Uganda’s MAM Telecom bets on agent float gap with $250,000 grant
Ugandan financial infrastructure company MAM Telecom Ltd has secured US$250,000 in grant funding from a private South African businessman as it prepares to launch a liquidity and settlement platform for the region’s mobile-money ecosystem.
The Kampala-based company said the funder has asked to remain anonymous. The capital will go towards regulatory licensing and compliance, recruitment of key technical and operational staff, platform development, risk and operational systems, and early market and partnership readiness ahead of its Ugandan launch.
“MAM Telecom has always been focused on solving an infrastructure problem rather than simply building another financial application,” said Milon Ahabwe Mutebile, Founder and CEO of MAM Telecom. “Securing this grant is an important validation of that approach. More importantly, it gives us the resources to strengthen our regulatory foundation, bring in critical talent and move from planning into disciplined execution.”
MAM Telecom is building infrastructure to tackle persistent liquidity and settlement problems in East Africa’s mobile-money and digital payments market. Its core platform is designed to give mobile-money agents and other financial service participants access to digital float, while offering centralised settlement, reconciliation, reporting and API connectivity to fintechs and enterprises.
Rather than competing as a consumer wallet, the company is positioning itself as a settlement layer connecting players across the existing financial system. A complementary consumer product, MAM Fex, is being developed as a cross-border remittance and foreign-exchange platform running on the same infrastructure.
The startup’s business plan identifies fragmented agent liquidity, slow float resupply and limited visibility into liquidity and settlement as major gaps in the region’s digital financial infrastructure. These are pain points familiar to mobile-money agents across East Africa, where running out of float can halt transactions and push customers to competing agents.
MAM Telecom says it is taking a compliance-first approach, with regulatory licensing, anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing (AML/CFT) controls, KYC and transaction monitoring built into its operating model from the outset.
Mutebile framed the grant as a starting point rather than a finish line. “We see this as the beginning of a much more intensive phase of execution,” he said. “Our priority is to build the regulatory, technical and operational foundations properly before scaling.”
The company will focus initially on Uganda, with longer-term plans to extend its infrastructure across East Africa.
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