40 companies that are beating the West

Ask an American what they know about African tech, and you’re likely to hear one name: M-Pesa. The Kenyan peer-to-peer payments pioneer was so groundbreaking in the 2000s that it featured on TED Talks, and its story is taught in U.S. business schools today. M-Pesa enabled Kenyans to send money securely via text messages, unlocking financial inclusion for millions. It has inspired look-alike platforms in nearly every non-Western country, and is still going strong at home, too: M-Pesa is used by a whopping 84% of Kenya’s population and processes transactions that amount to roughly half of the country’s GDP.

India is covered in QR codes — from iPhone stores to roadside tea stalls — and they’re compatible with practically all of the country’s payment apps. The backbone of this infrastructure is the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), a nonprofit owned by a consortium of banks, which functions under India’s central bank. NPCI’s UPI is so well-integrated into Indian life that it processed over $1 trillion in transactions last year. Meanwhile, its homegrown card network, RuPay, has been on such a rise that both Visa and Mastercard have grumbled to the U.S. government about its unfair advantage.

The São Paulo-based Nubank is currently the largest digital bank in the world. It seized on Latin American banks’ inability to quickly digitize, and snagged a big investment from Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. Nubank has also smartly aligned itself with local pop culture, recruiting Brazilian pop star Anitta to be its global brand ambassador.

Mexican crypto-exchange Bitso may have actually found the smartest use for cryptocurrency: remittances. The company processes 4% of the remittances sent between the U.S. and Mexico, which adds up to billions of dollars each year. One trick Bitso has used to compete with established players like Western Union and MoneyGram: reducing the commissions on transactions.

When the Turkish delivery company launched its London operations two years ago, co-founder Tuncay Tütek said he wanted to teach the world to pronounce Getir — GET-EER — which means “to bring.” That shouldn’t be hard, as global investors have flocked to the startup in recent years, shooting its valuation to almost $12 billion. Getir has pioneered ultrafast delivery by shortening delivery times to 10 minutes, which continues to give it a competitive advantage amid a sea of players. But to invent 10-minute delivery, Getir first had to create its own network of maps in Istanbul: A five-person core team built the app’s geographic information system, and then paired it with government data on migration patterns to decide how to deploy drivers and where to build warehouses.

Even as Getir continues its takeover of the competition in Europe, it has reportedly pulled out of several European countries, including Spain and France, citing weak sales and an inability to raise adequate funds.

For years, Uber and its UAE-based rival Careem were locked in a costly price war for ride-sharing customers in the Middle East. When Uber acquired Careem in 2019 for $3.1 billion, it was the biggest payday ever for the blossoming tech sector in the Middle East and North Africa. The ride-hailing company’s early growth came down to understanding its local users better: It enabled cash-on-delivery years before Uber did, built call centers (so that less-app-literate users could book cars over the phone), and solved for technical gaps in Google Maps that had led to fewer reliable pickups and routing. Today, it operates in 90 cities — all the way from Pakistan to Morocco.

Careem scored a major victory in 2018 when Saudi Arabia made it legal for women to drive. The company became closely associated with the policy change, giving it both a PR win and a new supply of drivers.

Few startups in South Asia have managed to expand regionally, let alone also lead those markets. Pathao is the biggest ride-hailing company in Bangladesh and Nepal — both markets with half a dozen local and international players, including Uber (in Bangladesh) and inDrive (in Nepal). And it’s the only profitable food-delivery business in Bangladesh. Pathao recently got the green light to launch its own payment wallet, PathaoPay. We’ll see if it does as well as the rest of the company.

Kitopi takes the ghost kitchen idea and supercharges it. Founded in Dubai in 2018, the kitchen-as-a-service platform currently operates over 60 kitchens across the Gulf states. When a restaurant brand joins Kitopi, they hand the company their recipes and train its workers on how to prepare their food. The entire process — from setting up to launching deliveries — takes no more than 14 days. Its services have grown so rapidly in the region that Kitopi has already helped Shake Shack and Papa John’s to establish virtual restaurants in the Middle East.

The second most-downloaded ride-hailing app in the world started in Siberia. But after Russia invaded Ukraine, inDrive left the country and relocated its employees and their families elsewhere. One of inDrive’s key features was inspired by local taxi price-gouging during the region’s cold winters. The app allows users to negotiate a price with drivers. It now also supports couriers and freight delivery. You can haggle with them, too.

