She worked in entertainment, fashion and digital businesses before joining Chocolate City, where she led content development and social media. She was part of a company building the careers and public identities of some of Nigeria’s biggest music acts, including M.I Abaga, at a time when Nigerian music was increasingly finding an audience beyond the country.

Her background was already pointing in one direction: understanding people, understanding culture and figuring out how to make something connect. Public profiles of her career also show that she studied psychology at Birmingham City University, a foundation that would later become part of how she thinks about marketing and audiences.

So when she eventually moved into technology, it was not because she had suddenly decided that entertainment was no longer interesting. It was almost the opposite.

At Chocolate City, she had found a workplace where creativity and work could exist together. She could enjoy the culture around her while still doing serious work.

“By nature, I love a good time,” she says. “Don’t get me wrong, work was still work, but at Chocolate City, it felt like I had the best of both worlds.”

That mattered because the next opportunity gave her something similar, only in a completely different industry.

Payments was still a relatively young space when she joined Flutterwave. The company was building infrastructure that was difficult to explain to ordinary people, while also trying to establish itself as a brand people could understand and trust.

Yewande saw an opportunity.

She was not walking away from entertainment. She was taking the thing she had learned there, how to understand people and make stories connect, into a new industry.

That decision would eventually take her from being Flutterwave’s early storytelling and branding lead to leading its marketing function.

The people behind the payments

When Yewande arrived at Flutterwave, she did not think the company needed to invent a completely different story. She thought it needed to show people what was already there.

“The people,” she says.

Payments can be difficult to explain. There are processors, infrastructure, APIs, cards, transfers, compliance and a long list of things happening underneath a transaction that most customers never see.

But the people building all of that are not infrastructure. They have stories.

“They were just as complex and interesting,” she says. “There were so many unique stories within Flutterwave that we needed to bring to the forefront, beyond all the technical jargon.” That became an important part of her work.

Instead of allowing Flutterwave to exist only as a technology company talking about payments, she wanted people to see the businesses using the technology, the people building it and the problems it was helping solve.

That approach eventually showed up in initiatives such as Flutterwave Merchant Stories, which put the businesses using the platform at the centre of the story.

A profile of Yewande’s early Flutterwave work described her as the company’s first storyteller and credited her with creating opportunities for audiences to understand Flutterwave through its users.

It was a simple shift, but an important one. People understand people much faster than they understand infrastructure.

The story did not change. Flutterwave did.

Flutterwave has changed considerably since Yewande joined. The company that began with a focus on helping businesses make and receive payments has expanded its products and markets, with its conversations now covering everything from bank transfers and remittances to stablecoins and banking.

But Yewande does not think the fundamental story has changed.

“At its core, it hasn’t really changed,” she says.

The original ambition was to help make Africa feel more connected through payments and make it easier for people and businesses on the continent to participate in the global economy.

What changed was the technology available to deliver that ambition.

That creates a different challenge for a marketer. It is no longer enough to explain one product. You have to help people understand how several different products fit into one larger story.

For Yewande, that has meant making sure the story grows with the company without losing the original reason the company exists.

You cannot market your way into trust

Fintech marketing comes with a problem that entertainment does not have in quite the same way. When someone watches an artist perform, the stakes are different. When a business hands a fintech company its money, trust becomes part of the product.

Yewande believes that is why marketing cannot manufacture trust that the business itself has not earned.

That belief has shaped how she thinks about marketing Flutterwave across Africa.

There is no single African customer.

Markets have different regulations, cultures, business environments and expectations. A message that works in Lagos may not mean the same thing in Nairobi or Johannesburg.

“Africa isn’t one market,” she says.

So the brand has to understand the people it is speaking to rather than assuming that one message can simply be copied across the continent.

She points to Flutterwave’s response during COVID-19 as an example. The company launched its Keep the Lights On campaign to support businesses struggling through the disruption.

For her, the important thing was not simply that the company had a campaign to talk about. It was that the campaign reflected something businesses were actually experiencing.

That is where she believes marketing becomes more meaningful.

Africa should not need permission to tell its own story

Yewande has also watched African technology change from an industry outsiders were simply curious about into one attracting serious global attention. But she thinks there is still a question around who gets to tell the story.

“For a long time, a lot of the narrative around African tech was being told from the outside,” she says.

The problem was not necessarily that outsiders were interested in Africa. It was that African companies were sometimes allowing other people to decide which parts of the story were worth telling.

Yewande believes that is changing.

African companies now have more confidence to explain their markets, products and problems in their own language and from their own perspective.

It is an idea that fits neatly with the work she has spent years doing at Flutterwave.

The technology may be African. The customers may be African. The problems may have been understood from lived experience. There is no reason the story should have to be translated through somebody else before the rest of the world can understand it.

The psychology behind the marketing

Perhaps the most interesting part of Yewande’s career is that, despite moving between industries that look completely different on paper, the thread connecting them is surprisingly consistent.

