Dr. Aloy Chife is a businessman with over three decades of experience working and investing in the technology sector.

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He currently serves as Managing Partner/CEO of family-owned venture capital firm Saana Capital located in Princeton, USA which has portfolio companies in the U.S., Europe, and Africa. The VC firm specializes in consumer aggregation, financial intermediation, and a broad range of digital financial services, with a mission of creating digital infrastructure to connect African nations and break down barriers to cross-border trade and investment. The firm’s latest venture, a digital financial services (DFS) provider called Brij, is operationally active in Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana, and currently expanding across East and West Africa.

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Dr. Chife began his career in the Energy industry, covering the upstream oil and gas sector and utility services. He served as Director of Information Systems and Technology at Enron Corp. from 1997-1999 before joining Apple in Silicon Valley as a Director.

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After leaving Apple in 2002, Dr. Chife founded two tech ventures, Socketworks Ltd and SW Global, with financing from the International Finance Corporation (IFC) the private sector arm of the World Bank, which contributed to many of the digital platforms currently used by Nigerian government agencies, and other institutions across Africa and Asia. Dr. Chife has served as an information technology consultant to the Federal Government of Nigeria and as an advisor to the U.S. State Department on its Global Entrepreneurship Program (GEP).

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Dr. Chife has been featured in multiple international publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and The Economist, and was awarded the Best SME Entrepreneur Award by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). He holds a Ph.D in Political Economy from the London School of Economics, where he was a Foreign and Commonwealth Office scholar. He is the author of The Political Economy of Post-Cold War Africa (NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997).