Bruce Ayonote,
Co-founder/CEO, Suburban Fibre Company & Legend Internet
Bruce Ayonote was born on the 15th of April 1974 in Lagos Nigeria, he is a member of the board and one of the founders of Suburban Fibre Company, one of Nigeria’s leading internet service providers that have stood the test of time spanning over a decade since launch. He has over 20 years of International Business experience specializing in telecommunications. He is responsible for driving the group’s advanced technology adoption strategy which has given Suburban its unique advantage in the Telecommunications market and early innovators that shaped the technology industry in the country, especially in the federal capital territory when the industry was dominated by foreigners.
Mr Bruce is a founding member of what is known today as Suburban Group, he has been part of the team that has grown the company from its formation in 1999 through its various growth stages to its present position. He is also a substantial shareholder and member of the board of directors. He is a regular contributor on Entrepreneurship and business forums and is deeply committed to youth development ventures in Nigeria.
Mr. Ayonote holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Politics and Public Administration from the University of Maiduguri and has received the BT Diploma in Telecommunications Management Studies from Hull Business School in the United Kingdom. He is an alumnus of the General Management Program (GMP) at Harvard Business School and has also attended several courses at the London Business School.
He has received several awards and recognitions, celebrated in 2021 as Abuja’s Most Outstanding Under 50 CEO in Internet Service Provision and also Abuja’s Most Outstanding Under CEO of the Year. He tirelessly continues to lead a team of young and vibrant innovative technology enthusiasts through the Legend brand with Legend Internet, Legend, Home, Legend Fibre and various other world class products and services.
Becoming Legend by Suburban Fiber Company
Bruce and his co-visionaries founded Suburban Fibre Company as one of the pioneers of internet technology in Nigeria and part of the turbulent fashioning of the country’s technology space with the transition of decades of military rule to democratic system of government in 1999, situated in no other city but the newly formed Federal Capital Territory. As one of the country’s indigenous fiber optic internet companies, it became popular through its urban savvy world class advert of legend internet when it was launched in 2016.
Legend is an offshoot of Suburban Fiber Company was about enabling easy access to content using broadband technology for Nigeria with a population that largely could not have access to affordable internet solution; when internet was considered by many to be just for the upper class. Legend is a product of Suburban FibreCo. Learning this solved the mystery of how Legend is able to deliver fibre-optic connections right inside people’s homes. Suburban is a 24 year old company, and has had quite a while to set up the groundwork, way before the concept of Legend was even conceived. Legend is in fact a product that takes advantage of years of investment in deploying a robust fibre network that spreads across the breadth of Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory that has become one of the fastest growing cities in the world.
After 7 years since its launch, Legend has gone beyond just a product suite that delivers premium content, TV, internet and voice services – all over a high-speed fiber optic data connection in Nigeria’s capital city of Abuja in its initial vision but significantly contributed to the growth of the technology industry beyond the Federal Capital Territory. Bruce has led his team to offer solutions for government, rural communities, hospitality industry and other private sector businesses enabling the spiral leap of the technology development in the country. Legend studied and tried various solutions but only got a deeper appreciation for the underlying issues ranging from wide and general factors like social & economic to granular issues like the power switch in a customer’s home being turned off.
The company has focused on delivering stellar customer service to its customers as a result of its critical study and analysis of the market after which it launched the hilarious My Legend App. ‘‘At the heart of My Legend App was company’s commitment to ensuring that its customers have a seamless experience when using their services such as LegendPay and other products and services of the Legend Ecosystem. The services eliminate the need to go through third parties or cumbersome media to reach support function which will respond to the consumers’ interactively.
Legend also ensures that its product enables consumers to track their tickets and enquiries so they never have to worry about insufficient information on your Legend services. The App is available on both iOS and Android platforms which can be downloaded for free from the App Store or Google Play.
During the upsurge experienced by telecommunication service providers and customers during the Covid-19 pandemic, Legend as a digital service provider has moved towards an audacious task of delivering the customer service expectations that emerged post COVID-19 pandemic. While the magnitude of this responsibility can easily be mistaken for regular customer service the pre COVID-19, expectations are coming out differently from the regular which has made it possible for Legend to transform its services.
Legend is a digital services platform headquartered in Abuja, with a focus on three main markets in the technology space: broadband, fin-tech and mobile. The company’s broadband services, Legend Fiber and WiFi, are the largest fiber-to-the-home and public WiFi networks in Abuja and Minna.
According to the company, ‘‘Legend Pay is directly integrated with merchants, banks and digital payment platforms to enable easier and seamless payments. Our Fiber to the Home service boasts of a robust customer base with over 250,000 homes passed and 10,000 homes activated. We also have a mass market consumer service which has over 100,000 connections monthly.’’
Mr Bruce Ayonote is one personality who is media shy and prefers to hide behind the spot light of his company’s success, yet it is without a doubt that whilst so many indigenous businesses that were founded within the same period have shut down or failed, through his innovation and altruistic team drove the company to better days. Legend has become formidable and stork in the technology space in Africa with phenomenal experience center spread across the city and gearing to take over the world.
He very rarely accepts accolades for the giant strides the company has achieved under his leadership yet he was awarded in 2021 as Abuja Most Outstanding CEO in 2021 and Abuja Most Outstanding CEO in Internet Service Solutions in 2021. But to the humble, easy going Bruce Ayonote, he is just getting started.
