Ben Best is the Co-Founder and CTO of Numida, a rapidly growing digital financial institution in East Africa providing unsecured working capital loans to micro and small businesses.

Ben studied at the University of Waterloo and gained software engineering experience at FiveStars and Engineers Without Borders Canada before co-founding Numida in 2017.

As CTO, Ben architected Numida's proprietary credit scoring and tech-enabled underwriting platform that enables loan disbursement to cash-based businesses with no digital transaction history.

Numida became the first Ugandan startup accepted into Y Combinator (W22) and raised a $12.3M pre-Series A round led by Serena Ventures, with participation from Breega, 4Di Capital, and Y Combinator.

Numida has disbursed over $20 million in working capital to more than 27,000 micro and small businesses across Uganda, growing 7.5x since its seed round and expanding toward new African markets.