Talabat, which is Arabic for “request,” was founded by Kuwaitis in 2004. Back then, the company took online orders over a modem connection, which it would then disconnect to call the restaurant, place the customer’s order, and reconnect to the internet. It has since expanded across the Middle East and North Africa, and in 2015, was acquired by Germany-based Rocket Internet for $170 million. Talabat’s recipe for success includes a focus on exclusive deals, lower commission rates for restaurants that sign up only on its platform, and locally tailored promotional campaigns, including during Ramadan. As of last year, it had nearly 80% of the market share in the UAE’s food delivery market by order volumes. Talabat also signed Cristiano Ronaldo as a brand ambassador. The company certainly takes goals very seriously.

Everyone in the world is trying to create the “everything app,” but the closest you’ll come to finding one outside of China is probably Naver. It’s not just South Korea’s Google, it’s South Korea’s entire internet. Its flagship products are Line, a supercharged messaging app that practically runs Japan and is the No. 1 messenger in several other countries in Asia; and Weverse (integrated with V Live in 2021), the platform that drives the K-pop industry. And whoever runs K-pop pretty much runs the world.

It might not grab headlines as often as ByteDance or Shein, but Tencent is one of China’s most valuable companies. It produces some of the world’s most popular video games, like PUBG and Honor of Kings, but its real powerhouse is WeChat: the “everything app” that is the envy of the global tech industry. Although every would-be super-app aspires to be the next WeChat, no platform in China or elsewhere comes close to the company’s utter domination. It’s so deeply integrated into daily life in the country that if the app vanished one day, the majority of China would be unable to function.

Vietnam considers itself a socialist-oriented market economy, which presents certain challenges for startups seeking access to global investors or talent pipelines. But protectionism doesn’t explain why the country’s biggest messaging app, Zalo, continues to trounce Viber, Messenger, and WhatsApp in the battle for Vietnam’s roughly 75 million internet users — just about all of whom are Zalo users. Building one of the few successful super-apps outside of China hinged on knowing what the masses wanted: One reason for its early popularity was the option to share and save high-quality photographs instantly, without having to rely on email or Google Drive.

One of the most commonly used writing assistant apps in U.S. colleges was founded in Ukraine. Initially, Grammarly’s three founders wanted to build a tool that’d help students with spelling and grammar, and discourage them from plagiarism. Well, it turns out students aren’t the only ones who need writing assistance. The company reached 30 million daily active users in 2020, and by 2021, Grammarly was worth $13 billion. After years of slim competition, new rivals like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are openly challenging its supremacy.

Africa’s number one mobile phone supplier launched in Lagos, with a suite of desperately needed localized features like dual SIM and phone cameras that accurately recognized darker skin tones. Today, Transsion is based in Shenzhen, which tells an interesting story about the growing Sino-African tech sector. The company overtook Samsung in 2017 and has continued to expand, largely thanks to low prices and a “glocalization” strategy, focused on devices specifically tailored to local markets.

In richer countries, it’s easy to take the internet for granted. But building towers and cables can cost billions, and not many telecom companies are willing to take the risk with small or poor countries. Especially not in 2001, when Denis O’Brien, an Irishman, launched Digicel in Jamaica. His belief that a high volume of low-income users could make telecom infrastructure pay for itself — and then some — made Digicel the dominant operator across the Caribbean and South Pacific, highly influential in the economies and politics of those markets. That is, until a multibillion-dollar debt burden grew too heavy and it began restructuring. It still controls the lion’s share of the Caribbean mobile phone market and is the largest foreign investor in Haiti.

The Bengaluru-based BigBasket cracked grocery delivery in a market where behemoths like Amazon and Flipkart have failed. How? By solving for the necessary infrastructure to bring online grocery shopping to the far corners of a country that doesn’t have the roads, highways, or cold storage systems to support it. The company’s big innovation was building a network of small warehouses in major cities across India, and then going all-in on technology — like investing in web-connected, temperature-controlled trucks and inventory-optimizing algorithms — when almost no one else was.

It might be surprising to think that Mexico’s answer to 7-Eleven is a tech company, but it absolutely is. Thanks to its Oxxo Pay service, and the Spin by Oxxo debit card and app, the company’s network of over 20,000 convenience stores has evolved into a fintech powerhouse. It combines digital payments, e-commerce integrations, and physical storefronts, making Oxxo the dominant player in Mexico and, more recently, across Latin America. For instance, Spin by Oxxo — a neobank-like debit card that needs to be activated at an Oxxo store — has more than double the customers Nubank does in Mexico.

