The Next Wave: “Coping ugly”

A friend recently sent me a YouTube video featuring George Bonanno, a psychologist who has spent decades studying how people respond to trauma. It wasn’t the sort of video I’d normally watch, but one phrase lingered long after it ended: coping ugly. The more I thought about it, the more I realised it described something I’d been seeing across African tech over the past few years, even though Bonanno wasn’t talking about business at all.

Bonanno’s research challenges one of our most comforting assumptions about resilience. We like to believe that people recover through discipline, emotional clarity and carefully thought-out decisions. He argues that recovery is often far messier. People distract themselves, bury themselves in work, avoid difficult conversations or laugh at moments that seem anything but funny. From the outside, those behaviours can appear irrational or even unhealthy. Yet they often help people stay functional until life becomes more manageable again. That’s what he calls coping ugly.

Once I started looking at African startups through that lens, it became difficult to unsee it.

We often explain successful companies in terms of vision, execution and strategy. But many of the startups that survived the funding slowdown didn’t endure because they uncovered a brilliant new opportunity. They survived because they were willing to make uncomfortable decisions that looked wrong at the time but bought them enough breathing room to keep going.

One of venture capital’s favourite habits is turning complicated company histories into neat narratives in which every decision appears deliberate, and every pivot feels like part of a master plan. Founders identify a problem, build the right product, raise another round of funding and adjust course at precisely the right moment. They are satisfying stories because they make success seem inevitable.

The past five or six years have told a different story. African founders have had to navigate funding markets that disappeared almost overnight, currencies that moved faster than pricing models, stubborn inflation, rising logistics costs and customers with less money to spend. Companies that had spent years thinking about growth suddenly found themselves asking a far simpler question: how do we make sure we’re still here next year?

Some of the most consequential decisions in African tech emerged from that period because they challenged assumptions that had shaped businesses from day one. They involved cutting costs instead of chasing growth, embracing operational complexity instead of avoiding it and, in some cases, acknowledging that the original business model had reached its limits.

Moniepoint offers a good example because its story is often told from the ending rather than the beginning. Today, the Nigerian fintech says it serves more than six million businesses and individuals. In 2025, it also averaged 1.67 billion monthly transactions worth more than ₦412 trillion ($294 billion). Looking at those numbers, it’s easy to assume the company always knew where it was headed.

When Moniepoint launched as TeamApt in 2015, it built software for banks, a business that looked attractive because enterprise software scales efficiently and requires relatively little physical infrastructure. Over time, however, the company realised the software wasn’t the constraint; distribution was. Banks moved slowly, and growth depended on institutions that had little incentive to move any faster.

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Rather than building more software, TeamApt chose a path many technology companies would have avoided. It entered agency banking, deployed POS terminals across Nigeria and built thousands of relationships with merchants, taking on the messy work of maintaining hardware, supporting agents and managing liquidity in the field. None of those decisions sounded particularly glamorous, especially at a time when venture investors were captivated by asset-light businesses. They turned out to be the foundation of Moniepoint’s competitive advantage.

Looking back, that’s the part of the story I find most compelling. It’s easy to admire Moniepoint now that it has become one of Africa’s most valuable fintech companies, but those decisions didn’t look especially clever when they were being made. They looked operationally expensive, difficult to manage, and far removed from the software company investors had originally backed. The business succeeded because it adapted to the market it actually served, rather than the one people hoped would eventually exist.

Bonanno’s idea changed the way I think about resilience in business. We often imagine resilience as a breakthrough moment or a bold strategic pivot, when, in reality, it is often something far less glamorous. Sometimes resilience means accepting that the market has changed, letting go of ideas that no longer work and embracing the kind of work nobody imagined would become a company’s greatest strength.

If Moniepoint adapted by embracing greater operational complexity, MaxAB and Wasoko confronted a different challenge altogether. They had to recognise that the business they had spent years building was far more expensive to run than anyone had anticipated, and that no amount of growth would fix the underlying economics.

Both companies were products of a very different funding environment. Investors were willing to back businesses that promised to modernise Africa’s informal retail sector through warehouses, delivery fleets and integrated supply chains because the opportunity appeared enormous. Millions of neighbourhood shops still relied on fragmented distributor networks, and the company that could organise that market stood to become a critical piece of Africa’s commerce infrastructure. Between them, MaxAB and Wasoko raised more than $230 million pursuing that ambition, convinced that scale would eventually outweigh the razor-thin margins of moving consumer goods.

That assumption became much harder to defend once global interest rates rose and venture funding slowed. Warehouses, trucks and delivery networks still had to be financed, fuel costs kept climbing, and margins of just a few percentage points left almost no room for errors. Every additional order brought another layer of operational cost, making growth look less like a solution and more like an increasingly expensive commitment.

The companies merged in 2024 and, over time, reshaped the kind of leadership the combined business required. Daniel Yu stepped away from running Wasoko after more than a decade building the company, while MaxAB co-founder Mohamed Ben Halim also exited day-to-day operations as the merged group concentrated less on expansion and more on financial performance. Those departures attracted plenty of attention, but they were symptoms of a company entering a new phase rather than the story itself.

Instead of treating wholesale distribution as the destination, the combined company began treating it as the foundation for building something with stronger economics. Every order placed by a merchant generated information about purchasing behaviour, repayment patterns and inventory cycles—data that could support lending, payments and other financial services long after the goods had been delivered. Distribution was still necessary, but it became the means to a more valuable business itself.

That helps explain why Fatura, the Egyptian B2B marketplace MaxAB acquired before the merger, has become far more central to the company’s direction than it first appeared. Today, the acquisition looks more like an early building block in a broader financial services strategy, giving the company deeper merchant relationships and richer transaction data that can be turned into higher-margin products than wholesale logistics could ever deliver.

Looking back at companies like Moniepoint and Wasoko-MaxAB has changed how I think about resilience in African tech. We tend to tell success stories from the ending, smoothing over the difficult years until painful decisions look like inevitable strategy. They rarely feel inevitable at the time. Employees worry about layoffs, investors question management, founders abandon ideas that once defined their companies, and businesses quietly retreat from markets they once described as strategic.

Bonanno wasn’t talking about startups, but his idea fits surprisingly well. The companies that endure are often not those with the best technology or the clearest strategy, but those that are prepared to let go of certainty, make unpopular decisions and survive long enough to discover what the business really needed to become.

Kenn Abuya

Kenn Abuya is a senior reporter at TechCabal. He leads the Startups Desk.

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