Dangote Group, the empire of Africa’s richest man Aliko Dangote, has offered a 30 per cent holding in its proposed 700,000 barrel-per-day (bpd) refinery to nations in East Africa, the region where the mega crude-processing plant is to be located, Bloomberg reported Friday.

Kenya, where the new refinery will be sited at the southeastern coastal town of Lamu, will take a 10 per cent stake estimated at around half a trillion dollars, David Ndii, a top economic adviser of President Ruto, told Bloomberg.

“The total for the region is about $1.5 billion. I don’t actually see a challenge in doing that, and if some of them are not off-taking we will backstop,” Mr Ndii was quoted as saying at a capital market conference in Nairobi on Thursday.

Ethiopia and Rwanda are said to have indicated willingness to participate.

Mr Dangote is turning to business-friendly Kenya and other promising markets in East Africa to expand his multi-billion dollar empire after facing an avalanche of resistance from his home country Nigeria in bringing a refinery of similar capacity to completion.

The Nigerian refinery, situated in the outskirts of Lagos and initially projected to be completed in 2016, did not see the light of the day until eight years after, held back by logistic delay, infrastructure constraints and COVID-19 lockdowns.

The magnate, who has built his fortune around cement, sugar and a couple of fast-moving consumer products, accused international oil companies of sabotaging efforts at getting the refinery running seamlessly in its early days.

He claimed that the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority, which serves as the top watchdog for the midstream and downstream segments of the oil industry, issued new licences to some players to import “dirty fuel” as part of a broader conspiracy to frustrate his push to wean Nigeria off its longstanding dependency on fuel imports.

In the heat of the crisis, Farouk Ahmed, the CEO of the regulator at the time, resigned his appointment, while Mele Kyari, the immediate past managing director of state oil company NNPC Limited, whom Mr Dangote accused of surreptitiously running a fuel blending plant off the coast of Malta, was shown the exit door.

“I knew there would be a fight. But I didn’t know that the mafia in oil, they are stronger than the mafia in drugs,” he told an investment conference in June 2024.

ALSO READ: Dangote Refinery raises $2.5 billion in Africa’s largest private equity placement

A private placement, which raised $2.5 billion ahead of the Nigerian refinery’s planned $5 billion initial public offer scheduled for October, valued the refinery at $40 billion.

The private equity capital raise was 3.7 times, drawing interest from African institutional investors and institutional investors from outside the continent.
The groundbreaking of the Kenyan refinery is expected to kick off next month.

That puts the company on course to achieve the ambition of doubling its refining capacity to 1.4 million bpd in the next three years, with processing capacity at the refinery in Lagos already upped to 700,000 bpd from its original 650,000 bpd.

The planned refinery in Kenya is expected to cost $15 billion to $17 billion.

Rillet co-founder and CEO Nicholas Koop seems justifiably confident as we talk over Zoom a day after his company announced a $100 million raise at a $1 billion valuation. The US has has a shortage of accountants right now, which is driving growth of his AI-native accounting platform so much, he raised that cash in 48 hours without even trying.

Rillet emerged from stealth two years ago. Since then, it has raised $200 million from top investors like ICONIQ, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia. It’s also amassed 600 customers, most of whom are looking to ditch legacy accounting systems like Oracle and NetSuite, Koop says.

A few weeks ago, Rillet held a board meeting and shared with investors its growth since its $70 million Series B last summer. Annualized revenue rate had doubled in the last quarter alone; the startup added new clients, many of them public companies, and an alliance with EY to introduce AI tools to the auditing giant.

His customers aren’t piloting Rillet either, he said — they’re yanking out ERP and accounting software from competitors like Intuit, NetSuite, or Oracle.

After that board meeting, text messages were fired, calls were made, and 48 hours later, Rillet was a unicorn. The company wasn’t even looking to raise, Koop said.

Seth Pierrepont, the general partner at Iconiq who led the round, said that the deal came together fast but “it wasn’t a cold start,” he described.

