Sabi: How Nigeria's No.2 Fastest-Growing Company Traded Soap for Critical Minerals (2026)

The fastest-growing companies list usually rewards the obvious: a slick fintech, a payments app, a logistics unicorn. It rarely rewards a company that started by helping neighbourhood shops restock soap and biscuits and ended up exporting lithium. Yet that is exactly the story of Sabi, the Lagos company that placed second on the Financial Times' 2026 ranking of Africa's Fastest-Growing Companies, published on 11 May 2026, and now the highest-ranked Nigerian firm on the entire list.

What makes Sabi worth your attention is not just the ranking. It is the radical pivot behind it, from B2B e-commerce to the traceable export of critical minerals, and what that pivot tells you about where opportunity in Nigeria is actually moving.

The pivot in one line: from soap to stones

Sabi swapped corner-shop commerce for critical-minerals export, and the numbers followed. According to the FT ranking, Sabi grew revenue from about $1.52 million in 2021 to roughly $46.5 million in 2024, absolute revenue growth of around 2,950% and a compound annual growth rate of about 213%, second only to Egyptian investing app Thndr. But the engine behind that leap is not the business Sabi is famous for. It is a new one: moving verified African minerals to global buyers.

How it started: an operating system for corner shops

Sabi began in 2020 as B2B commerce for Nigeria's informal retail. Co-founded by CEO Anu Adedoyin Adasolum and Ademola Adesina, Sabi built a platform that let the corner shops and market traders who move most of Nigeria's consumer goods restock fast-moving items, manage inventory, tap logistics and reach embedded finance. It grew fast: by mid-2023 it reported more than 300,000 merchants and around $1 billion in annualised gross merchandise value, and raised a $38 million Series B at a valuation topping $300 million. Total funding across its rounds is reported at roughly $66 million.

Why it pivoted: thin margins, a hard year, and an unexpected knock on the door

B2B e-commerce in Africa is a brutal business, and Sabi felt it. Thin margins and capital-intensive operations have humbled several once-hyped players. In June 2025, Sabi laid off roughly 20% of its workforce, about 50 people, to refocus on commodity exports. That was the painful part of the story, and it is worth remembering when you read the growth headline.

The pivot came from demand, not a whiteboard. Small-scale mineral traders, facing the same market-access problems as shop owners, started asking to use Sabi's platform to sell their products. The traceability and compliance tools Sabi had originally built for agricultural trade turned out to be exactly what mineral exports needed. "We realised that minerals were where Africa could make the biggest difference globally," Adasolum told TechCabal. "The world was changing geopolitically, and minerals were becoming central to that change."

What Sabi is now: TRACE and the minerals rail

The product is traceability, not mining. Sabi does not dig ore. It built TRACE, short for Technology Rails for African Commodity Exchange, a platform that verifies and tracks mineral shipments from mine to port using digital "passports" that log a material's origin, the labour practices behind it, and its environmental data. In markets where provenance and working conditions are under intense global scrutiny, that verification layer is the product. "Traceability is the solution," Adasolum says. "Every producer is verified, sites are audited, and every movement of material is logged."

The scale is already serious. Sabi now moves more than 20,000 metric tons of lithium, copper, tungsten and antimony every month, supplying buyers in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Singapore and across Asia. It says it has facilitated the movement of more than 100,000 tons of lithium out of Nigeria, ranking among the region's top five lithium-export enablers, and its platform is now live in Nigeria, DR Congo, Tanzania and Zambia. Its stated ambition is to supply about 5% of US imports in select mineral categories.

Nigeria's minerals moment

Sabi's timing is not an accident. Nigeria is trying to build a real minerals economy. The government says the solid-minerals sector attracted more than $2.6 billion in foreign direct investment over 30 months, on the back of reforms including a digital licensing platform, tighter rules and a crackdown on illegal mining. Official solid-minerals revenue climbed to about ₦68.1 billion (around $50 million) in 2025 from ₦28 billion in 2023, and several lithium-processing plants are due to open, backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in Chinese investment. Mining still contributes less than 1% of Nigeria's GDP, and the government's target of 10% by the end of 2026 is ambitious, but the direction of travel is unmistakable, and Sabi has positioned itself right at the centre of it.

Read the dollar numbers with a raised eyebrow. The naira's devaluation from May 2023 depressed dollar-denominated revenues for locally reporting companies and actually dragged many Nigerian firms off the FT list this year. Nigeria's representation fell to 16 companies, behind Kenya's 17 and South Africa's tally of around 50. Sabi grew through that headwind by moving up the value chain, where a single export contract dwarfs thousands of small merchant orders.

What this signals for your career

First, "commodities tech" is a real, new career lane in Nigeria. For years the ambitious crowd chased fintech. Sabi's rise shows that the traceable export of minerals and agricultural commodities, the unglamorous, physical, deeply strategic work of proving where a material came from, is now building globally-facing companies at home. If you want to work on problems that touch the real economy and geopolitics at once, this is where momentum is.

Second, look at the roles this kind of business needs. A commerce-and-commodities firm like Sabi hires across operations and logistics (moving material reliably across borders), trade and sourcing (buyer relationships, export contracts), data and analytics (pricing, demand, risk), and engineering and product (the platform itself). The pivot adds a genuinely new category: compliance, ESG and traceability roles, people who understand responsible-sourcing standards, documentation, audits and verification. That skill set barely existed in Nigeria five years ago, and it now travels well into mining, trade finance and global supply chains.

Third, treat the pivot itself as the lesson. Sabi's most valuable move was not a product; it was the willingness to follow demand from consumer goods into minerals when the market signalled it. For your own career, the same skills, applied to where the value is moving, can matter more than the sector you started in.

Sabi's climb to No.2 on the FT's 2026 list is a real Nigerian success story, and a reminder that the fastest-growing companies often look nothing like they did at the start. Just weigh the growth headline against the human reality of a company still very much in transition, including the people who lost their jobs in the pivot, and do your own diligence before you treat any employer as a destination.

— Team CareerBuddy

Image: courtesy of Sabi via its official website.