She studied psychology. She worked in fashion. She worked in entertainment. She worked at Chocolate City. Then she moved into fintech. The industries changed. Her interest in people did not.

That curiosity has become part of how she approaches marketing.

She likes taking complicated ideas and making them easier for people to understand. She likes finding the human story underneath a technical product. And she likes building the bridge between what a company wants to say and what its audience actually cares about.

That may explain why her transition from music and entertainment into technology never really felt like a complete career reset.

She was still doing what she had always been interested in, just with different products.

At Chocolate City, the story might have been an artist trying to reach a larger audience. At Flutterwave, it might be a business trying to receive payments from customers across borders.

The technology is different. The human question is not. Why should anyone care? How does this make their life better? And how do you tell that story in a way that feels true?

What remains after the job titles

Yewande has spent more than a decade building brands, leading storytelling and marketing teams, working across industries and helping a fintech company explain increasingly complex products to increasingly diverse audiences.

Her career has moved from entertainment to technology without losing the creative instinct that brought her into the industry in the first place.

Her public profile now describes more than 10 years of experience across branding, storytelling and marketing, while her recent work at Flutterwave has included shaping campaigns, brand narratives and marketing initiatives across its growing markets.

But take all of that away, and she does not describe herself through any of those titles.

“If we removed ‘marketing’, ‘Flutterwave,’ and every job title from your story,” we asked her, “what are you actually good at?”

Her answer was perhaps the simplest description of her career.

Then she adds something else. “I’m also passionate and creative.”

It is a fitting combination for someone whose career has moved from music to fintech, from artists to entrepreneurs, and from entertainment audiences to customers moving money across borders.

Ultimately, she says she wants to be known as someone who “understands people, sees possibilities, and has the creativity to bring them to life.”

Maybe that is what the journey from Chocolate City to Flutterwave has really been about. Not leaving one world for another.

Finding out that the same ability to understand people, spot a possibility and tell a story can travel much further than the industry where you first discovered it.

For Olamide Otasanya, a Treasury Finance Analyst and the National Coordinator of Hult Prize Nigeria, there is a much simpler way to tell whether work is actually moving: look at the evidence.

His normal day involves reconciling prior-day transactions, monitoring safeguarding balances, reviewing cash movements, posting transactions, investigating breaks and making sure everything balances before the day closes.

It is the kind of work where activity alone does not tell you much. The real evidence is in what has changed by the end of the day.

“The numbers tell me,” Olamide says. “Reconciliations clear, outstanding items reduce, balances match, and transactions move from pending to completed.”

That distinction sits at the centre of how he thinks about productive work.

In a workplace where being responsive can sometimes be mistaken for being effective, Olamide’s view is more straightforward. Good work should leave evidence behind.

The work people do not always see

Treasury is rarely a one-person operation. Olamide works across Operations, Treasury, Compliance, Accounting and banking partners, with different teams responsible for different parts of the process.

That means a delay in one place can quickly become someone else’s problem.

“Timing matters because one delay in a payment, reconciliation, or approval can affect the entire flow,” he says.

It is one of those parts of work that can be difficult to see from the outside. A transaction may look like a simple payment to the person receiving it, but there can be several checks, movements, reconciliations and approvals happening before everything is actually complete.

That is why coordination matters. The work has to move between people without losing information, ownership or momentum.

For Olamide, some of the biggest problems happen at those handoff points.

“Usually at handoff points, especially when ownership or supporting information is unclear,” he says.

His solution is not more meetings or more people checking in on each other. It is clearer ownership, deadlines and documented follow-ups.

That sounds simple, but it changes how teams work. When everyone knows what they own, what is expected, and when it needs to be done, progress becomes easier to see without someone having to constantly ask for an update.

When the status says “fine” but the work says otherwise

One of the easiest ways for teams to misunderstand productivity is to confuse an update with evidence. Someone can report that a task is on track while the actual work underneath it is already showing a problem.

Olamide has seen this happen.

“Sometimes a report can say everything is on track while a reconciliation shows an unresolved break,” he says.

When that happens, the team does not simply change the status and move on. They go back to the underlying transaction, find the gap and fix the source.

That is an important distinction.

A status update tells you what someone says is happening. Evidence tells you what is actually happening.

For a finance team, that evidence might be a reconciliation that has cleared, a balance that now matches or a transaction that has moved from pending to completed.

The same principle can apply outside finance.

A project is not necessarily progressing because someone said it is progressing. A product task is not complete because it is marked “done” in a tracker. A customer issue is not resolved because someone replied to the message.

The output has to exist.

Small blockers can become big problems

The same thinking applies when someone gets stuck. In many teams, people delay raising blockers because they do not want to appear stuck or because they assume they can solve the problem themselves before anyone notices.

Olamide thinks that can create bigger problems.

“Blockers should be raised early,” he says. “In finance, a small unresolved issue can become a larger reconciliation or settlement problem if it is left too long.”

