Andrew Milne, Kuunda co-founder who wired credit into Africa's mobile money, dies at 54

Andrew Milne built a company most people have never heard of, and it touched the lives of millions of people who will never know his name. That is the strange arithmetic of the fintech plumbing business, and it is why his death on October 13, at 54, lands hard in the corner of African finance where the real work of extending credit happens.

Kuunda, the company Milne co-founded in 2018 with Sam Brawerman and Morné van der Westhuizen, confirmed the news. The timing carries a particular cruelty. Only days earlier, he had been celebrating the close of a secondary share sale, a transaction that let early backers take money off the table and gave the company room for its next phase of growth. The $5 million sale, announced October 13, saw a group led by E4E Africa buy shares, while existing investors Accion Ventures, Portugal Gateway Fund and Seedstars Africa Ventures increased their holdings. That came after a $7.5 million pre-Series A round announced in October 2025, as Kuunda pushed out from Tanzania and Pakistan into Uganda, Malawi, Kenya and Mozambique.

For readers outside the sector, Kuunda is not a consumer brand and never wanted to be. Milne described it plainly in a 2025 interview: "We're a media-shy company." What it does is solve a stubborn problem. Mobile money agents, small shops and ordinary consumers are plugged into digital payment networks yet still run short of cash when it matters. Kuunda built technology that lets banks and digital platforms embed overdrafts and working capital inside services people already use, using transaction data to judge who is good for the money. One of its earliest partners was M-PESA Tanzania, where it helped develop financing for mobile money agents before widening into other lending products. The result is credit that reaches millions without the lender ever becoming a household name.

Milne's path to that work was not a straight line, which is part of what made him good at it. He ran Virgin Lifecare as managing director, then led Hello Doctor, a service that put medical advice on people's phones. He went on to serve as chief operating officer at Zoona, the mobile money operator. Different sectors, one instinct: get services to people that branches and consulting rooms never reach. That is the biography of a builder, not a promoter.

His death matters to anyone tracking African wealth because it removes, abruptly, one of the operators who understood that the continent's financial upside sits in the unglamorous middle — the agent with a float to manage, the duka owner who needs stock before the weekend. Kuunda's markets now stretch across Africa and Asia, and the investor lineup on its cap table reads like a map of development and venture capital interest in the region. The secondary sale was itself a signal: early money finding an exit is a milestone that most African startups still struggle to reach.

Kuunda's statement called him "an energetic and resilient leader," much loved and deeply respected by those who worked alongside him. The company was blunter about what comes next: "Kuunda's next chapter will now be written without him, and we will carry it forward in a way that honours what he started." His colleagues now have to finish the growth plans they were drawing up with him days ago. For a founder who spent his career building infrastructure others stand on, that may be the most fitting legacy of all.