Oyaje Idoko,
Co-founder/CEO, Layer3
Oyaje Idoko is the CEO and Founder of Layer3, a prominent cloud and IT solutions provider in Nigeria. With over 19 years of experience in the ICT sector, he embarked on his professional journey with brief tenures at the nowdefunct Prodigy International and Startech Connections before establishing Layer3 more than 18 years ago. Under his guidance, Layer3 has consistently experienced growth, distinguishing itself as one of Nigeria’s most customerfocused IT companies. The company has expanded its reach across Africa, prioritizing the delivery of peace of mind to its diverse clientele.
Oyaje holds a degree in Communications Engineering from the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, and furthered his education at the Stanford Graduate School of Business Executive Program. Additionally, he is an alumnus of the Stanford Seed Program.
The name Layer 3 is one that anyone who hears will easily point one foreign company or American tech geniuses to create such a hard to forget name for a company. It was founded in 2005 when the telecommunication penetration was gathering mounted from the major cities to other parts of the country with less than 10% of the population at the time connected to a mobile phone or internet.
Under the visionary leadership of Mr Oyaje, the company aimed to remain at the forefront of our technology business transformation in the country. With a team of local content well equipped and groomed by the founder to combine our knowledge of world-class technology solutions, in addition to partnership with some of the global technology providers to deliver exceptional value for clients. These cutting edge solutions which are targeted at addressing technology solutions cross all sectors and includes the innovation of the data center, software, server & storage systems, mobile device management, security & network infrastructure solutions and access solutions including broadband and VPN services.
Oyaje is driven by a laser focus on the things that matter to him. He is an introvert with a naughty streak and believes in the continuous pursuit of excellence. He is certain that perfection can be achieved with determination and effort.
“Arduous and downright rewarding” has characterized his journey. And yes, he used to program over 1000 lines of code at age 12, with no doubt that he would wear this techie badge for a long time. No wonder he obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Communications Engineering from the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, Nigeria and moved on to kick off his formal career as a Network Engineer with Prodigy International. Shortly after, he led the team that built the first fixed wireless broadband network in Nigeria at Startech Connections which launched the first fixed wireless access as 3.5 GHz operator in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) and the company was the first to rollout this service among the 19 companies that were awarded licences by the National Communications Commission (NCC) on 1st July 2002. Pure entrepreneurial ambition and a love help fuelled his commitment to learning and diligence to work setting him at the top of his team. This rich attribute elevated him to led the Engineering Team at Startech from 2002 to 2005 and in that same year, started Layer3.
Every new day since then has signaled exciting challenges and experiences that keep him ticking. In the quest for more knowledge, Oyaje took on a Stanford University Graduate School of Business Executive program because learning improved methods as the world around you evolves is the only way to keep the eyes focused on the moving target that is technology and the business of it.
Mr Oyaje and his team have built a 24/7 network management and support center that allows them to provide round the clock remote monitoring and support services for its customers’ IT and network infrastructure as well as our expansive metro fiber network infrastructure guaranteeing optimal performance and quick fault resolutions.
The company has progressively transitioned through various strides from launching its initial operations with just two staffs in 2005, becoming a Juniper registered partner in 2006 (Juniper Networks, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. The company develops and markets networking products, including routers, switches, network management software, network security products, and software-defined networking technology.
The company was founded in 1996 by Pradeep Sindhu, with Scott Kriens as the first CEO, who remained until September 2008. Kriens has been credited with much of Juniper’s early market success. It received several rounds of funding from venture capitalists and telecommunications companies before going public in 1999. Juniper grew to $673 million in annual revenues by 2000. By 2001 it had a 37% share of the core routers market, challenging Cisco‘s once-dominant market-share. It grew to $4 billion in revenues by 2004 and $4.63 billion in 2014), opened its Lagos office with distribution of B2C VMware, Metro Fibre License Juniperselect Partner Commissions Longhaul Service in 2009 and rolled out Abuja and Kano Fibre.
Mr Oyaje in the past decades has demonstrated his consummation of exploring new ways of doing things, thinking of ways to scale goodness on earth through mentoring and volunteering. You can catch him on the flip side tucked in his sofa enjoying war and epic movies, buried in a book somewhere, engaged with a podcast or enjoying playtime with family.
Olumide Soyombo,
Co-founder/CEO, Blue Chip Tech and Voltron Capital Ltd
Olumide Soyombo is the co-founder and chief executive of Blue Chip Technologies Ltd and Voltron Capital, one of the pioneer technology startup companies based in Lagos state. He holds a BSc in Systems Engineering from University of Lagos and MSc in Business and Information Technology from the Aston Business School in Birmingham, England.
The 40 year old technology enthusiast is one of the those young Nigerians who many considered strange due to the passion for technology at a time when many people in Nigeria had very little knowledge of it beyond just the type writer. At the age of 12 when many people had never seen a technology device except the NITEL phone booth which they would queue up to make phone calls, Olumide had already been fascinated with technology after immersing himself for hours into the world of his father’s desktop computer. He seized upon on the innovative idea to leverage on emerging technology need and initiated his inaugural venture; registering email addresses which were later sold to customers.