Early communication therefore becomes part of productivity.

It is not about reporting every minor difficulty. It is about making sure an issue does not quietly sit inside a process until it affects everyone else.

That requires a team where people can say something is wrong before the deadline arrives.

And that becomes even more important when work involves multiple teams.

Accountability without watching everyone

Modern workplaces have created plenty of ways to make work visible. People can see when someone is online. They can track response times, count meetings, monitor task updates and ask for daily reports.

But visibility is not the same thing as productivity. For Olamide, the things that matter are much more concrete.

“Accuracy, completed outputs, resolved issues, and consistency,” he says.

Being online or responding quickly does not necessarily mean the work itself is getting done.

It is a useful distinction because some of the most important work can look quiet from the outside.

A person investigating a difficult reconciliation may not send many messages for several hours. Someone working through a complicated financial issue may not appear particularly busy on a calendar. What matters is whether the problem is eventually understood and resolved.

His experience coordinating Hult Prize Nigeria also gives him another perspective on the same question. Working with people and coordinating execution means progress cannot simply be measured by how active everyone appears.

Teams need to know what they own, what needs to happen next and whether the expected outcome is actually being delivered.

That is why Olamide describes a healthy, high-performing team in fairly simple terms.

“People know what they own, communicate early, and can trust each other to deliver,” he says. “Accountability should create visibility, not micromanagement.”

From status reports to evidence

This is also the problem Eodly is interested in.

Eodly is an AI end-of-day report for founders and team leads. Each teammate sends one short check-in in Slack, Telegram or Discord; Eodly checks it against what actually happened in GitHub and Linear, and the lead gets one report on what shipped and what is stuck. It is status backed by evidence, without another meeting.

Olamide arrives at a similar conclusion from a finance perspective.

“If I could change one thing, I would move teams from status reporting to evidence-based tracking,” he says.

For him, that means clear owners, deadlines, blockers and measurable outputs. That approach does not eliminate communication. It makes communication more useful.

Instead of repeatedly asking someone whether they are making progress, the team can look at what's been completed, what remains outstanding, and what is blocking the next step.

It also creates a healthier relationship with accountability.

People know what they are responsible for. Managers have visibility into what needs attention. Teams can identify problems earlier. And nobody has to spend half the day producing updates about work that could have been spent doing the work itself.

For a Treasury Finance Analyst, the final test is still remarkably simple.

The transactions should reconcile. The balances should match. Outstanding items should reduce. Problems should get resolved.

The work should move.

And perhaps that is the simplest definition of productivity: not how busy you look while doing the work, but what is different because you did it.

There, he faced a common challenge: information overload. He constantly read research papers, textbooks, and documentation but struggled to retain the vast amount of information.

Kennedy's "aha!" moment came during a project when he needed a specific methodology he'd previously encountered. He knew he'd read it, but couldn't recall the details.

This forced him to re-read the paper, sparking an idea: what if reading could automatically become remembering? This question became the foundation for CogniPage, his new venture aimed at transforming how we retain information.

Kennedy has been building for more than 10 years

Kennedy, before co-founding CogniPage, carved a remarkable path through the tech world. As Lead Software Engineer at Tehilah Base Digital, he spearheaded an insurance and membership platform that recouped £1.08 million in just three months. He also innovated a generative AI application specifically for students.

As CTO at Shawali Intercontinental, he led the creation of a humanitarian portal that aided over 12,000 individuals, along with a bustling marketplace that connected over 30,000 vendors and delivery agents. He's also the innovative force behind ViapaAI as its Co-founder and CTO.

Kennedy's contributions haven't gone unnoticed. Thinkers360 recognized him as a Top 50 Global EdTech Thought Leader and a Top 25 Global Open-source Thought Leader. His pioneering AI work has also garnered international acclaim.

Despite these diverse achievements, education remained his enduring passion. He observed, "The real problem in learning isn't getting access to content. It's remembering it." This profound insight became the challenge he was determined to solve.

CogniPage wants to make reading stick

CogniPage revolutionizes how you learn by transforming your everyday reading into a powerful retention tool. Forget juggling bookmarks, highlights, and manual flashcards; CogniPage handles the heavy lifting, ensuring information truly sticks.

Here's how it works in four seamless steps:

1. Read: Dive into any content – PDFs, websites, videos, or even physical books.

2. Capture: CogniPage intelligently identifies and saves the parts you spend the most time on.

3. Recall: Those key passages are automatically converted into personalized flashcards and quizzes.

4. Retain: The system tracks your performance, identifying areas where you struggle and scheduling future reviews to solidify your memory.

CogniPage isn't about changing how you read; it's about making the reading you already do incredibly effective.

As Kennedy, its creator, puts it: "You don’t change how you read. CogniPage makes the reading stick."

