Think about the last ad you scrolled past today. Can you remember what it was for? Probably not, and that’s the problem Rafiq Phillips has spent his career thinking about.
In this episode of The Founder Room, I sat down with Rafiq, co-founder and CTO of Naritive, the attention intelligence company helping brands move beyond impressions people barely register. We unpack the technology strategy behind the company's proprietary Attention Intelligence Platform, and why he believes marketers have spent too long measuring delivery instead of what their advertising earned.
We also went quickfire: what he wanted to be growing up, his first job, build or buy, raise early or bootstrap longer, and the first app he opens each morning. His short answers reveal as much about how he thinks as anything else in the conversation.
Rafiq has been online since before most of us had an email address. He taught himself to build his own website in 1999, and he spent years running search and digital campaigns at MTN, where he saw the same thing up close: brands were paying for ads people barely noticed. So he hacked together a prototype in a few days to fix it.
That prototype became Naritive. Today, more than 100 brands and agencies use it, and it is built entirely out of Africa. The company won Bronze for AdTech Innovation at the first Mark Awards in 2025, was shortlisted in eight categories this year, and has expanded from Johannesburg into Nigeria, Kenya, the UK and Europe. This month, Rafiq heads to TEDAI in Vienna to put that African-built stack in front of the people shaping AI.
Watch the full episode (requires free membership of the Techloy community) to hear Rafiq on why attention, not impressions, is the metric that matters, how a few days of hacking turned into a company, how Naritive won over its first brands and agencies, and what building adtech from Africa for the world really takes.
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