Around 1999 when Nigeria was leaping into a technology boom, Olumide had secured a significant capital investment of about $40,000 from his father forming the foundation for what is known today as Bluechip Technologies Ltd. His dogged commitment shaped by years of experience led him on a trajectory that gradually positioned to stand out and inspire so many young technology enthusiasts at the time. That investment was nurtured over the years to blossom into a multi-million dollar enterprise of considerable growth and influence today.
Olumide streak of entrepreneurship is quite uncommon for many young people who had come from a wealthy background such as his own, yet as an undergraduate in University of Lagos he engaged in personal development through several professional training programs fashioning his business foray.
Many years before starting Bluechip Technologies, Olumide had returned from the United Kingdom after completing his Masters in Business and IT, and then started his career as a junior analyst for Tavia Technologies established in year 2000. Tavia Technologies was one of the pioneer technology pioneer specialized in data analysis providing business solutions to financial institutions in the country. It is his experience at Tavia that further illuminated Olumide’s mind to explore more opportunities in the technology space facilitated by his father’s determination to encourage him to become successful.
Olumide would leave Tavia few years later to found Bluechip Technologies Ltd in 2008 with his business partner Kazeem Tewegbade who had worked with him at Tavia.
With just few staff in 2008 when the company started, he has built the company into one of the leading business application firm focused exclusively on assisting organizations in planning, designing, implementing and operating business application solutions and strategies that are central to creating and maintaining a competitive business advantage. The company in 2022 announced its expansion based on growing demand beyond the company’s initial products and services offer, leading it to other African countries like Ghana, Kenya, Zambia and the DRC, providing warehousing growth.
His passion driven leadership has grown the company into an enterprise technology company that has worked with top tier companies in financial and technological industries, including MTN, 9mobile formerly Etisalat, Guaranty Trust Bank, First Bank and Access Bank. Bluechip Technologies also worked with internationally reputed technology leaders like Apple and Amazon in providing cutting edge solutions for businesses across Africa.
Mr Olumide became popular not just from the success of his technology based company but his significant investment investing and developing human capital in the technology space. The ethos of his father to leave his handprint in people’s lives engineered his commitment to funding startups becoming what is referred as pre-seed investor.
Pre-seed investing is not what many will venture into in a developing economy like that Nigeria, not even financial institutions would venture into seed funding talk more of pre-seed funding. This is because pre-seed investing is investment made at the earliest stage of a business, incubation period which require developing the product, identifying the market before launching it.
This is no mere move by Olumide, as even the top tier banks and financial institutions shy away from funding startups and when they decide to, they request white elephants that make it practically impossible for the creators of the idea to meet up. He has singlehandedly funded about 100 startups with many of the breaking even into success. His venture capital firm, Voltron Capital has helped 53 African startups through its Fund 1 stream using an empirical funding approach that focuses on several streams of funding.
Mr Olumide investment in different startups as an angel investor using gains from Bluechip Technologies led to the remarkable successes of multi-million dollar companies like Piggyvest, Paystack and TeamApt.
He launched his literary composition in a memoir titled, “Vantage,” the book which exposes his vantage point, investment in the African technology sector, and the profound business and life lessons he acquired on his journey on blazing the trail in the tech.
The story of Olumide Soyombo is on that redefined the trajectory of African industry from a short lived subsistent one to an evolving generation of formidable business system that will last generations from today.
Tosin Faniro-Dada
Pioneer Member, Lagos Innovate, Former CEO, Endeavor & Board Members, Flutterwave
Tosin Faniro-Dada is the former Managing Director/CEO of Endeavor in Nigeria, a non-profit organization that selects, mentors and accelerates the best high-impact entrepreneurs in Africa through provision of various support systems to enable them scale business challenges and former Head of Startup at Lagos Innovate.
She is a certified public Accountant licensed in Massachusetts USA, a graduate Summa Cum Laude (highest honors) with a B.Sc in accounting from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and an M.sc in Accounting from Boston College. She also obtained advanced Management Certificate from INSEAD, United States.
Tosin was the Director, Programmes & Coordination, Lagos State Employment Trust Fund (LSETF) where she led the fund’s intervention programs; providing access to finance to MSMEs, facilitating training and job placements for young people and supporting entrepreneurs in Lagos State, under the Lagos Innovates program. The program which aimed at providing enabling environment for Tech startups and innovation driven enterprises to thrive in the state also provided tech founders with access to co-working space, talent and event sponsorship.
Prior to the establishment of the programme, most tech startups and innovation driven enterprises had little or no support from the government thereby stifling so many startups and leading some of them to fizzle into oblivion. As the first of its kind in the entire country at the time, Lagos State Employment Trust Fund for resident founders and Lagos-based high impact, high-potential startups in smart ways, drawing from the experience and successes of similar government-led initiatives like Startup Chile, Startup India and Startup Singapore.
She had joined the Lagos State Employment Trust Fund as the head of Strategy & Partnership in 2016 and was responsible for raising private sector finance to fund the activities of the Fund and also engaging strategic methods of promoting the Fund. Her efforts as one of the pioneer members of the founding management executives contributed the phenomenal success of the programme and its sustainability over the years with groundbreaking support of idea hubs, talent development programmes, hub loans and work space vouchers. In 2022, about 6 years since its establishment, the programme had created over 168,000 direct and indirect jobs within Lagos state by empowering micro, small and medium enterprises putting the state at the country’s access to finance index to 20%. The organization which has spread to 26 local government areas in the state has over the years received funding of up to N8.4 billion.