Its first users are already shaping the product

Launched in August, CogniPage's beta has garnered over 600 downloads and 150 active users, primarily from Nigeria and the UK. Students form the largest user group, utilizing the platform for exam preparation, coursework, and transforming lectures into revision materials.

The AI platform actively collaborates with over 20 secondary and university students to refine its product, incorporating feedback that has already influenced its development.

User demand for mobile review led to the launch of an iOS app, with an Android version planned. Addressing the challenge of digitizing physical books, CogniPage is developing a smart camera that clips onto glasses and is currently in discussions with a manufacturer.

This unconventional hardware venture for a software company stems from observing actual study habits rather than assuming laptop-centric learning.

The business model is built around learners and institutions

CogniPage is free to download, with a monthly allowance. Its Pro plan costs $4.99 per month or $44.99 annually, alongside top-up credits. Kennedy also made a deliberate decision to support Naira payments.

For a Nigerian product trying to serve Nigerian learners, he says forcing users to pay in dollars creates an unnecessary barrier, particularly when local cards can fail on international transactions.

The bigger commercial opportunity, however, may be institutions.

Schools, universities, training providers and employers could eventually pay for CogniPage through pilots and per-seat licences.

The difference is that the platform would not only tell them who completed a course.

It could show what people actually retained.

Kennedy thinks remembering could become the next learning problem

CogniPage aims to revolutionize how we retain information. While the internet has made information readily available, and AI is enhancing its processing, neither guarantees memory retention.

The product's long-term vision is to create a "memory layer for learning" that accompanies individuals throughout their educational and professional journeys, accessible across various devices and even physical books and wearables.

However, it is currently addressing a more immediate problem: the frustration of forgetting where you encountered crucial information just weeks after reading it. CogniPage strives to minimize such occurrences.

He was Director of Sales at OneRemit, worked in growth and operating roles at FTX Africa and Backpack Exchange, and co-founded the operations side of Finna.

Across those roles, however, he kept noticing the same problem.

Managing a distributed team often meant reconstructing the work after it had already happened. A manager would get updates, read messages, check tickets and follow up with people, then try to piece everything together into a picture of what was actually moving and what was not.

That experience eventually became the starting point for Eodly, an AI productivity tool designed to give founders and team leads a clearer view of what their teams actually got done.

“I kept landing in the same position: responsible for a distributed team’s output without ever really seeing the work as it happened, only the reports about it afterwards,” Juwon says.

“Do that for enough years, and you notice how much of managing a team is really reconstructing what happened from other people’s summaries of it. Eodly came out of that.”

The problem was not a lack of updates

For Juwon, the problem was not that teams were failing to communicate. There were already standups, check-ins, Slack messages and project management tools.

The problem was that most of these systems relied on what people reported.

When he started speaking to other founders and team leads, he found that the problem was much broader. Managers wanted to know whether work was actually moving, but getting that answer often meant following up with people task by task.

That could quickly become micromanagement.

Eodly takes a different approach. A team member sends a short check-in through the communication tool they already use, while Eodly looks at the underlying work in tools such as GitHub and Linear. It then compares the two and produces an end-of-day report showing what was shipped, where someone may be stuck, who has gone quiet and where a status update does not match the available evidence.

The idea is simple: a check-in is a claim, not necessarily proof.

“When they match, you can relax,” Juwon says. “When they don’t, you know exactly where to look, without chasing anyone.”

That distinction is central to how he thinks about productivity.

Juwon does not think busy means productive

One of the biggest mistakes he sees founders and managers make is measuring activity because activity is easy to count.

Hours online, messages sent, response times and green dots can all create the impression that work is happening, but none necessarily tells you whether something was actually built or delivered.

His preferred signal is much simpler: what changed?

On a healthy team, Juwon says, problems should surface early. Someone should be able to say they are stuck on day one rather than waiting until a deadline has already passed.

He also pays attention to whether updates correspond with what actually happened. But that does not mean every quiet employee is a problem.

“Someone can be shipping solidly and saying very little,” he says. “That isn’t a problem to fix. It’s a person to recognize.”

That thinking also shapes what Eodly deliberately does not measure. The product does not track keystrokes, screen activity or time spent online, and Juwon says it will not score or rank employees.

For him, the distinction is important because better visibility should not come at the cost of turning work into surveillance.

The founder wanted to give time back, not take more of it

Interestingly, Juwon says one of the things that surprised him while talking to founders was how little they wanted more management information.

They wanted less management work.

When he asked what founders would do with an extra hour of clarity about their teams, the answers were usually things like raising money, building the business or running other parts of their companies.

Nobody asked for another check-in.

“That told me the job isn’t visibility for its own sake,” he says. “It’s giving the founder a true enough picture that they can stop chasing and get back to the work only they can do.”

That idea has influenced how Eodly is designed. A team member does not need to learn another dashboard or spend time filling out another form. They send a short message through the communication platform they already use, while the product pulls evidence from the systems where the work already happens.