This e-commerce unicorn came out of a 54-hour hackathon, and takes its name from an iconic Mad Men reference. Carousell is a one-stop mobile platform to buy and sell secondhand goods — the company says it sees more than 140 items sold per minute. It’s a novel idea, as long as its efforts to combat fake sellers and phishing scams prove successful. Outside of Southeast Asia, Carousell is making waves in Australia and New Zealand.

Shopee is a juggernaut. Calling it the “Amazon of Southeast Asia” doesn’t quite do it justice, but “Amazon of the Global South” might. This Singapore-based e-commerce giant — with operations in six other Asian markets and one in Latin America — pioneered the now-ubiquitous livestreaming and “shoppertainment” elements in the online shopping experience. Sadly, getting Ronaldo to dance to a “Baby Shark”-like song wasn’t enough to insulate Shopee from layoffs last year.

Pinduoduo literally means “shop more together,” which is a good way to explain how it became one of China’s largest e-commerce companies: by transforming shopping into a social experience. The South China Morning Post once described the company as if “Amazon, Groupon and Facebook had a baby in China.” Even if you haven’t heard of Pinduoduo, you’d know its sister app Temu, which launched in the U.S. last year and followed up with a Super Bowl ad this February. Temu follows Pinduoduo’s model of rock-bottom pricing and gamified social e-commerce, and has continued to dominate our Instagram feeds.

For years, Western tech companies were shy to enter Pakistan, despite the country having one of the largest populations of internet users in the world. Necessity breeds innovation, which meant e-commerce platform Daraz developed such a lead that Amazon couldn’t catch up. The company doubled down on its head start by investing in its own delivery logistics platform Daraz Express and launching new features like livestreaming — which boosted orders by a whopping 900% in the second half of 2022. After dominating Pakistan, Daraz, which was acquired by Alibaba in 2018, is on a mission to capture the e-commerce markets in Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.

South African streaming platform Showmax is growing quickly and is currently available in more than 40 countries in Africa. It was launched by MultiChoice, a hugely popular subscription TV company previously owned by tech and media giant Naspers. One reason for Showmax’s success is its focus on local markets: It has expanded domestic payment channels in several countries, and offers a strong selection of local movies. Some estimates indicate that the number of streaming users in Africa is set to triple from 5 million to 15 million in the next three years. And Showmax is well-positioned to be in the continent’s top three services, behind Netflix and Disney+.

Founded in Belarus in 2015, Flo Health is now the biggest period-tracking app in the world, beating femtech competitors such as Clue and Glow. The company closed its headquarters in Minsk after Belarus came out in support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s worth noting that Belarus, which once had a thriving tech scene, has experienced a mass exodus of tech talent since the war. In 2022, Flo launched an “anonymous mode,” following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on Roe v. Wade, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion.

In 2021, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint against Flo, alleging that it misled users and shared sensitive health data with analytics companies. Flo reached a settlement with the FTC.

It’s tough to take on streaming behemoth Netflix, but popular Indonesian platform Vidio is doing just that. It leaned hard into producing Bahasa Indonesia-language content for its 60 million local users, with sports, reality TV, and teen dramas. Netflix has noticed the potential of Indonesia’s streaming market: Last year, it announced a plan to launch seven local titles. But Vidio’s sitting pretty — it announced 40.

You might not know what Genshin Impact is, but Gen Z sure does. The open-world action role-playing game by miHoYo is the world’s highest-grossing video game, having generated $4 billion by the end of last year. But miHoYo isn’t stopping at one hit game. If the buzz around its sci-fi adventure game Honkai: Star Rail is any indication, it is on track to becoming one of the great new global powerhouses in gaming.

Robot-maker Fanuc, the most in-demand robot manufacturer in the world, prefers to stay out of the spotlight. The company has supplied for companies like Apple, Samsung, and Tesla, with nearly a million of its robotics units installed globally. Fanuc says it has more than 810,000 industrial robots installed globally, more than any other company in the world, and has made more than five million Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machines. How tight-lipped is this company? In a rare 2015 interview with Bloomberg, a Fanuc executive took the opportunity to say that the company planned to continue not talking to the press.

Without semiconductor giant TSMC, the world would stop. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company produces over half of the world’s semiconductors: those tiny little chips that power almost every single electronic device, from iPhones to EVs to fighter jets. In recent years, the company has found itself caught in a geopolitical battle between the U.S. and China. But with the two countries lacking their own significant chipmaking capabilities, they can neither alienate nor disrupt TSMC.