Anu Adedoyin Adasolum’s rise in African enterprise shows how powerful change can happen when someone understands their environment deeply and chooses to solve real problems with clarity and courage. Her journey is marked by a commitment to structure, discipline and a strong belief that progress in Africa must be built on local insight, not borrowed models.
Her education, which included studies in the United Kingdom, offered her a good grounding in how organisations and economies function. Yet it was her decision to immerse herself in the realities of African commerce that shaped the direction of her life. She began her career at Dangote Industries where she learned the discipline of executing large scale operations. She strengthened her analytical instincts at KPMG Nigeria, gaining a close view of how businesses operate at different stages of maturity.
Her move to Jumia Nigeria placed her in the heart of the everyday trading ecosystem. There she worked directly with vendors, sourcing networks and the massive world of informal commerce. She saw the struggle many merchants faced: supply chains without structure, inventory systems without visibility, logistics without dependability and daily trading without reliable data.
An even deeper perspective came at Rensource Energy where she rose to the role of Chief Operating Officer. While building energy solutions for businesses, she uncovered a much broader truth. African merchants were not held back by lack of ambition, but by lack of infrastructure. They needed more than power. They needed order. They needed tools that understood their struggles. They needed systems designed for them. This reinforced something she has always believed, that Africa’s most effective progress will come from understanding local dynamics and creating solutions that grow out of those realities.
This was the foundation for Sabi.
In 2020, Anu co-founded Sabi alongside Ademola Adesina with a mission to build a commercial backbone for African merchants. Not just a marketplace, but a full infrastructure platform offering inventory management, fulfilment support, logistics, data, financing and business tools, all shaped around how African trade actually works, not how outsiders imagine it should work.
The impact was immediate. Within eighteen months Sabi was approaching half a billion dollars in annualised trade volume. The platform expanded rapidly, securing a seed round, a bridge round, a strong Series A and a major Series B that pushed the company’s valuation close to the three hundred million dollar mark. Merchants responded quickly because they recognised that Sabi was built for them, with their challenges and their realities in mind.
By late 2023 Sabi crossed the one billion dollar mark in annualised trade volume. More than two hundred thousand merchants were on the platform. Expansion moved into other African markets, proving that a locally grounded model could thrive across borders.
Through all these achievements, Anu has remained anchored in a central principle: African markets require African solutions shaped by local understanding and operational excellence. Her leadership continues to show that when structure meets insight, and when innovation respects the realities of those it intends to serve, transformational results follow.
Anu Adedoyin Adasolum stands today as one of the most impactful female business builders of her generation, a leader shaping Africa’s commercial future by grounding progress in local truth and building systems that allow millions to thrive.
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