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Most of Africa’s trade does not happen in shopping malls or on e-commerce websites. It happens in markets, kiosks and warehouses run by small traders who rely on cash, personal relationships and handwritten records. Anu Adedoyin Adasolum built a company around that reality. As co-founder and chief executive of Sabi, she runs a platform that gives informal traders the tools large businesses use: inventory systems, logistics, credit and access to bigger markets. This biography covers her age, education, career and the thinking behind her company.
Who Is Anu Adedoyin Adasolum?
Anu Adedoyin Adasolum is a Nigerian entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Sabi, a Lagos-based technology company that builds digital infrastructure for the distribution of goods and services across Africa. She founded it with Ademola Adesina. Before Sabi, she served as Chief Operating Officer of Rensource Energy, the clean energy company that spun Sabi out.
Anu Adedoyin Adasolum’s Education
She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics and Politics from SOAS University of London in 2009. Economics explains how markets allocate goods, and politics explains how rules and institutions shape them. Sabi works exactly where those two meet, in markets that operate outside formal systems.
Early Career: Dangote and KPMG
Her career began in 2011 at Dangote Industries, where she planned operations until 2012. Planning the movement of goods inside one of Nigeria’s largest industrial groups taught her how supply chains work at scale and where they break.
She then joined KPMG Nigeria as a business analyst in management consulting and stayed until about 2014. Consulting trained her to break a business problem into parts and test solutions, a habit that later helped when she designed a platform for thousands of small merchants.
Jumia and Rensource
In 2017, she led transformation of JForce at Jumia, the e-commerce company. JForce was Jumia’s network of agents who helped customers shop and receive orders where online shopping was still unfamiliar. The job showed her how much trade still depended on trusted people on the ground, even for an online business.
She then joined Rensource Energy, first as General Manager in 2018 and then as Chief Operating Officer from November 2018 until April 2021. Rensource focused on solar power for commercial and industrial customers. Running operations there taught her to manage physical infrastructure, field teams and demanding customers, which suits a company that moves real goods around Africa.
Founding Sabi
In 2021, Adasolum and Adesina launched Sabi as a spinout from Rensource, and she became CEO. Their idea was to bring order to a part of African commerce that outsiders often dismiss as chaotic.
Sabi connects manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers and retailers on a single platform and treats all of them as merchants. It offers a business-to-business marketplace, fulfilment and logistics, inventory tools, market data and financial services. The company operates in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, and in South Africa it opened a Johannesburg office through a joint venture with a local technology platform.
The Numbers Behind Sabi
Funding arrived quickly. In 2021, Sabi closed a $6 million bridge round to expand beyond Nigeria, and Adasolum named Kenya and South Africa as the next markets. In 2023, Sabi closed a Series B round of roughly $38 million. That same year, the company announced that it had reached $1 billion in annual gross merchandise value. Sabi says it has served more than 250,000 users and processes about 15,000 transactions a month.
TRACE and the Export Push
Sabi’s most distinctive product is TRACE, short for Technology Rails for African Commodity Exchange. It helps African manufacturers, farmers and small-scale miners sell to buyers in Asia, Europe, South America and the United States.
Adasolum says the company sharpened its focus on TRACE in late 2023 because demand was rising and global buyers increasingly insist on ethical sourcing and traceable supply chains. Sabi runs a network of samplers, testing laboratories, verification agencies and sourcing consultants who visit sites to check data and practices. Sabi says TRACE has helped move about 50,000 tons of mineral exports since its pilot.
The strategy shows how her thinking has grown. Sabi started by serving local trade between merchants. TRACE helps those same producers reach buyers abroad, who often pay more but demand proof of origin and quality.
Public Profile
Adasolum speaks often about African trade and technology. She has joined Nigeria’s minister for trade, industry and investment on a public panel, and she explains in interviews how to build B2B platforms in informal markets. She says informal commerce is more sophisticated than outsiders assume, a lesson she took from her years at Jumia and Rensource.
Why Anu Adedoyin Adasolum Draws Attention
Her profile rests on three things: she built a trade platform at billion-dollar scale in a hard market, her company reaches into mining and agriculture exports, and her career crosses industry, consulting and e-commerce. Readers search for her to learn who stands behind Sabi.
Family and Personal Life
Adasolum keeps her private life private. She has shared no details about a spouse or children, so this biography lists none.
Anu Adedoyin Adasolum’s Net Worth
Nobody has published a verified net worth for Adasolum. A startup’s valuation does not equal what one founder owns, because investors, employees and co-founders hold their own stakes. Until she or a reliable financial record shows a figure, her net worth stays unknown.
What Her Journey Teaches
Three lessons stand out. First, operations experience prepares you to build a company that moves physical goods. Dangote, Jumia and Rensource each taught her a different part of the logistics problem. Second, informal markets run on trust and relationships, and technology works best when it respects them. Third, a successful product can lead to a bigger one. Sabi’s local marketplace gave it the data and contacts to build an export platform.
