How Cadana Scales Across 26 Countries Without a Traditional Sales Team

How Cadana Scales Across 26 Countries Without a Traditional Sales Team

Most B2B companies scaling across 26 countries hire armies of sales reps, open regional offices, and build country-specific go-to-market playbooks. Albert Owusu-Asare, CEO and Co-Founder of Cadana, took a radically different approach. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Albert revealed how Cadana reached 400+ customers across 26 African countries without the traditional sales infrastructure most founders assume they need. The answer wasn’t sales efficiency or better tooling—it was building a product so essential that geographic expansion became a customer acquisition strategy, not just a growth initiative.

The Traditional Playbook Cadana Ignored

The conventional wisdom for geographic expansion follows a predictable pattern: establish product-market fit in your home market, hire sales reps in target countries, build local partnerships, adapt your product for regional requirements, and slowly expand market by market.

This approach works when you have capital to deploy and margins to support country-specific infrastructure. But for a company serving emerging markets with a horizontal platform, this playbook would have been impossibly expensive and slow.

Albert needed a different approach—one that didn’t require hiring sales teams in 26 countries or building country-specific versions of Cadana’s platform. The solution came from understanding what actually drives adoption in infrastructure products: solving expensive operational problems that businesses can’t ignore.

The Foundation: Building for Scale Before Having Scale

Cadana’s geographic expansion strategy started years before they entered their second country. It began with a product architecture decision that seemed premature at the time but proved essential later.

“We focus very much on scalability and reliability,” Albert explains. “So we built the platform to be able to handle very, very large scale.” This wasn’t just about transaction volume—it was about building infrastructure that could serve businesses across different countries, currencies, and regulatory environments without requiring country-specific customization.

“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,” Albert says. This meant investing in multi-currency support, flexible compliance frameworks, and infrastructure that could handle diverse payment systems before they needed these capabilities.

This decision became the foundation for Cadana’s expansion strategy. Because the platform was built to be genuinely horizontal and scalable from the beginning, entering a new country didn’t require rebuilding the product or hiring local engineering teams. The same platform that served Nigerian fintechs could serve Kenyan e-commerce companies or South African betting operators.

The Pull Strategy: Let Problems Drive Geography

Rather than deciding which countries to enter based on market size or competitive dynamics, Cadana let customer problems drive their geographic expansion. This inbound approach fundamentally changed their GTM motion.

“We currently work with over 400 businesses across 26 African countries,” Albert shares. This distribution didn’t come from targeted expansion campaigns—it came from businesses across Africa discovering they had the same expensive operational problems Cadana solved.

The pattern was consistent: businesses processing high volumes of payments would hit operational complexity that manual processes couldn’t handle. Reconciliation consumed entire teams, accounting integration required constant manual work, multi-currency operations created endless headaches, and compliance reporting became overwhelming.

These businesses would search for solutions, find Cadana, and sign up—regardless of which country they operated in. The problems were universal enough, and Cadana’s horizontal platform was robust enough, that geography became almost incidental to the value proposition.

This pull strategy only works when three conditions align: the problem you’re solving is genuinely universal across geographies, your product requires minimal localization to serve new markets, and the pain is intense enough that customers will find you rather than waiting for you to find them.

The Horizontal Advantage in Geographic Expansion

Cadana’s decision to build a horizontal platform across multiple industries created an unexpected advantage for geographic expansion. Because they served ride-hailing companies, fintechs, e-commerce businesses, betting operators, and software companies, entering a new country didn’t mean finding one specific vertical—it meant serving any high-volume payment business.

“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 accelerated geographic expansion in two ways. First, it increased the addressable market in each country, making even smaller markets viable. Second, it created network effects where success in one vertical in one country created credibility with other verticals in other countries.

A fintech in Nigeria using Cadana would recommend it to an e-commerce company in Kenya. A betting operator in South Africa would tell a ride-hailing company in Ghana. The horizontal platform turned every customer into a potential entry point for new geographies and new verticals simultaneously.

The Infrastructure Moat: Making Geographic Expansion Defensible

The genius of Cadana’s expansion strategy wasn’t just reaching 26 countries—it was making that expansion defensible. By building infrastructure that handled the complexity of operating across multiple countries, currencies, and regulatory environments, Cadana created switching costs that grew with geographic scope.

A business operating in three countries using Cadana would need to replace not just a financial operations tool but an entire infrastructure layer that handled cross-border complexity. The more countries a customer operated in, the harder Cadana became to replace.

This is why Albert’s early decision to build for scale mattered so much. The infrastructure investments that seemed premature when serving a few customers in one country became competitive moats when serving hundreds of customers across dozens of countries.

The Product-Led Motion: Reducing Friction to Zero

While Albert doesn’t explicitly detail Cadana’s onboarding process, the pattern is clear: their geographic expansion relied on making it as easy as possible for businesses to start using the platform without requiring sales intervention.

Infrastructure products traditionally require lengthy sales cycles, complex implementations, and significant services support. Cadana’s horizontal platform, built for scale from the beginning, could support faster adoption without country-specific customization or lengthy implementation projects.

This product-led approach only works when your infrastructure is robust enough to handle diverse use cases out of the box. It’s the difference between a platform that requires configuration for each customer versus one that works immediately for a broad range of businesses.

The North America Expansion: Applying the Same Playbook Globally

After achieving density across 26 African countries, Cadana expanded to North America and is preparing for European expansion. The same fundamentals that enabled African expansion—horizontal platform, infrastructure built for scale, solving universal operational problems—transfer to new geographies.

The sequencing mattered. By going deep in Africa first, Cadana proved the platform could handle diverse countries, currencies, and regulatory environments. This gave them confidence that the same infrastructure could serve businesses anywhere, and it created reference customers across enough geographies to validate their approach.

The Replicable Framework

Albert’s experience reveals a framework for geographic expansion without traditional sales infrastructure. First, build infrastructure that’s genuinely multi-geography from day one, even if you’re only serving one market initially. Don’t wait until you need international capabilities to build them.

Second, solve problems that are universal enough that customers across geographies face them. If your solution requires significant localization for each market, product-led geographic expansion won’t work.

Third, make the product horizontal enough that entering a new geography means serving any customer with the operational characteristics you target, not just one vertical. This increases addressable market size and accelerates expansion.

Fourth, let customer problems drive geography rather than making expansion decisions based on market size projections. The countries where customers find you most urgently are often the best markets to serve.

Fifth, build switching costs that grow with customer scope. The more countries or use cases a customer applies your platform to, the harder it should be to replace.

Cadana’s journey from struggling startup to processing over $400 million across 26 countries proves that geographic expansion doesn’t require armies of sales reps—it requires infrastructure worth expanding with.