioning Nigeria’s startup scene on the global innovation map.
Finnish Ambassador to Nigeria, Sanna Selin, highlighted the growing collaboration between Nigerian founders and global tech hubs, emphasising this as a moment to “build new bridges.”
“Let us use this moment to build new bridges… between Nigeria and Finland,” said Selin to highlight the growing collaboration between Nigerian founders and global technology hubs.
The event underscored Nigeria’s thriving tech ecosystem, with the 2024 Partech Africa Report revealing a record $1.4 billion raised by Nigerian startups in 2024, reflecting strong investor confidence. The conference didn’t just showcase individual startups but spotlighted an entire ecosystem poised for global impact.
From ‘Africa is Not Waiting’ to homegrown innovation
Charles Ilo, CEO of Peerless SGS and keynote speaker, boldly declared, “Africa is not waiting,” capturing a continental shift from dependence on foreign aid and technology to homegrown innovation.
“Local is the default now,” Mr Ilo stated. He stressed that African founders are solving problems with locally tailored technology.
However, Ferdinand Adimefe, CEO of Magic Carpet Studios, urged for a more balanced focus, calling for investment in sectors like creative arts, agriculture, and edtech, alongside fintech.
Fintech alone cannot transform this country,” Adimefe said.
Adimefe also emphasised the need for collaboration to nurture Nigeria’s creative industries and build an environment conducive to long-term innovation. Policy reforms, such as tax incentives and trade agreements, could unlock capital and create opportunities for scaling startups globally.
AI as Africa’s Next Frontier: Intentional, Inclusive, Impactful
Boye Ademola, Founder and CEO of Bazaa Technologies, discussed the transformative potential of AI, predicting it could add up to $2 trillion to Africa’s economy in the next decade.
He called AI a “general purpose technology” whose impact could surpass even the internet and electricity. He projected that AI could add “up to $2 trillion to Africa’s economy over the next 10 years,” equating to roughly 60-70 percent of the continent’s current GDP (McKinsey Global Institute, 2023).
Ademola emphasized AI’s capacity to transform key sectors such as agriculture by optimizing farming with satellite data education through innovative learning models beyond traditional classrooms, healthcare with early disease diagnosis, and finance by enhancing credit scoring and automating lending processes.
He posed a critical question to businesses: “What are we doing today that AI agents cannot replace?” warning startups to “be careful what we’re spending our energy on today” and to prioritize intentional investments in AI infrastructure, particularly data governance.
Malik Afegbua, a generative AI artist, stressed the importance of representation and bias mitigation in AI development. His project, “African Generative AI: Art and Data for Curating an Unbiased Global Creative Economy and Culture,” spotlights older Africans, a demographic often overlooked, using AI trained on authentic African datasets to counteract colonial biases embedded in mainstream AI models.
Afegbua asserted, “AI is only as good as the data you feed it,” emphasising the need for culturally relevant data to reshape global narratives and perceptions about Africa and its people.
Lagos Slush’D 2025 showcased that Nigeria’s startup founders are leading a new era of innovation, collaboration, and cultural leadership. The future is homegrown, AI-driven, and unmistakably African.