Building Eodly has also changed Juwon’s view of his own job

Juwon has built and operated companies before, but Eodly has reinforced one principle he learned from those experiences: verify the work rather than simply accepting someone’s description of it.

He does not see that as distrust.

In his view, checking the work can actually be fairer to employees because it gives credit to people who quietly deliver instead of rewarding those who are simply good at reporting what they are doing.

That is especially relevant for African startups, where teams can be spread across different countries, time zones and communication platforms.

The risk, he says, is that managers respond to this complexity by adding more meetings and more check-ins, creating a system that rewards visibility rather than delivery.

He wants Eodly to push companies in the opposite direction.

“I’d want us to judge people on what shipped, not on how visible they are,” Juwon says.

For him, the future of productive teams is not necessarily more monitoring or more meetings. It is having enough clarity about the work to trust people with the rest.

That is ultimately what Eodly is trying to build: not another tool for watching employees, but a simpler way for founders to understand what happened during the day without spending the next one chasing answers.

At the beginning, it is usually about the idea. Then it becomes about customers, revenue, hiring and growth. Eventually, another question enters the room: How do we finance all of this?

Abisinuola Adedeji has spent years close to that journey.

A management consultant and ecosystem builder, she has worked across startup programmes, partnerships, communities and business support, giving her a front-row view of companies at different stages of growth.

She has watched founders search for product-market fit, make their first revenue, build teams and eventually start asking bigger questions about capital.

That experience gradually changed the questions she was asking, too.

How do we make this business work better? How do we improve execution? How do we build the right structures?

Then came another question: “What happens when this company needs capital?”

That question pulled her deeper into venture building and venture finance, particularly the space between building a stronger business and making better decisions about the money that comes into it.

For Adedeji, the two cannot really be separated.

And that is part of what The Work Behind the Work, in collaboration with Eodly, is interested in: not just the outcome people see, but the decisions, systems and day-to-day work underneath it.

Eodly helps founders and team leads get a clearer picture of what is actually happening across their teams by bringing together signals from the tools they already use.

In Adedeji’s case, that unseen work sits around a different question: what makes a business strong enough to use capital well?

Money does not fix everything

One of the things Adedeji has learned from working with early-stage businesses is that capital tends to amplify whatever already exists in the business.

“If the business has strong fundamentals, capital can accelerate them. But if the company has unclear economics, weak reporting, poor financial controls or no real understanding of what drives growth, adding more money doesn’t automatically solve those problems.”

And that is where operations becomes important.

An investor isn’t just investing in an idea. They are ultimately investing in the company’s ability to execute that idea. How a company tracks revenue, understands customers, manages cash, makes decisions, and measures performance can become very important when looking at the business from an investment perspective.

Adedeji has also learned that being able to use capital well is different from being able to raise it.

A founder might successfully raise $500,000, but the more important question is what that $500,000 unlocks. What changes in the business because that capital came in? What milestones does it fund? What does success look like after deployment?

That is the part she finds particularly interesting: capital as a tool for building the business, not simply as a milestone to celebrate.

Look beyond the pitch deck

Adedeji prioritizes substance over presentation when evaluating early-stage companies. “I try to get underneath the story quite quickly.”

The pitch is important, but she wants to understand what happens when you start asking practical questions.

“Who is actually paying? Why are they paying? How often do they pay? What does it cost to serve them? What is changing because the product exists? Where is growth coming from? What happens if the founder stops pushing every single part of the business personally?”

At very early stages, she does not expect a company to have perfect numbers or a perfectly proven model.

What she wants to see is evidence of learning and some underlying economic logic.

A founder saying “we grew 300%” does not tell her very much by itself. She wants to understand what drove that growth.

“Was it ten customers becoming thirty? Was it one large contract? Was it a temporary campaign? Is that growth repeatable?”

For Adedeji, “the real business starts becoming visible when you can connect the customer, the problem, the revenue, the economics and the company’s ability to execute.”

That, she says, is much more interesting than a polished pitch deck.

What does it actually mean to be ready for money?

Fundraising advice often focuses on surface-level tasks like pitch decks, financial models and data rooms. But Adedeji believes capital readiness goes deeper.

It starts with knowing why the money is needed, what the money is going to do and why that is the appropriate form of capital for the business at that particular point in time.

If a founder is raising equity, what are they giving away and what does that capital enable? If debt is appropriate, can the business actually service it? If a grant makes more sense, why pursue an equity round?

There also needs to be some level of organisational readiness.

The numbers should tell a coherent story. The ownership structure should make sense. Financial records should be reliable. Founders should understand their unit economics as much as their stage allows.

But perhaps the biggest part is having a clear relationship between capital and milestones.

“I don’t think ‘we need $500,000 to scale’ is enough.”

She wants founders to ask: “Scale what? Why $500,000? What happens with $100,000? What happens with $1 million? What does the business look like after deployment?”