Tosin’s strides cannot be far from her years of cutting her teeth in practicing in topnotch firms like PricewaterhouseCoopers in Boston, United States. She attributes her analytical thinking skills that have contributed immensely in her ability to successfully deliver on client engagements as a Lead Senior officer. This included planning and executing financial statement audits, managing associates, and keeping partners and clients well informed of the audit progress.
Before working with LSTEF, she worked in the Corporate Banking Division at Skye Bank (Polaris Bank) where she executed Oil and Gas Upstream transactions.
Her foray into tech will be considered by many as an unforeseen event, yet to her it was taking a dive in untested waters when the opportunity came calling her to work at Lagos Innovate. She emphasized that her finance and project management skills gave her an edge over other people in tech enabling her to easily facilitate funding of the tech ecosystem.
She joined Endeavor Nigeria, a subsidiary of the global community of, by and for high-impact entrepreneurs – those who dream bigger, scale faster and pay it forward. Driven by the belief that high-impact entrepreneurs transform economies, Endeavor is on a mission to build thriving entrepreneurial ecosystems in emerging and underserved markets around the world.
The organization creates multiplier effect by inspiring high-growth founders to dream bigger, supporting and investing in them to scale faster, and providing a platform to pay it forward – thereby compounding their individual impact. It was launched in February 2018 with the support of seven local business leaders – founding board of directors and in partnership the Omidyar Network.
Endeavor’s network spans 42 markets and supports more than 2,300 entrepreneurs whose companies generate combined revenues of over $42 billion US and have created more than 3.9 million jobs. Endeavor’s unique entrepreneurs-first model and network of trust provide a platform for founders to dream big, scale up, and pay it forward to the next generation of entrepreneurs.
After her successful exit in 2023 from Endeavor Nigeria, Tosin Faniro-Dada currently sits on the board of one of the most valued companies in the world, Flutterwave where she provides her wealth of experience in driving the company’s multi-national vision.
Temitope Omotolani
Co-founder/CEO, Crowdyvest
Temitope Omotolani is the Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Crowdyvest; an impact driven community focused on creating an interdependence between individuals and businesses by providing an all-in-one financial solution geared towards achieving financial freedom, while facilitating impactful growth in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Regardless of the tough business terrain, Temitope’s resilience also seeks to solve hard problems.
She is one of the Co-founders of Farmcrowdy, Nigeria’s First Digital Agricultural Platform that launched in November 2016. Her first role was Product Development & Sales and in 4 months, she grew to become the VP of operations and in 1 year she became the COO. As Chief Operations Officer (COO) of Farmcrowdy, she coordinated all farm operations across over 14 states with over 25,000 farmers.
Temitope founded her first start-up when she was 16, called ‘Gifted Hands’, a make-up business that ran for 10 years. At age 19, she founded a cleaning services company known as ‘Fínífíní’ enterprises. In 2012, she built a product that focused on the buying and selling of agricultural produce from the rural areas and sold to the urban parts of the city of Lagos with over 18 million people, through offline crowdfunding, and set up a local market in Lekki every last Saturday of every month. It was called ‘Ojawara.’ Tope is mentioned by HEDA Resource Centre as one of the “30 Super Women” who choose to challenge issues in Food Security & Environmental Justice for International Women’s Day 2021 and is also listed as one of the “Top Female Founders in Africa” who raised 2.5 million USD for the Nigerian agric-tech startup Farmcrowdy. As a young woman who cares about the community, she was the Project Director at “Beyond the Classroom Foundation”; an organization that helps raise funds for the purchase & distribution of school supplies to kids in less-privileged areas. She also volunteered at “The Irede Foundation” which aims to educate and empower children living with congenital and/or acquired limb loss.
The graduate of Economics from the University of Lagos is also an alumni of Lagos Business School (LBS) and FATE Foundation’s Aspiring Entrepreneurship Program. She has mentored and spoken on multiple panels and platforms both locally and internationally, addressing various topics around entrepreneurship and impact. She also sits on the board of some businesses across the world. She is an ardent believer in disruptive innovation, impact, and entrepreneurship as the most sustainable ways to eradicate poverty in Africa. Tope loves traveling, good music, strategy, planning and execution, and is passionate about creating businesses that focus on solving economic problems and adding value to humanity.
Crowdyvest is an impact-driven financial technology platform that creates financial solutions for a community of individuals and organizations that are committed to long-term growth and financial freedom. The company was founded out of the need to address impact-driven opportunities in different sectors of the economy. It was founded by Temitope Omotolani (CEO), Onyeka Akumah, Akindele Phillips, Christopher Abiodun, and Ifeanyi Anazodo – the same team that started Farmcrowdy, as a digital platform that connects investors to impact-driven opportunities through sponsorship packages to fund higher yields for a share of the returns.
