Nigeria’s new club of young billionaires emerge

By AYOOLA OLAOLUWA

The success stories of how Nigeria’s young, bold and audacious entrepreneurs currently making waves in the tech space broke the ceiling is quite awe-inspiring. Like the tech mavericks of Silicon Valley, these young digital visionaries have upended the old business tradition laid out previous generations as the ordained path to great wealth.

While most of their contemporaries spend their youth hunting for jobs or honing work skills in entry-level jobs, they had already joined the millionaires league by making things happen around them through thoughtful thinking, beliefs, and choices.

Barely in their 30s and 40s, they had demonstrated innovative and entrepreneurial skills, as well as management capabilities to redefine the rules. Since their entry into the scene, they have remained relevant in the fast evolving space.

From Piggyvest to Flutterwave, Jobberman, 54gene, Kobo360, Paga, eTransact and many others, the founders of these emerging brand names had transformed fantastic ideas into business success by exerting themselves to make it a reality.

In this report, Business Hallmark features some of Nigeria’s tech savvy entrepreneurs and how their brands are currently making waves.
Jobberman.

Unarguably Nigeria’s No. 1 recruitment website with over 2.5 million job applicants and 60,000 employers nationwide, Jobberman was founded in August 2009 by the trio of Olalekan Olude, Ayodeji Adewunmi and Opeyemi Awoyemi, then students of the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) in Osun State right inside their hostel rooms.

According to one of the founders, Olalekan Olude, the website was set up to help connect people looking for jobs with companies looking for hands.

By 2010, the firm which was funded by stipends from its founders had become so large that the team entered into a partnership with Tiger Global Management in August 2010 to help secure a ‘Series A’ financing and investment in the business. It is currently worth over $100million (N5 billion).

An impressed Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, had named the founders “as examples of young Nigerians using digital technology to make impact across Africa.
BH reliably gathered that the site which is ranked the 48th most visited site in Nigeria and receives 5,000 job applications daily has been fully acquired by One Africa Media.

Flutterwave

Another Nigerian startup making waves is Flutterwave. Founded in 2016 by the duo of Olugbenga Agboola and Iyinoluwa Aboyeji as a Nigerian platform, the firm has grown to become an Africa-wide payments platform, connecting all payment types in the continent and bringing a single-use payment solution to merchants and small businesses.

The technology deployed by the firm allows business owners to accept payments from customers without worrying about compliance requirements, infrastructure technology, or having to deal with multiple payment providers.
With the Flutterwave platform, businesses can accept payments from anywhere in the world.

“Africa needs three major things, logistics, payments, and commerce. Flutterwave is taking care of the fragmented payment system in Africa. The fragmented system needs a central means of payment to facilitate commerce within the continent. That is what Flutterwave is out to do,” declared Iyinoluwa Aboyeji who served as the first CEO of the company from inception to 2018.

The co-founder, Agboola, who served as the Chief Technical Officer until October 2018 is now the company’s CEO. In 2020, Fortune magazine listed one of the founders, Agboola, in its popular yearly Under 40 list which recognises 40 individuals who are below the age of 40 and are considered to be influential leaders in their respective fields.

Agboola, who graduated from the prestigious MIT’s Sloan School of Management with experiences at PayPal and Google has helped shape the fintech space in Nigeria since co-founding Flutterwave.

The company is currently Africa’s most valued startup with a valuation of $3 billion after it raised $250 million from a Series D funding round in February 2022.

Using an exchange rate of N570 to one United States’ dollar, Flutterwave’s valuation is about N1.71 trillion, more valuable than Nestle Nigeria, ZENITH and GTCO, the two most valuable banks on the NGX.

54gene

Another young Nigerian with a Midas touch is Abasi Ene-Obong, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of 54gene, an health startup that uses human genetic data derived from diverse African populations to improve medical products in the continent.

Founded in 2019, the startup rode on the wave of the novel Covid19 pandemic to success by researching, developing and coordinating the country’s fight against Covid19. The biotechnology firm’s laboratories were among the first privately owned facilities to test for Covid19 in the country.

