Countless of African techpreneurs have gone far in disrupting the tech industry in Africa. However, Iyinoluwa Aboyeji’s rise to the top in the tech industry in Africa is exceptional because he has co-founded three successful start-ups in Africa before launching Flutterwave in 2017.
Iyinoluwa is widely recognized as one of the few Africans blazing the trail in Technology across Edutech, FinTech, and consumer technology. He’s an alumnus of Columbia International College, where he bagged his degrees in International Development, Legal Studies, and Economics. Aboyeji furthered his education at the University of Waterloo, where he earned a B.A in Legal Studies.
Iyinoluwa’s Rise
In 2012, he started Bookneto.com, an online learning platform in partnership with a friend while studying in Canada before it was acquired by the Canadian Innovation Centre in 2013. In 2013, Aboyeji started Fora along with Ian Carnevale, Nadayar Enegesi, and Brice Nkengsa. Fora is an online platform that enables young professionals in Africa to build and discover high-quality online certificate courses or at universities in the United States. After several regulatory itches, he moved on to co-found Andela together with Christina Sass, Nadayar Enegesi, Ian Carnevale, Jeremy Johnson and Brice Nkengsa in 2014. Andela is a company that specializes in training software developers. The company employs a strong technical and human development approach to build high-performing Africa’s tech talents with Africa’s top developers to help companies overcome the tech talent shortage and build better products, faster.
Founding Andela
In 2014, he met with an old friend, Jeremy Johnson with whom he discussed starting Andela, a talent accelerator that recruits and trains software developers and connects them with employers. It grew to be one of Nigeria’s best-known start-ups. The start-up has received a $24 million investment from the Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg and Aboyeji helped build it to over $100 million market cap in two years. Andela has gone on to raise a series C funding totaling up to $40million. In 2016, Aboyeji left Andela to start Flutterwave, a provider of technology and infrastructure solutions for digital payments across Africa.
Unto Flutterwave
Flutterwave, a payments API that makes banks and businesses to process payments across Africa. The service allows consumers to pay for things in their local currency; Flutterwave takes care of integrating banks and payment-service providers into its platform so businesses don’t have to take on that expense and burden. The omnichannel payments processor enables seamless and secure transactions processing across different payment instruments like mobile money, cards, bank accounts, airtime and different channels like web, mobile, agents, USSD and ATM in over 30 African countries. The company processes over $760 million through 7.5 million transactions for merchants in partnership with financial institutions.
With $15.7 million in funding, the payments company is empowering Pan-African merchants to execute business on a global scale, processing $1.2 billion in transactions so far. Aboyeji’s previous startup Andela, gained attention when the venture received $24 million in funding from Mark Zuckerberg.
IyinOluwa’s Achievements
Like other techpreneurs, Iyinoluwa has served in various leadership roles within several local and international organizations, including the World Youth Alliance, Imprint Publications, Harambe Africa and Empowerment Squared. He was named by Forbes as one of the 30 under 30 CEO in Africa. He also recently emerged as the only Nigerian inducted into the World Economic Forum 2018 Young Global Leaders (YGL), a platform for young innovators and influencers in the world.
His award-winning payments platform for banks and businesses has been a major part of the Fintech ecosystem in Africa processing more than $1.2 billion dollars across 10 million transactions and introducing 4 different products to enable Africans easily transact online. The award-winning omnichannel payments processor enables seamless and secure transactions processing across different payment instruments like mobile money, cards, bank accounts, airtime and different channels like web, mobile, agents, USSD and ATM in over 30 African countries.
Today, we celebrate Iyinoluwa Aboyeji for the impact of his ventures on the African Technology Scene and for connecting Africa to the global economy through his remarkable ideas and businesses and leading Nigeria’s youthful tech industry into the international fora.