The Digital investment platform, Crowdyvest, provided investment solutions to Nigerians into the tech startup’s investment opportunities, plus interest offering returns on investment through savings and yields, with an assurance that the investment opportunities are “well-vetted.” A company that started as a team of 8 who sat around just one table and did all the operations. Things were a bit rocky in the early stages of the start-up, but as time went on, gained more structure, definition, unified vision and mission. It later grew to a staff strength of 27 with over 101,000 members from across the world and a range of 7 major product offerings within 18months and have been able to help more than 10 businesses across different sectors achieve many of their project targets.
Temitope took over the leadership of the company in 2021 during its most turbulent and difficult time with a debt of about N7.7 billion which have been converted to equity for the investors. Her track record of remarkable success at Farmcrowdy leaves many with little doubt that she will fail and reposing investors’ confidence in a rebound moment for the company in the days ahead. She is pronounced as one of the few women, who have contributed to the growth of communities in Nigeria even as a philanthropist, she has helped in putting the local farmers on the world scale to modernize farming and monetize it.
The present challenges of Crowdyvest do not in any deter her commitment to beat the storm as according to her, “Failure should be demystified and celebrated just as much as its vaunted counterpart.”
Kola Aina
Founding Partner, Venture Platform
Kola Aina, Founding Partner at Ventures Platform. He is an avid angel investor and mentor to startup founders. He founded companies and sits on the board of some of them. Prior to focusing on venture building, Kola worked in corporate finance, administration, corporate turn-around and strategy. He had started off his early career in banking with Fifth-Third Bank in the United States where he grew from entrant Electrical Engineer to financial analyst. He was an excellent student of Electronics Engineering Technology at Savannah State University. He concluded his programme in 2004 and basically handed over his degree certificate to his father. Afterwards, he focused on his own thing. As Aina preferred business to screws, engines, and electricity, his exit from Savannah was almost immediately followed up with an MBA programme at Bowling Green State University. There, Aina was a blazing sun, brilliant enough to become the President of the MBA Students Association, take over several other prestigious positions. All of these—and more—polished Aina with enough experience to make his foray into the world of business, starting with being a financial analyst at Fifth Third Bank in Ohio, USA, in 2005, and going on to raise funds for business he believed in. He further obtained professional training from the Harvard Business School, University of California – Berkeley Law, Lagos Business School, and IESE Business School.
He currently served on the Presidential Committee on Job Creation and a mentor at the World Bank XL Africa program.
Kola’s foray into technology started with when he co-founded a leading Nigerian enterprise software company – Emerging Platforms. This penchant for developing new businesses inspired his investments into startups as a Venture Capitalist, identifying and investing in early-stage technology companies focused on the disruption of financial services, healthcare, education, agriculture, and enterprise software. He built a strong investment portfolio that became top tier among venture capitalists and investors in Nigeria. Some of those successful investments included category-defining companies including Mono, PiggyVest, Reliance HMO, and Paystack, which was acquired by Stripe in 2020.
A passionate ecosystem builder, Kola Founded Ventures Park, a co-working space and community for entrepreneurs as well as Ventures Platform Foundation, which empowers entrepreneurs by providing access to capital, education and digital resources and advocates for entrepreneur-friendly policy.
Kola Aina is Founding Partner at Ventures Platform, an early-stage “discovery” venture capital fund championing the next generation of African entrepreneurs. He is a leading executive and board director who combines a powerful mix of entrepreneurial, investment, and technical experience across diverse industries including technology, finance, media, agriculture, infrastructure, and real estate.
He also served as the Chair of the Advisory Group on Technology and Creativity to the President of Nigeria and Co-Chaired of the Committee on Job Creation & Youth Employment to the President of Nigeria. He was also a board member and advisory board member for institutions including ARM Financial Advisers Limited, Reliance HMO, and the Yemisi Shyllon Art Museum.
Ventures Platform has supported over 140 founders to launch technology solutions from healthcare to logistics. Some of the companies have made to the top tech companies in the country with significant positive impact on the economy through enormous job creation and employment opportunities. Among them are Credable; a driving the future of banking by enabling financial and non-financial institutions to deploy various digital financial solutions, such as digital savings wallets, lending products, payments, and more, to their end consumers, through a modern API-driven platform. Paystack is a Nigerian financial technology company that offers payment processing services to businesses and was acquired by Irish-American financial services company Stripe for $200M in 2020. Pigyvest, the first online “Savings & Investment” app in West Africa. These are just few from the list of 140 businesses initially backed up by Ventures Platform.
Kola is passionate about mentoring and advising young entrepreneurs who are creating solutions for mass underserved -markets. This has put him on many stages both locally and internationally, where he has delivered speeches, lectures, and talks on technology, entrepreneurship, social change, and various other topics. He gave a TED talk at TEDxEuston where he spoke on the topic “Who will own our future unicorns?” He was also a speaker at Techcrunch’s first event in Nigeria, Techcrunch Startup Battlefield Africa 2019. He has received multiple awards and has been featured in various lists such as The 20 most important people in Nigerian tech, The ten most influential people in Nigerian Tech and #YNaijaPowerList2018 for Technology and many more. In his spare time, he enjoys writing on topics he’s passionate about in his blog or on Twitter, reading books and spending time with his family.
