Nael Hailemariam Built Ethiopia's Payment Rails — Now He Wants the Continent

When Nael Hailemariam talks about money, he talks about plumbing. Not the glamorous part of fintech — the apps, the valuations, the launch parties — but the invisible infrastructure that decides whether an Ethiopian business can take a payment at all. For most of the country's history, the answer was simple: it couldn't, at least not online, and not from the rest of the world.

That is the gap Hailemariam set out to close. As co-founder and CEO of Chapa Financial Technologies, he helped build what became Ethiopia's first online payment gateway — the rails that let a merchant in Addis Ababa accept a card, a mobile wallet, or a cross-border payment without stitching together the banking system by hand.

The licence that unlocked a market

Chapa's breakthrough was as much regulatory as it was technical. In May 2022, the startup secured a payment gateway licence from the National Bank of Ethiopia — a milestone in a tightly controlled financial sector — and went operational that August. The licence mattered because it was the difference between a clever prototype and a legal, national-scale business.

The traction since has been the kind of number that turns heads outside Ethiopia. By recent counts, Chapa supports more than 10,000 merchants, connects to 18 banks, offers 14 payment methods, supports 25 currencies, and has processed over 100 million transactions — putting it among the country's leading fintechs.

A founder shaped abroad, betting at home

Hailemariam's path runs through some of the world's most competitive technology institutions. He earned a master's in data science from Tsinghua University in Beijing and did research work at Tencent focused on game design and digital payments across Africa and the Middle East — before turning that global exposure back toward the Ethiopian market.

That combination — frontier training, local conviction — is exactly the profile Forbes.et exists to celebrate. Hailemariam represents a generation of Ethiopian founders who could have built anywhere and chose to build the infrastructure their own economy was missing.

Why it matters

Payment infrastructure is foundational. Every e-commerce store, SaaS startup, ride-hailing app, and freelancer that wants to get paid sits on top of rails like Chapa's. By lowering that barrier, Hailemariam isn't just running a company — he's expanding the surface area for everyone else's company. The next wave of Ethiopian startups will, in many cases, be built on what he made possible.

The ambition now is continental: payments that let Ethiopian businesses reach a global pool of consumers, and a digital-finance layer for Africa's emerging tech ecosystem. Success, as the saying goes, leaves clues. Hailemariam left a big one.

Sources:

• naelhailemariam.com
• Empower Africa — Nael Hailemariam profile
• Disrupt Africa — Chapa launches payment gateway (2022)
• Nasdaq — Chapa Launches First Payment Gateway in Ethiopia
• Chapa

Editorial note: Verify the latest merchant/transaction figures against Chapa's official channels before publishing, as these grow over time.