Rwandan innovator Amen Divine Ikamba is among the founders selected to showcase their fintech ventures at the AI Ventures Accelerator (AIVA) Demo Day in Delhi, India, in October. The event, scheduled for October 4 to 7, will bring together 22 founders from the accelerator’s inaugural 2026 cohort. The founders will present the companies they have developed over the past six months. Ikamba’s innovation, PACIN, is an API that converts mobile money and alternative financial data into explainable AI credit scores for lenders. The platform analyses existing financial behaviour, including savings patterns, repayment history and transaction consistency, and uses the data to support credit decisions. The Delhi event comes after several other milestones for PACIN. The startup was selected for the Black Is Tech Pitch Competition in Houston, Texas, and accepted into the NVIDIA Inception Program this year. It was also selected among 25 startups to pitch at the Africa Fintech Summit in Kigali in November. The idea behind PACIN is rooted in Ikamba’s childhood, where she watched her mother work as a loan officer and interact with small business owners who struggled to access additional financing. Many of the vendors returned repeatedly for relatively small loans but were unable to grow their businesses because they lacked the formal financial records banks typically require. The experience stayed with her as she later studied technology and economics and began examining whether the challenge she had witnessed was unique to Rwanda. She later concluded that the problem extended across the continent, particularly among people who use mobile money and operate businesses but lack formal credit histories. “Across Africa, hundreds of millions of people are using mobile money every day to move money and build their businesses, but almost none of them have anything a bank would recognise as a credit history,” she said. Beyond the international events, Ikamba said PACIN is working towards partnerships with mobile money operators, banks and microfinance institutions in Rwanda and across the region. The partnerships are intended to allow PACIN to access financial data responsibly and with consent, including mobile money transactions, savings patterns and repayment histories, as it works to validate and scale its credit intelligence technology.
