Benjamin Fernandes

CEO & Founder

Benjamin Fernandes is the founder and chief executive of NALA, a cross-border payments company he founded in 2018 to build payment infrastructure for Africa and its global diaspora. Backed by Y Combinator, it has raised more than fifty million dollars in venture funding, including a forty million dollar Series A. Born in Tanzania, he grew up there and worked as a national television presenter before scholarships took him to the United States at seventeen. He earned an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he was the first Tanzanian student admitted and the youngest African accepted in its history, and completed executive education at the Harvard Kennedy School. Before founding NALA he worked at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and then returned home to build the company. He was listed among the most influential Tanzanians in 2020, in the inaugural Rest of World list of one hundred influential technology leaders in 2022, and among Africa's top changemakers in 2023.