“Rillet had already proven it could win against the incumbents that have owned this category for decades,” Pierrepont told TechCrunch. Iconiq also invested in the company’s Series B, and with this latest round, Pierrepont joins the Rillet board. “A year of watching the team deliver on that made doubling down and leading the Series C an easy call.” 

Julien Bek, Sequoia’s lead investor on the deal, also said that, though 48 hours might look rushed from the outside, from their perspective, re-investing in Rillet was a “very easy decision,” after the company’s growth in the past year. 

“Rillet’s initial wedge is accounting, but ultimately they are reinventing the entire finance function,” Bek told TechCrunch, adding that agentic finance could become “one of the largest application software opportunities of the AI era.” Sequoia led Rillet’s Series A last summer. 

“When the opportunity came together,” Bek continued. “We already had all the context we needed.” 

Rillet is one of many AI-native startups now giving legacy players a run for relevance. Earlier this year, software stocks on the public market dipped as investors worried about how emerging AI tools would affect them. Koop thinks there’s some truth to that.

“AI is going to come hard at these legacy players,” he said because it is giving customers compelling alternatives.

Rillet, for example, was built for AI agents, not humans, letting humans work alongside the AI agents on corporate bookkeeping. Rillet clients range from laundromats to the NFL Hall of Fame. Some 50% of Rillet customers come from Intuit, 30% from NetSuite and Sage Intacct, and 20% from Oracle, SAP, Workday, and Microsoft products, he said. 

Security is critical when working with sensitive client data, Koop said. Rillet includes model routing, so customers can redirect requests to the foundational model of their choice (like OpenAI or Anthropic), and Rillet’s harness prevents these models from training on their data, he says. 

There’s also no cross-training — meaning one customer’s data remains proprietary. The agents also have memory, so they can remember and store historical actions they can then use for their own process and improvement.

About three months ago, Rillet released a governance feature letting accountants see and audit every decision the AI agent has made — including what numbers the agents pull and how they calculated them. Creating this was harder than it looks, Koop said, because the team had to compress agent data into a format humans could understand.

Koop said this feature was only possible to build recently because AI agents have gotten so powerful so quickly. They can, for example, now support multi-step workflows over longer periods of time. Because of that, auditing what they are doing has become even more important for clients.

“We barely scratched the surface of potential and opportunity that this technology has,” he said. 

Right now, regulations for public companies require that every transaction made by an AI agent be approved by another human. He thinks regulators and top names are watching how the accounting industry evolves around this new technology. He’s hopeful that new rules and regulations will evolve that align more with where everything is headed.

“It’s a very normal process,” he said. “Similar to when the cloud came, of just getting everybody familiar with what’s going on and how it helps the profession.” 

Koop also doesn’t think mass job displacement from AI is coming anytime soon, especially in accounting. (Stanford released a report a few weeks ago that found no widespread job displacement yet.) He insists that Rillet isn’t a human replacement, not even for junior accountants. They can use Rillet to help automate and assist with some of the profession’s grunt work. 

He also pointed out the expected shortage of accountants in the U.S. The number of those graduating with an accounting degree has been declining since at least 2010. In a recent report, the Controllers Council Organization found that 61% of finance leaders have struggled to find finance, accounting, and CPA talent in the past year. The pullback is not entirely shocking: accountants’ hours are long, the pipeline to the top is arduous, the pay often doesn’t match the workload and the work doesn’t appeal to everyone.

At the same time, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has projected that accounting-related needs are expected to grow by at least 5%, adding 72,800 jobs by 2034. It also doesn’t expect AI to reduce the demand for accountants, even as the technology becomes more widespread. “The automation of routine tasks, such as data entry, will instead make accountants’ advisory and analytical duties more prominent,” the BLS said.

“I just don’t see people losing their job anytime soon,” Koop said. “These people have started their professions to help businesses make better financial decisions,” he added. “We can fully enable them to do that.”