Eight Kenyans Named in Forbes Africa Most Promising Entrepreneurs

Eric Kinoti is the proprietor of Shades System East Africa – a company that manufactures and supplies tents, as well as...

Eight young Kenyans have been named in the list of the 30 most promising young entrepreneurs in Africa by Forbes Magazine.

The list followed a request made by the Magazine last month which received close to 800 nominations for this year’s Africa’s brightest young entrepreneurs with the oldest entrepreneur on the list at 33.

Here are Kenya’s brightest young entrepreneurs:

Trushar Khetia

Khetia, 28, is the founder of Tria Group, an outdoor transit advertising firm that uses public transit vehicles to market leading consumer goods in Kenya.

Founded in 2013 the company already has annual revenues exceeding $1.3 million (Sh118 million).

Catherine Mahugu

The 27-year-old is a co- founder of Soko, an online destination platform forshoppers to discover handcrafted accessories from all over the world and purchase them directly from the designers and artisans.

In 2013, the company raised $700,000 from a Dubai-based investmentfirm.

At Soko, Mahugu leads innovation to foster new scalable and appropriate solutions. She is an International Telecom Union (ITU) Young Innovators fellow.

Mubarak Muyika

Muyika founded Hypecentury Technologies a web hosting company when he was 16, sold the company after two years to Wemps Telecoms in a 6-figure deal

The 20 year old has now ventured into a cloud enterprise software dubbed Zag Apps that helps companies manage inventory such as accounting, payroll, stock management, marketing among others.

Hasnain Noorani

Noorani, 32 has expanded his inherited business (a small driving school and car hire business) to Pride Inn group that owns six 3 star hotels acrssKenya under the PrideInn brand, bakeries, restaurants, a tour company and other assets.

Kelvin Macharia Kuria

The 23-year-old founded Sunrise Tracking, a vehicle security tech firm that offersGPS tracking, CCTV and ability to turn engines off remotely via SMS.

Eric Kinoti

Kinoti is the Shades Systems East Africa founder with an annual turnover of 1 million dollars.

The company manufactures military and relief tents, branded gazebos, restaurant canopies, car parking shades, marquees, luxury tents, wedding party tents canvas seats and bouncing castles across the region.

The company also exports its products to Somalia, Congo and Rwanda.

Ronak Shah

Shah 27, manufacturers low-cost household cleaning products at his company Kronex Chemicals Ltd, such as dishwashing liquids and multi-purpose detergent targeted at Kenya’s lower class.

Barclay Paul

The 23 year old is the founder of Impact Africa Industries, a company that produces low cost sanitary pads for poor women in informal settlements Kenya three years ago and he now sells the pads to as far as Uganda and South Sudan.

Located in Kitale, the company has 23 employees, 15 of whom are women who help in production and distribution of the sanitary pads.

- Capital FM News