From a failed venture in South Africa to co-founding an AI cybersecurity powerhouse, CyberAlliance president Larry Yon II sits down with PHATHISANI MOYO for Coffee With… to explain why digital trust and diaspora capital are key to unlocking Africa’s true tech potential.
The first time Larry Yon II flew out of South Africa, he sat in a window seat, looking down at the landscape fading beneath him and wondering if he would ever return.
Yon, the co-founder and president of CyberAlliance, a US-based AI-powered cybersecurity firm, had originally arrived seeking commercial opportunities. He left with something far more profound: a realization that the continent he encountered bore little resemblance to the reductive narratives he had grown up with in America.
“I remember sitting in a window seat on the plane preparing to leave South Africa and return to the United States (US),” Yon told TechCabal over coffee on Wednesday. “I looked out the window and felt this tremendous sadness. I didn’t know if I would ever have the opportunity to come back.”
Then came a second, lingering thought, one that transformed a personal reflection into a broader mission.
“I didn’t know whether I would ever be able to bring other people from the US here so they could see what I had seen, feel what I had felt and experience what I had experienced.”
Years later, that underlying question continues to anchor much of his life’s work.
How Africa became personal
Yon’s engagement with Africa did not begin with cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, or venture capital. It began with a failed investment.
Having backed an American expatriate operating on the continent, Yon made a mistake familiar to many novice investors: caught up in the promise of the opportunity, he failed to grasp local market nuances and rushed the due diligence process.
The venture collapsed. Yet rather than walking away, the experience ignited a deeper curiosity. Determined to understand what he had overlooked, Yon travelled across the continent, met local founders, and began cultivating relationships that would ultimately redefine his career.
Later, as managing partner at B&C International, a prominent Black-owned global strategy consulting firm in the US, Africa fell squarely into his professional remit. He advised American corporations entering African markets while helping African enterprises expand into the United States.
South Africa gave that relationship a more personal and human dimension. While working on a business process outsourcing initiative in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) Province, Yon crossed paths with two of the country’s prominent figures. The late liberation stalwart Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and the late King Goodwill Zwelithini, eighth monarch of the Zulu Kingdom.
Mama Winnie left him with a simple lesson. “Don’t forget about the people,” while King Zwelithini left him with another.
“He told me that my ability to tell Africa’s story in the United States would always be greater than his ability to tell Africa’s story in the United States.” Yon has carried both messages into his work. The first grounding his belief that business is ultimately about people, and the second giving him a sense of responsibility that goes beyond identifying commercial opportunities to helping broaden how Africa is understood and engaged with in America.
From trade to trust
Today, Yon serves as co-founder and president of CyberAlliance, a US cybersecurity and artificial intelligence company operating across American and African markets. While his trajectory from economic development to deep tech might appear disjointed on paper, Yon sees a clear logic. “Trust has been the common thread throughout my career,” he explained.
Trade depends on trust, as does cross-border investment and the growth of digital businesses. And as artificial intelligence becomes more deeply embedded in the economy, the stakes become even higher, raising questions about data, privacy, security and who ultimately controls the technology.
Yon believes cybersecurity is therefore not a technical side project attached to Africa’s digital transformation. It is part of the infrastructure that allows that transformation to happen.
“If cybersecurity doesn’t keep pace with AI adoption, Africa risks losing trust that its innovation is safe, that people’s and companies’ data will be protected, and that African countries and businesses can adopt global technologies and enter global partnerships without sacrificing sovereignty.”
That concern sits behind CyberAlliance’s work with startups, investors and universities. The company has worked across South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Senegal, Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria and Morocco.
Operating across these diverse jurisdictions reinforced a fundamental lesson: Africa is not a monolith. Each nation presents a distinct regulatory landscape, business culture, technological maturity, and threat profile—factors that dictate how software is developed, deployed, and adopted.
“Global capability doesn’t replace local intelligence,” Yon explained to TechCabal in an interview on Wednesday. “You can bring world-class technology into a market, but if you don’t understand the context in which people will use it, you haven’t really solved the problem.”
Making cybersecurity speak human
This is where SallyAI enters the story.
CyberAlliance describes Sally as an AI-powered cyber analyst and translation layer. It takes complex cybersecurity information and turns it into prioritised, business-ready intelligence for security teams, executives and boards.