Capital readiness, for Adedeji, is about being able to answer those questions with some level of confidence.

Investors aren’t all looking for the same thing

One misunderstanding Adedeji sees is the idea that fundraising is primarily about convincing someone that your idea is great. It isn’t only that.

Investors are evaluating a combination of things: the market, the business model, the opportunity, the team, the evidence of execution, the risks and ultimately the potential relationship between the amount of capital invested and the return that investment could generate.

She also thinks founders sometimes approach investors as though there is one universal definition of a “good startup.” There isn’t.

Different investors have different mandates, stages, sectors, geographies, risk appetites and return expectations.

So, a company being rejected by one investor does not necessarily tell you that the company is fundamentally bad. It may simply mean there isn’t a fit between the company and that investor’s mandate.

And founders should also spend time understanding what they are saying yes to.

“The terms matter. The type of capital matters. The expectations attached to that capital matter. Who you bring onto your cap table matters.”

“Raising money is not the end of the process. It’s the beginning of a new relationship and a new set of obligations.”

The right money depends on the business

Adedeji advises founders to start with the business rather than the available capital.

At the earliest stage, the priority might simply be proving that the problem exists and that people are willing to pay for a solution.

That might not require venture capital at all. It could be bootstrapping, grants, customer revenue, friends and family, or other forms of early support.

Once there is evidence of demand, the question changes.

A company might need capital to build the product, acquire customers, hire key people or expand into a new market.

As the business becomes more mature, debt, venture debt, strategic capital or other financing structures may become relevant depending on the business.

So, for Adedeji, the question should not simply be: “How do I raise venture capital?”

The better question is: “What is the constraint on my business right now, and what type of capital is best suited to solving it?”

Sometimes the answer is equity. Sometimes it isn’t capital at all.

“Sometimes the business needs better execution before it needs more money.”

She believes that distinction is incredibly important.

The gap between money and capability

Working across founders and the wider startup ecosystem has also shown Adedeji another problem.

A company can get access to capital without necessarily having the capacity to absorb it effectively.

And she does not think that is simply a founder problem. It is also an ecosystem problem.

There has been plenty of conversation about the funding gap facing African startups. But Adedeji believes another conversation is needed around the infrastructure and capabilities businesses need to become investable, financeable and sustainable.

A founder might need $50,000 to reach a particular milestone, but the available funding mechanisms may be designed around much larger venture rounds.

Or a company may have potential but lack the financial reporting, governance or operating structure expected by a particular investor.

Sometimes, she says, there is a mismatch between what the business needs, what the capital provider offers and what the company is currently capable of supporting.

That mismatch represents an opportunity.

“I think there is a huge opportunity to build better bridges between founders and capital, not just by helping founders pitch better, but by helping businesses understand capital, prepare for it, choose it intelligently, and deploy it effectively.”

Venture building is more than writing a cheque

For Adedeji, venture building is about increasing the probability that a company can become a strong, sustainable business. Capital can be part of that, but it is only one input.

Good venture building can mean helping a founder validate the problem before they spend heavily on building a product. It can mean helping them think through the business model, recruit the right people, establish the right financial structure, find distribution, develop partnerships or access the right networks.

It also means understanding when to push growth and when to slow down and fix the foundation.

Adedeji sees venture building as creating the conditions around a company that allow it to compound: “capital, talent, strategy, networks, infrastructure, governance and execution.”

She has spent significant time close to founders and businesses. Now, she wants to deepen her understanding of how capital is raised, structured, managed and deployed, and how those decisions affect the companies receiving it.

Her goal is not just to understand how to help a founder become fundable, but to understand the investor’s side of that equation too.

“I want to be able to operate at that intersection between company building and capital allocation.”

For her, understanding the founder side, the ecosystem side and the capital side offers a more complete view of how companies and ecosystems actually get built.

Someone announces they are flying home. Within minutes, the requests start coming in. A bag of chin chin from a specific brand in Lagos. A fabric that only exists in Balogun market. Asoebi that needs to make it to Houston before a wedding on Saturday. Baby food that is not sold anywhere in the UK.

A phone that costs twice as much if ordered internationally, and the traveller just trying to get from one city to another, has become a one-person logistics operation for everyone they know.

And on the other side of that group chat are the people who didn't know anyone flying at the right time. The ones who missed the window. Whose item sat in a Lagos shop for weeks because no one they knew was heading to Toronto. Who paid a courier more than the item was worth, gave up entirely, or asked a stranger on Twitter and hoped for the best.

Samuel Ayokanmbi, Adebanjo “BJ” Adesoye, and Seyebomi “Sheye Banks” Ogunsanya have been on both sides of this story. Multiple times. Across multiple cities. Over many years.

They did not build Pikkah because they spotted a market opportunity on a spreadsheet. They built it because they lived the frustration long enough to know exactly what the solution needed to feel like.

