At 19, David Nandwa had a $5,000 payment frozen by PayPal. That frustration became fuel. Months later, he launched Honeycoin, a fintech bridging blockchain and traditional finance across Africa. Today, it processes over $150 million monthly in 40 markets, backed by nearly $6 million in funding.

Five years ago, a young software engineer in Nairobi received a $5,000 payment for freelance work. The project was done, the client was satisfied, but PayPal wasn’t.

Without warning, the global payments giant froze his funds for three months, declaring his country a high-risk jurisdiction, a digital verdict on where he was born.

For 19-year-old Nandwa, figuring out his place in the world, the shock of it all became a moment of clarity.

“It was a wake-up call,” he says. “Here I was, a developer building global systems, and I couldn’t access my own money. I realised Africans weren’t just excluded from opportunities, we were excluded from access. And I had the skills to do something about it.”

That frustration became the spark for Honeycoin, the fintech startup he would found months later, in the stillness of the pandemic lockdown, in 2020.

Today, Nandwa is the Founder, CEO, and CTO of Honeycoin, a rapidly growing fintech platform connecting traditional finance with blockchain infrastructure.

The company now processes more than $150 million in monthly transactions across 40 markets, transforming how Africans send, receive, and interact with money.

From play to purpose

Before he ever thought of building a fintech, Nandwa was a coder. He was drawn to computers the way some kids are drawn to football fields.

His father, an engineer, had encouraged his curiosity. “I loved gaming,” Nandwa says, “and my dad told me, if you learn how to code, you can build your own games.”

That idea, that one could create entire worlds from a keyboard, changed everything.

By age nine, he was teaching himself to code; by 12, he was contributing to online developer forums; by his teens, he was fluent in Ruby, C, Python, and JavaScript.

But for him, being a young African coder in the early 2010s wasn’t glamorous. There were few local communities, and few mentors. “Software engineering wasn’t cool then,” he laughs. “There were no meetups. I learned online, helping people on FreeCodeCamp and Codecademy.”

That self-taught discipline laid the foundation for everything that came next.