Not surprisingly, the firm has attracted $20 million (N10 billion) in funding from Silicon Valley venture capitalists who are betting big on the yet unexplored African genome. In less than three years in existence, the firm has expanded its biobank capabilities from around 50,000 to 200,000 samples.

As expected, several honours have come the way of the 32 years old Ene-Obong. In 2021, she was recognised by Fast Company as one of the most innovative companies in Africa. She was also named by Fortune magazine in its 2021 Under 40 list. According to the magazine, the 32-year-old founder had spurred the biotech revolution in Africa and one of the reasons she was selected was because of her company’s exploits during the pandemic.

“As with many companies, COVID-19 has brought some change. When the crisis started, 54gene provided equipment to public labs in Nigeria, as well as testing, setting up molecular diagnostic labs across states within the country,” the magazine had explained.
Kobo360

Also on the list is Kobo360, a tech-enabled logistics startup that aggregates end-to-end haulage operations to help cargo owners, truck owners, and drivers, and cargo recipients to achieve an efficient supply chain framework. It is more of a Uber-like platform that connects truck owners and drivers with cargo companies aiming to make supply chains more efficient, affordable and transparent.

Founded by Obi Ozor and Ife Oyedele, the company uses big data and technology through an all-in-one robust logistics ecosystem to reduce logistics frictions.

According to one of the founders, Obi Ozor, the idea to float Kobo 360 came after he experienced the slow movement of cargo first-hand some years back when he was importing diapers and hauling them across the country.
“Africa’s logistics is very informal, making it challenging for many businesses to move goods efficiently. There’s a serious disconnect between getting goods from A to B.

“It used to take one week to transport goods 1,000 km, from Lagos to Kano”, Ozor had stated.

With Kobo360, cargo companies can choose a company online instead of having to visit a truck park to find a driver. The moment a deal is consumated, drivers receive half of their payment immediately. Drivers are charged between 5% and 10% of their fee for linking them with goods for their return journey.

By providing drivers with information about weather and traffic conditions and matching them directly with companies, Kobo360 has been able to cut the time for a 1,000 km journey down from one week to two to three days.
The company works with 50,000 truck drivers in Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Kenya and Uganda to help them transport over one billion kilos of goods, worth an estimated $250 billion yearly. Procter & Gamble (PG), Unilever (UL) and Maersk are among the leading companies that use the Kobo 360 platform.

The firm has raised around $40 million (N20 billion) in funds. In 2020, it raised $30m from Goldman Sachs to build out its blockchain-enabled Global Logistics Operating System (GLOS) so that it could transition to more supply chain services.

One of the founders, Ozor, is also on the list of Fortune’s 2020 Under 40 achievers. He was recognised for spearheading the company’s growth as CEO as well as his efforts in trying to digitise an age-long offline industry and providing innovative solutions.

The 32-year-old Ozor who is a member of the Endeavor network, has been able to lead the company effectively as it navigates around challenges posed by the pandemic.

Piggyvest

Founded in 2015 by three friends, Somto Ifezue, Odunayo Eweniyi and Joshua Chibueze, Piggyvest is Nigeria’s biggest automated savings platform that helps customers invest spare money with promises of interest rates.
Currently in their 30s, the trio are epitome of resilience and perseverance. Between them, they had founded and managed eight failed businesses before they hit gold with Piggyvest.

Within a year of its existence (December 2015 to December 2016), the firm helped about 450 users save ₦21 million through Twitter-enabled bootstrapping. with next to nothing spent on marketing, according to Eweniyi, one of the founders and the company’s Chief Operating Officer.

With continuous improvement, Piggyvest has grown to become a globally recognised innovative company. In spite the coronavirus pandemic, the ended 2019 with a million users who saved about $80 million. It presently has over 3 million users.

The company’s last funding round was in May 2018, with a $1.1m seed fund led by LeadPath Nigeria, with participation from Village Capital and Ventures Platform. The fund was used to acquire a microfinance bank license.