Mira Adeyemi
Co-founder & General Partner
ABOUT
Mira has spent eight years deep in emerging markets fintech, moving between product leadership, platform strategy, and capital formation. She led product at a Lagos-based payments company through its Series B scaling phase, then shifted into platform partnerships at a pan-African digital bank, working directly on how financial infrastructure actually expands across fragmented markets.
She’s operated as a founder, an operator, and an early backer across 14 companies before Kindling — mostly in environments where constraints aren’t edge cases, they’re the default state. That experience has built a hard bias toward execution over narrative, and infrastructure over surface-level fintech packaging.
Her conviction is straightforward: the next wave of breakout companies won’t come from re-skinned Western models — they’ll come from operators building in markets where capital, regulation, and distribution all behave differently, and where understanding those dynamics is the product advantage.
WHAT HE"S LOOKING FOR
Founders building in markets most investors still misread. Not “emerging markets” as a theme, but real operational complexity — fragmented rails, inconsistent infrastructure, and users who don’t behave like spreadsheet models predict.
Products that sit closer to infrastructure than software. Systems that move money, trust, identity, or access — and do it in environments where reliability is harder and therefore more valuable. If it only works in clean conditions, it’s not interesting.
Teams with lived understanding of the markets they’re serving. Not research-driven insight, but operational exposure — people who’ve had to deal with settlement failures, regulatory friction, distribution bottlenecks, and real-world edge cases at scale.
Companies that are structurally aligned with how value actually moves in constrained economies. That usually means unconventional distribution paths, embedded financial flows, or partnerships that look messy on paper but dominate in practice.
And long-horizon bets where infrastructure compounds quietly. The kind of systems that become default rails over time because switching costs, trust, and integrations stack faster than competitors can copy features.
mira@kindling.vc
mira-adeyemi
miraadeyemi
SECTOR
Fintech