The clothes that almost missed the wedding

Sam knows the problem from Toronto, where he leads operations and strategy at Pikkah. His job is making sure the marketplace actually works: traveller verification, the mechanics of a carry, the arrangements and handovers that decide whether a delivery completes properly.

He also sets the commercial direction: where Pikkah grows next, which partnerships open those markets, and the legal and fundraising work that supports the vision.

But before any of that, he was just a Nigerian in Toronto trying to get things home.

He once paid courier charges that cost more than the item being sent. That alone should tell you everything about the gap in the market. But the story that has stayed with him, the one that captures what Pikkah is really about, is simpler and more human than any transaction.

He needed clothes made in Lagos for a wedding in Toronto. The clothes were ready. They were beautiful. Getting them from one city to the other became one of the most stressful parts of what should have been a joyful occasion.

“When something is tied to an occasion like that,” the team said, “its value is not just what is written on the receipt.”

That line says it all. Logistics platforms look at an item and see weight and dimensions. The person sending it sees something else entirely. The fabric your mother picked out. The outfit you’ll wear the first time you see your family in two years. The food from that one shop back home that just doesn’t taste the same anywhere else.

Pikkah came out of that gap, between what a package weighs on a scale and what it weighs to the person waiting for it.

The team behind it

Three people built this. Each one brings something the others do not have, and that combination is not accidental.

BJ is a product leader based in the United States with over a decade of experience across Nigeria, the UK, and the US, spanning startups and Big Four consulting, including work with major global financial institutions.

At Pikkah, he leads product strategy and technical delivery, working with engineering to turn customer needs into the shopping, matching, payment, and trust experiences people actually use.

Living abroad keeps the problem personal for BJ in a way that no amount of research could replicate. He knows the requests. He knows the favours. He knows the uncertainty of depending on someone else’s travel plans just to get something basic from one place to another.

“He wants to build a product people can use with confidence when asking someone they know is no longer an option,” the team said.

Then there is Sheye Banks, broadcaster, media entrepreneur, and the third co-founder, based in Lagos. With over a decade across radio, live entertainment, artist development, and brand partnerships, Sheye built a career around something deceptively difficult: making people feel understood quickly, and giving them a reason to trust something new.

At Pikkah, he leads media and marketing, shaping the brand, growing the community, and developing partnerships in Nigeria. He's focused on that moment between someone noticing the problem and actually doing something about it. The interest is already there. What people need is to feel safe enough to take the first step.

Sam in Toronto. BJ in the US. Sheye in Lagos. The founding team is geographically positioned across the exact corridor their product serves, which is either a coincidence or the clearest possible signal that these are the right people to build this.

The friendship that became a founding team

Before Pikkah was a company, it was a friendship. Three of them, actually, woven together over years in the way that real partnerships form. Not at a networking event or an accelerator programme. Through life.

Sam and BJ have known each other since university. The kind of friendship where you’ve already seen each other through enough to know how the other handles pressure, disagreement, and the slow grind of building something from nothing.

BJ and Sheye met during their National Youth Service year in Abuja, over a decade ago. That friendship grew quietly over time until it became a working relationship that just made sense, the kind only time can produce.

So when the three of them came together around Pikkah, they weren’t strangers trying to build trust while also trying to build a company. They already trusted each other completely. That foundation, invisible to anyone looking at the product from the outside, is one of the biggest things Pikkah has going for it.

Building a startup is hard. Building a startup that is specifically about creating trust between strangers across international borders, with money moving between people who have never met, requires founders who trust each other absolutely first. Sam, BJ, and Sheye have had a decade to get there.

What existing shipping gets wrong

International courier services exist. They move enormous volumes. They do their job well for the things they are designed to handle.

The problem is what they are not designed to handle.

The item that's only sold locally and can't be ordered online. The purchase that hasn't happened yet because someone has to actually walk into the shop and buy it first. The small thing where the shipping costs more than the item itself, and everyone knows it. The one a store simply won't ship internationally, no exceptions, no discussion.

“For the people we are building for, buying the item can be easier than getting it home,” the Pikkah team said. “A store may not deliver to their country. The item may only be available locally. Or the delivery bill for one small purchase may be hard to justify.”

The informal favour economy that has grown up around this gap- the group chat messages, the Twitter requests, the family network activations- is not evidence that people have solved the problem. It is evidence that people have built workarounds for a problem nobody has properly solved.

Pikkah is the proper solution.

How Pikkah works: from request to doorstep

Pikkah is a marketplace connecting two types of people. Shoppers and Travellers. The simplicity of those words is intentional.

A Shopper is anyone who needs something brought from somewhere else. They post a request, a product link, a description of what they want, or details of something already purchased that needs to be collected and carried. They specify the route, the timeline, and what they need for delivery.

A Traveller is anyone making a journey who has luggage space they are willing to use. They post their upcoming trip, destination, dates, available space, and Pikkah matches them with suitable Shopper requests. Before accepting anything, the Traveller sees everything: the item, its weight, its value, where it needs to come from, and the reward being offered.