Olalekan Olude
Co-founder, Jobberman, roHealth, CiscoServe Payments,
Board Member, WhogoHost
Olalekan Olude is one of the top technology leaders in Nigeria, the co-founder of Jobberman, West Africa’s most popular job search engine and served as Special Adviser on Job Creation and Youth Empowerment to Ogun State Governor Dapo Abiodun. Olude was named as one of the 100 Most Influential Young Nigerians by Avance Media in 2016. Olude is from Imasayi in Yewa North Local Government in Ogun State; he started his education at Iganmode Grammar School, Ota, between 1993 and 1999 where he obtained his Senior School Leaving Certificate. He proceeded to Obafemi Awolowo University where he earned a Bachelor of Science (Hons) in Computer Science between 2005 and 2009. He also attended Lagos Business School (Pan Atlantic University), completed the Executive Management Program, and The Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania), with certificate in Executive Education in Strategy and Leadership.
Before Jobberman, Olude had few experiences including working with TeleMobile Nigeria Limited as a Network Engineer and with Goldman Sachs as Technology Analyst. In August 2009, at 28 years old he co-founded Jobberman with his friends from university, Ayodeji Adewunmi and Opeyemi Awoyemi. Olude acted as Jobberman’s Chief Operating Officer from 2009 to 2017. After exiting Jobberman, he was appointed Special Adviser Job Creation and Youth Empowerment to the Ogun State Governor in 2019.
In 2021, Olude founded an employee health benefits startup called roHealth, which later rebranded to become Motherboard (a comprehensive employee benefits platform) in 2023.
Jobberman, the platform which was built with his team of cofounders connected employees and recruiters to the right opportunities and talent. Before LinkedIn and social media blew up in Nigeria, Jobberman was the premier space for job-search interactions.
Jobberman launched in August, 2009, in the middle of a nationwide public universities’ strike. Olude was in his final year of school. In those early founding days, each co-founder focused on managing different aspects of the business: Adewunmi was its face and strategist; Ope its engineering and product marketing lead; and Olude its sales, operations, and finance lead.
On graduating university in 2010, Olude and Awoyemi left Ife for Lagos to continue hacking away at building their new company. The years between 2009 and 2014 would prove “formative” for the founders on their entrepreneurial journey, Olude recalls.
As a successful business that became a goldmine for investors, and by 2015, Olude and his partners had gotten a few approaches from investors wanting to buy them out. They didn’t take up any of the offers, but they kept an open mind.
In 2017, Jobberman got acquired by Ringier One Africa Media, and Olude and his co-founders exited the business, leaving behind them a legacy of 50,000 employers and over 3 million users on the platform. Each partner and friend wanted to “do other things” and “conquer the world”, Olude says, explaining why they exited.
Two years after leaving Jobberman, in 2019, Olude was appointed Special Adviser to the governor of Ogun—a state in southwestern Nigeria—on job creation and youth empowerment strategies. At first, he did not want the job. Government and entrepreneurship, he says, are two different worlds. When he left the latter for the former, he realised that government gave him the platform to create more impact, “with the stroke of a pen”.
Olalekan is invested in building and scaling businesses. To his credit, Olalekan Olude is the Founder and Advisor of Rovedana Limited, a startup providing staffing and payroll financing services to SMEs in Nigeria. Olalekan Olude is also Co-founder at CicoServe Payments Limited, a fintech startup providing grassroots banking to millions of Nigerians through more than 5000 agents nationwide. Olalekan cofounded Jobberman, Nigeria’s biggest recruitment website and the largest in Africa.
In 2009, Olalekan, alongside Ayodeji Adewunmi and Opeyemi Awoyemi cofounded Jobberman. At Jobberman, Olalekan operated in the capacity of the Chief Operating Officer from 2009 to 2017. Jobberman has now grown to become West Africa’s most popular job search board supporting over 60,000 companies and 5 million candidates in Nigeria and Ghana. Olalekan is also a Founding Partner at African Talents Company, an executive recruitment agency. He worked short-term as Africa Head, Executive Search at Ringier One Africa Media, South Africa from 2016- 2017. Prior to these, he was Network Engineer at TeleMobile Nigeria Limited and Technology Analyst at Goldman Sachs, a global investment bank.
In recognition of his numerous contributions to startups growth and youth development, Olalekan was named among the 100 Most Influential Young Nigerians by Advance Media in 2016.
He sits on the board of various startups including WhoGoHost, CicoServe Payments Limited, and E-Settlement Limited.
Ruth Iselema
CEO, Bitmama Inc.
Ruth Iselema heads one of the top crypto tech company in Nigeria, CEO of Bitmama Inc, a pan-African blockchain startup offering crypto products across payments, trading, loans, and investments, with footprints across Africa, Europe, and the US. Prior to founding Bitmama, Ruth consulted for other leading global exchanges and blockchain protocols on their product strategy and market entry into Africa. A 2020 online survey by data platform Statista found that 32% of those Nigerians who took part used cryptocurrencies – the highest proportion of any country in the world. Estimates show that of the top 10 countries for trading volumes, Nigeria ranked third place after the US and Russia in 2020, generating more than $400m worth of transactions.
Her over 6+ years of experience trading and managing blockchain accounts, she leads a network of distributed global team of 25+ at Bitmama that are spread across Nigeria and other African countries. Fondly called the Bitmama of Africa’s blockchain space, Ruth has also been recognized as one of the female leaders in tech and top 20 individuals shaping Africa’s blockchain space by leading media such as Crypto Asset Buyer and received other recognition from the German and Austrian Missions in Africa.
