The Story of Cadana: Building Africa’s Financial Operations Infrastructure Through Three Product Rebuilds

The Story of Cadana: Building Africa’s Financial Operations Infrastructure Through Three Product Rebuilds

There’s a moment in every failing startup when the founders have to make a choice: keep pushing on the current path or admit it’s not working and start over. For Albert Owusu-Asare, CEO and Co-Founder of Cadana, that moment came three times. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Albert shared the story of building Cadana—a journey that spans multiple pivots, complete product rebuilds, and the transformation from a struggling developer tool into a financial operations platform serving 400+ businesses across 26 African countries and processing over $400 million in annual transaction volume.

The Beginning: Infrastructure for African Software Companies

Cadana’s origin story begins with a straightforward thesis: African software companies needed better tools to distribute their products globally. The opportunity seemed obvious. Africa’s tech ecosystem was growing, developers were building products, and they needed infrastructure to reach international markets.

“We were building infrastructure for software companies in Africa to be able to distribute their products to the rest of the world,” Albert explains. The team built the product, launched it, and waited for customers to arrive.

They didn’t come.

“We spent about a year trying to sell that product, and we just couldn’t find enough people who wanted to buy it,” Albert admits. This wasn’t a marketing problem or a sales execution issue. The market fundamentally wasn’t ready. “The market just wasn’t mature enough for it to be a venture scale business in that category.”

A year of effort. Dwindling resources. No traction. Most founders would rationalize continuing—maybe we need better positioning, maybe we need a different sales strategy, maybe we just need more time. Albert and his team made a harder choice: they killed the product entirely.

The Second Attempt: Payments Infrastructure

With their first product dead, the team looked for adjacent opportunities. They observed businesses struggling with payment acceptance and saw an opening. If they could help companies accept more payments successfully, they’d unlock revenue growth.

The logic seemed sound. They built technology to improve acceptance rates. The product worked technically. But again, customers weren’t buying.

“We went into the payments infrastructure space because we realized that, okay, a lot of people have problems accepting payments. If we can help them accept more payments, then we solve the problem,” Albert says. But when they got into the market, they discovered a painful truth: “People weren’t actually losing that much money from payments not being accepted. So it wasn’t actually a big enough pain point for them to want to switch.”

This is the trap that kills many B2B companies. They solve a problem that exists but doesn’t hurt enough to justify the cost, friction, and risk of switching. The problem is real, customers acknowledge it, but nobody will actually pay to fix it.

Two years in. Two failed products. Limited runway. This is where most startup stories end.

The Discovery: Post-Payment Operations

Instead of building another product on another hunch, Albert and his team went back to basics: they talked to customers. Not to pitch, not to demo, but to understand.

“We started speaking to a lot more people and realized that actually the biggest problem that people had was not even accepting the payment. The biggest problem people had was everything that happens after you accept the payment,” Albert reveals.

This insight changed everything. Businesses weren’t losing money on failed payment acceptance—they were drowning in operational complexity. Reconciliation, accounting integration, multi-currency management, compliance reporting, dispute handling. “That’s where businesses were actually losing the most money, and that’s where they actually needed the most help.”

For the first time in two years, Albert had found a problem customers were actively, expensively struggling with. A problem they’d pay to solve.

The Third Build: Getting It Right

With this insight, Cadana rebuilt from scratch for the third time. “We basically built the entire product again, version three, to focus on that operations piece,” Albert explains.

This wasn’t iteration—it was reconception. The new Cadana didn’t facilitate payments; it solved everything that happened after the payment cleared. Reconciliation that used to take days happened automatically. Accounting integrations that required manual data entry became seamless. Compliance reporting that consumed entire teams became push-button simple.

The market validation was immediate and decisive. After years of struggling to find ten paying customers, Cadana began signing up businesses at scale. “We currently work with over 400 businesses across 26 African countries,” Albert shares.

Building Horizontal Infrastructure

With product-market fit finally achieved, Albert made another strategic decision that would shape Cadana’s trajectory: they built horizontally rather than vertically.

“Because we built a very horizontal platform, we work with all kinds of businesses,” Albert explains. “We work with ride hailing companies, we work with e-commerce companies, we work with fintech companies, betting companies, software companies, any company that has to do any high volume of payments or has to manage a lot of money flow.”

This horizontal approach had multiple advantages. It diversified revenue risk across industries, enabled faster learning from different use cases, and created a broader foundation for scale. But it also required building a platform robust enough to handle vastly different business models, transaction types, and operational workflows.

“We focus very much on scalability and reliability,” Albert emphasizes. “So we built the platform to be able to handle very, very large scale.” Even when processing relatively small volumes, they architected for billions. “Even when we were doing maybe only a few million dollars, we built it for scale so that when we’re doing billions of dollars, it still works the same way.”

This decision to build for tomorrow’s scale at yesterday’s revenue proved prescient. Today, Cadana processes over $400 million in transaction volume annually, and the platform handles it without breaking stride.

Expanding Beyond Africa

After achieving deep penetration across 26 African countries, Cadana began expanding globally. They entered North America and are preparing for European expansion. But this geographic expansion came only after proving the business model, achieving operational excellence, and building infrastructure that could scale globally.

The sequencing mattered. Going deep in one market first allowed Cadana to perfect the product, understand customer needs deeply, and build reference customers before multiplying their go-to-market complexity. Many companies expand geographically to chase growth when their core business isn’t working. Albert did the opposite—he expanded only when Cadana was working exceptionally well.

The Future: Building Africa’s Financial Operations Infrastructure

Looking ahead, Albert’s vision for Cadana is expansive but grounded in the operational complexity they’ve already solved. “It’s taken us quite a long time to get to the point where we’re at today,” he acknowledges, but that long journey has given Cadana deep expertise in financial operations that few competitors can match.

The opportunity ahead is massive. As Africa’s digital economy continues growing and more businesses face the operational complexity that comes with scale, the need for sophisticated financial operations infrastructure will only increase. Cadana is positioned to be the platform that powers this next wave of growth.

But perhaps the most important part of Cadana’s future isn’t geographic expansion or feature development—it’s the foundation they’ve built through three product rebuilds and countless customer conversations. They’ve learned what businesses actually need, not what founders think they should need. They’ve built infrastructure for scale before needing it. And they’ve proven they can execute through uncertainty and emerge stronger.

The story of Cadana isn’t about having the right idea first. It’s about having the persistence to keep searching until you find the problem worth solving, the discipline to rebuild when necessary, and the patience to get it right even when it takes years. For Albert and his team, that patience is paying off—one transaction, one customer, one country at a time.