Consider a hypothetical but common scenario in Africa’s tech ecosystem: A fintech startup raises $35 million in 2023 to bring embedded finance to SMEs across East Africa. The thesis was elegant: small businesses needed working capital, banks weren’t serving them, and mobile money made digital lending feasible. Eighteen months later, they’d burned through the capital and were pivoting. The problem wasn’t execution. It was information, but not the kind you get from customer surveys. They needed to know what price would actually stick once competitors showed up, once regulations clarified, once the operational mess of real lending set in. Pre-launch research suggested 8%. The market reality was 4%. That gap cost $35 million. The knowledge existed scattered across failed pilots from dozens o...