With a degree in Pharmacy, she jived to forge a path that would significantly impact the world rather than settle for a payday employment leading to her launching of crypto company Bitmama Inc, launched in 2016.
Bitmama offers two products to the crypto market in Nigeria; the first product is an eponymous mobile (Android and iOS) app that allows users to buy and sell crypto currencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Celo. And the second one is Changera, “an International money transfer app that lets millions of people send and receive money in any currency around the world in a very fast, easy, and secure way.”
The name Bitmama comes from a combination of Bitcoin and mama. “I started learning about blockchain and cryptocurrencies earlier in 2015, through a friend and a couple of Telegram and WhatsApp groups I joined. Just as it is now, I turned out to be only one out of maybe two women in the space. Because most of the conversations happened online and we did not see one another physically, people assumed I was an elderly woman. So they started calling me ‘Bitmama’ — a combination of bitcoin and mama — and the name stuck.”
The adventure started when she was scammed of NGN250, 000 (about US$576) when trying to invest in crypto currencies. “Even though I did my due diligence, I still got scammed. So I decided this has to stop,” she explained.
In September 2022, Ruth secured US$1.65 million in funding to scale beyond Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya. The funding was added to the US$350,000 she raised in October 2021. Thanks to the overall financing, she wanted to build “Africa’s most user-friendly, innovative blockchain company.”
In 2018, she was one of the beneficiaries of the Green House Lab accelerator program organized by Venture Garden Group. Between 2017 and 2018, she was the director of the tech company Venhub. In late 2021, she made it to the media outlet Crypto Asset Buyer’s list of the Top 20 Individuals that shaped Nigeria’s blockchain & crypto industry that year.
While Bitmama is a highly-secure crypto-fiat exchange that allows traders to buy and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum and other digital assets in Africa, Changera is a solution that makes cross-border payments easy and efficient for businesses and individuals. Ruth graduated as a Pharmacist from Central University Accra, Ghana and forayed into entrepreneurship back in 2013 when the African blockchain and fintech landscape were quite nascent. Crypto traders relied on social media like WhatsApp and Telegram to exchange coins despite associated risks and the process of conducting cross-border remittances proved very rigid for individuals and businesses.
In 2016, she was inspired to build solutions that address both challenges in parallel. This led to the birth of Bitmama Inc. In 2018, Bitmama emerged one of the startups selected for the inaugural Greenhouse Lab female accelerator by Venture Garden Group. Since then, the company has joined other accelerators and programs like LSETF, Seedstars and Startup Germany.
Bitmama’s solutions cater to thousands of users across the globe. Ruth leads the company’s globally-distributed team who are passionate and excited about the possibilities of their products, Bitmama and Changera. Bitmama offered to acquire the cross-border payment startup, Payday for a reported sum of $1 million. The acquisition deal, which puts Payday’s value at $30 million, allows Bitmama to broaden its product offering to include cross-border remittances without having to start this service from scratch.
Ruth Iselema has expressed her resolve to facilitate Africa’s seamless transition from a conventional financial transacting system to a more technology driven system; cryptocurrency.
Odunayo Eweniyi
Co-founder/CEO, Piggyvest & Feminist Coalition
Odunayo Eweniyi wears many hats beyond just being a tech pioneer in Nigeria but also an activist. She is the Co-founder and Chief Operations Officer PiggyVest and co-founder of Feminist Coalition. Eweniyi is the first child of two professors that take up origins from Oyo State, Nigeria.
Eweniyi graduated from Covenant University in 2013 with a first-class degree in Computer Engineering.
The graduate of Computer Engineering made her debut in the tech space with the launch Push CV with her fellow visionaries, Somto Ifezue and Joshua Chibueze after she graduated in 2013 leading to later starting what is known today as Piggyvest in 2016.
PiggyVest is the first ever online app for personal savings and investment in West Africa. The purpose behind it is to empower people to better manage and save their money. Users can save and earn interest on their money through the Piggybank feature, and invest in pre-vetted investment opportunities. With this innovation in Nigeria at a time when digital penetration and trust in digital apps was really low yet her and her team went headlong in overcoming the challenge of gaining customer trust.
Odunayo and her team at Piggyvest committed to surmounting the many difficulties that stifle great innovations in the country, from fundraising, market penetration, inconsistent government policies and unfair competition by big time businesses but they did not give up. Even when it meant building a business model that would become a strong competition against the conventional financial institutions. She revealed that the inspiration behind the business was from a Nigerian lady who had shared on her Twitter now X handle, how she had saved N1,000 daily for a whole year in a wooden box that many people refer to as a piggy bank. At the end of the year, the lady broke this box and shared the tons of money she had saved within 365 days. Like a snap of lightning for Odunayo and her team, they decided to digitize the idea into a system that people can easily subscribe to. This simple business model became an innovation that has helped so many people transform their financial lives and enabled people achieve erstwhile difficult financial goals.
In an interview she retells how Piggyvest became a success; “We decided to rely on peer-to-peer recommendations and word of mouth, instead of spending money on marketing. In December 2016, after about a year of operations, the early adopters who were using the platform were, kind of, withdrawing their money after a full saving cycle, and we saw an interesting thing happening. As soon as they withdrew money successfully, they would go to Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook to tell everyone, “Oh, I used this platform to save for Christmas, I withdrew the money successfully, earning interest is so quick” and other people were seeing that and asking “How can I sign up?” They would then share the link to the platform. So we decided to build on that, people experiencing PiggyVest positively and then telling their friends and family about it. We offer about 1,000 Naira for a successful referral.