According to Yon, the idea was influenced by CyberAlliance’s early work in Senegal, where he and his US team faced a practical challenge: they did not speak French fluently.The experience reinforced something that went beyond language itself. “For technology to be adopted and inform decisions, people have to be able to understand it,” he noted. “Cybersecurity is already complex, and technical terminology, language differences and cultural context can make it even harder to understand.”
The experience helped shape a philosophy that now runs through Yon’s thinking.
“Technology can be utilised without requiring the person using it to be a technologist,” he added.
That principle extends beyond cybersecurity, with Yon seeing AI as a tool that can lower the cost of building businesses and accessing expertise. But he also points out that the same technology can lower the cost of cyberattacks while making them faster and more sophisticated.
That is why he believes cyber readiness is becoming part of business readiness. The challenge for African startups is that the issue can surface when they seek investment, enterprise customers, insurance or expansion into another country.
A founder may think about product, revenue and growth. Investors may also want to know how customer data is handled, where it is stored and how intellectual property is protected. “The mistake is thinking cybersecurity is something you address after you scale,” Yon said. “It’s part of what determines whether you can scale.”
That view has also been shaped by Yon’s work across venture capital and investment ecosystems. He says cyber readiness is becoming part of investment readiness, with funders looking beyond a company’s financial health and growth prospects to how well its technology, data and intellectual property are protected.
Then there was jollof
Not all of Yon’s African lessons arrived wrapped in enterprise security parlance. Senegal taught him about digital communication—and permanently altered his culinary hierarchy.
“And on a much less serious note, Senegal also changed my opinion about jollof rice. I will leave it there before I get myself in trouble with my Nigerian or Ghanaian friends,” he chuckled.
It is a lighthearted moment, but one that highlights Yon’s genuine affinity for the continent. His engagement extends far beyond spreadsheets, venture capital metrics, and software stacks; it is deeply rooted in culture, community, and personal connection.
That connection fuels his current mission: persuading more African-American investors, founders, and executives to experience the continent firsthand.
Mobilising the African diaspora
Through Africa Diaspora Invests, a nonprofit CyberAlliance initiative focused on growing diaspora investment and engagement in Africa, Yon helps Black American entrepreneurs and investors, along with other friends of Africa, find opportunities to do business and build connections on the continent.
He wants more people in the West to see African markets as places where they can build companies, invest money, form partnerships and create wealth. “The goal is for economic engagement with Africa to become an expected part of the conversation about Black wealth creation, not an exception to it,” he said.
He believes some of the barriers are cultural and informational.
“Americans don’t speak African, and Africans don’t speak American,” he stated, explaining that investors and entrepreneurs can sometimes use different business languages even when they are discussing similar opportunities.
To bridge this gap, Yon advocates for direct engagement and nuanced market intelligence. Johannesburg operates differently from Lagos; Dakar is not Nairobi; Casablanca has its own commercial rhythms. Understanding these distinctions is critical to successfully navigating cross-border trade. Crucially, he wants more success stories from African tech hubs to reach mainstream American media to dismantle outdated stereotypes.
During a private meeting at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, Yon described a dream of boarding a US flight to Africa and seeing it filled with African-American families and businesspeople.
“That is not even close to what I see now.” The words take Yon back to that first flight, when Africa was still an unfamiliar place and he wondered if he would ever return. Now, he imagines those same planes coming in the opposite direction, filled with African-Americans arriving not as visitors passing through, but as investors, entrepreneurs and partners
What Africa will build for the world
After a decade of doing business across the continent, Yon remains convinced that global markets vastly underestimate African innovation. “We have grown comfortable asking whether Africa can produce another tech unicorn. I think that question is far too modest,” Yon asserted. “Why couldn’t the next NVIDIA be built on African soil?”
Yon acknowledges that significant infrastructure and compute gaps remain. But he points to several forces converging across the continent, including AI investment, expanding digital infrastructure and data-centre capacity, a young population, a growing consumer market, abundant resources and maturing technology ecosystems.
He argues that environmental constraints spur world-class engineering: “When you build software for environments where power stability, bandwidth cost, purchasing power, and language diversity are daily challenges, you are forced to innovate differently.”
Products forged under those conditions, Yon believes, will eventually export solutions to global markets.
It has been a long journey for the young American executive who once sat in an airplane window seat leaving South Africa, uncertain if he would ever set foot on the continent again. He returned and has spent the years since bringing global capital and talent with him.
Now, Yon wants the next wave of diaspora founders, angel investors, and venture capitalists to approach Africa with an ambition that far exceeds his own when he first landed.
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