The focus is on growing the platform. That means adding more features to further the vision for the product, which is to give people the power to better control their finances. We started with micro-savings and then we branched into micro investments, and so we’ll definitely be looking at other aspects of financial services and figuring out how we can break it down, how we can make it more accessible, how we can make it more affordable. That’s definitely the direction the company will be going.”
Her successful leadership at Piggyvest has earned her accolades including in 2018 as Future Awards Africa Prize in Technology, in 2019, she was on Forbes Africa 30 under 30 Technology list and was named as one of 30 Quartz Africa Innovators for 2019.
Also, Odunayo was on Forbes Africa’s list of 20 New Wealth Creators in Africa 2019. She was nominated for The Future Awards Africa Prize for Young Person of The Year in 2020. She was also listed on Bloomberg 50 in 2020 and Time’ Next 100 list in 2021 for her joint contributions during the End SARS protests of October 2020. In March 2022, she won the Forbes Woman Africa Technology and Innovation Award.
In 2022, She was selected as a Bloomberg New Economy Catalyst. As part of the program, she attended the annual New Economy Forum held in Singapore, and the Bloomberg New Economy Catalyst Retreat that same year.
Today, Odunayo who recently founded another tech solution known as Firstcheck could have been one of the Nigerian doctors ‘japaing’ or somewhere in a federal hospital in a doctor uniform practicing medicine if her dream had not been disrupted by technology, thousands of people have become better for it.
Babatunde Akin-Moses
Co-founder/CEO, SycamoreNG
Babatunde Akin-Moses, the Co-founder/CEO, SycamoreNG, one of the young Nigerians who turned the traditional loan business into a seamless technology driven business model. “...If you are in other countries, once you have a job, you can easily get a mortgage. But here in Nigeria, even if you are working, you need to be working for an upstream oil and gas firm or basically earning a lot of money before you can access a significant credit facility without having to present a landed property as collateral. You can see how that’s a major problem in a country where there are 100 million poor people,” explains co-founder and CEO Babatunde Akin-Moses.
In 2017, Babatunde Akin-Moses who holds an MBA from Lagos Business School and Bachelor of Science degree in Economics from Bowen University had worked with reputable organizations such as Shell, PwC, KPMG and Pezesha before starting off SycamoreNG. These experience built across various financial consulting giants fashioned his eye for financial solutions to the growing Nigerian population. One of such pivotal moments was the release of a survey on MSMEs in the country by PriceWaterhouseCooper in 2020 that obtaining finance for business operations was a major challenge for 22% of the survey respondents. Whilst about 48% of those who obtained alternative business finance confirmed that they received it from friends and family. At Lagos Business School, Akin-Moses would meet Mayowa Adeosun and Onyinye Okonji who would later join him as co-founders at Sycamore. Despite seeing a clear need in the market, Akin-Moses and his co-founders did not have the capital to finance a lending business, but as they conducted more research around the problem, they came across the peer-to-peer lending model used in the United Kingdom and Sycamore was born. Akin-Moses says the name Sycamore is a reference to the biblical story of Zacchaeus climbing a sycamore tree to see Jesus and is a metaphor for the company’s vision to provide financial upliftment for its customers. Having identified a problem and a solution, the team set about building the first version of Sycamore. Their idea was to facilitate SME lending using technology but with no technical skills, they outsourced the building of the website while spreading the word about what they were doing. This was where their class at the Lagos Business School came in handy. After sharing what they were doing with the class, a classmate reached out with a loan request for her business. The trio also got their first angel investment from their classmates. In addition to being able to lend to businesses, their first set of customers helped them validate the possibility of issuing loans without meeting in person.
Sycamore has come a long way since 2019 and now offers additional services on its website and mobile app. Users can lend to friends or family through the app earning some money through interest rates but without the hassle that comes with lending to friends and family. Akin-Moses explains that building a solution to enable peer-to-peer lending was the result of numerous requests from users who wanted a relatively safe way to lend to their friends. “People were asking how they could safely lend to their friends and people they know with some assurance of getting their money back. When we started getting more and more of those questions, we started to look at the data and then we saw that all over the world, people are getting more credit from friends and family than any financial institution, so we decided to make loan friends strictly for communal lending.” With this in mind, I asked Akin-Moses about the repayment rate for this service. According to him, about 90% of the people who take loans from friends on Sycamore repay the loans. This is aided by the fact that Sycamore runs it like any lending service and requires users to tokenise their accounts before loans are disbursed.
“The person you’re giving money to, the app requires them to tokenize their account. So basically the borrower won’t get the money out until they’ve attached a debit card. So just the way you would pay for DSTV or Uber, when it’s time to repay the loan, it will just repay your friend automatically, which is more convenient for everybody.” It is not uncommon to find people who are unable to pay after the deadline has passed but the Sycamore app continues attempting to debit the borrower until the loan is repaid. Since its launch in 2019, Sycamore has given out loans valued at more than $15 million to its customers and currently serves 50,000 users.