If the Traveller is also buying the item on the Shopper’s behalf, which is often the case, Pikkah handles the payment. The Shopper’s money is held securely until the item is confirmed delivered. The Traveller only receives their reward after the Shopper confirms that everything arrived correctly.

The whole chain, from request to purchase, carry, deliver, confirm, and pay, happens on one platform. No group chat coordination. No hoping someone follows through. No awkward conversations about reimbursement. Just a clear arrangement, agreed upfront, with accountability built in from the start.

The trust problem, solved from the inside out

This is the question every person has when they first hear about Pikkah: how do you trust a stranger to carry your item? Buy it correctly? Show up at the handover point?

It’s a fair question. Pikkah didn’t answer it with good intentions or community guidelines; they built accountability directly into the system.

Every user verifies their identity before joining. Trip verification confirms a Traveller’s offered journey is real. The items are checked for eligibility before any match is made.

Payments are held in escrow and only released when both parties confirm the handover is complete. Every completed transaction builds a public reputation, visible to the next person who encounters that profile.

The informal favour system works because social relationships carry their own accountability. When your cousin asks you to bring something, you follow through because you will see her at Christmas. Pikkah replaces social accountability with structural accountability, verification, escrow, reviews, and clear terms both parties agree to before anything moves.

This is where all of Sheye's work at the top of the funnel is headed. Someone hears about Pikkah, recognizes a problem they've lived with for years, and then needs a reason to actually try it with a stranger they've never met.

The brand, the community, the partnerships he is building in Lagos are all designed to close that gap, to turn recognition into trust, and trust into a first transaction.

The trust is not assumed. It is built into every layer of the experience.

Why this matters more than it looks

The informal "bring this back for me" economy among Nigerians is vast and unquantified. Nigerians living abroad send billions of dollars home annually, and with that money comes a significant movement of goods, personal items, packages, and purchases that traditional courier and logistics companies don't track.

This exchange occurs through personal networks, built on years of favours given and received, and the generosity of individuals willing to make space in their luggage for loved ones' essential items.

Pikkah is developing a system to make this economy accessible to everyone, not just those fortunate enough to know someone travelling the right route at the opportune moment.

Travellers can earn money by utilizing their unused luggage space, while Shoppers can acquire items they otherwise couldn't without difficulty, high costs, or compromise. What was once an informal transaction, prone to uncertainty, awkward conversations, and reliance on goodwill, now operates with clear terms, payment protection, and mutual accountability.

The core act of assistance remains the same, but the surrounding system has been transformed.

Sam manages operations, BJ develops the product, and Sheye fosters the trust that draws people to the service.

Thanks to them, a wedding outfit in Toronto arrives precisely when it's needed.

You need to buy USDT. Or sell it. Or send money abroad. Or receive a payment from a client in the UK. So you open Binance. Check the rate. Open Bybit. Check again. Someone in a WhatsApp group says Quidax is better today. You open Quidax.

Meanwhile, the rate on Binance has moved. You go back. You are now six apps deep, five minutes have passed, and you still do not know with any confidence where the best rate actually is.

In 2023, Jeremy Ikwuje and Olayinka Omoniyi were sitting with that exact problem and doing what software engineers do when something is clearly broken: they started building the fix.

“There wasn’t a single reliable view you could track USDT to naira rates across popular exchanges,” Olayinka told in60. “If you tried, you were jumping from app to app and there were literally no open APIs.”

So they built Monierate. And then 10 million page views later, they are still building it.

What Monierate actually is

Monierate is a currency data aggregator. In plain terms: it is the platform that pulls FX rates from across African fintechs, crypto exchanges, neobanks, and currency platforms and puts them all in one place so you can compare them in seconds instead of hours.

You visit monierate.com, and you get a live table showing what USDT is trading at across Binance, Bybit, Quidax, Bitnob, Grey, ChipperCash, Luno, and dozens of other providers, all at once, all in real time.

No toggling. No WhatsApp messages to currency peddlers. No guessing. Just the market, displayed honestly, side by side.

Jeremy brought the engineering: he had worked as a backend engineer on multiple stablecoin and fintech apps and had the network to get API access from the ground up.

Olayinka was at Convexity, which gave them further reach into the ecosystem. Between them, they had exactly what this kind of platform required: the technical ability to build it and the industry relationships to feed it with real data.

The rate gap you didn’t know was bleeding you

When Monierate launched, you could find dollar rates up to ₦130 cheaper on some providers compared to what ChipperCash and similar premium fintechs were quoting. Not ₦2. Not ₦10. ₦130 per dollar.

On a $100 transaction, that is the difference between paying ₦147,000 and paying ₦137,000.

On $1,000, that gap becomes ₦100,000. Gone. Just because you did not compare.

“The difference can be as low as ₦2 and as high as ₦160,” Olayinka said.

For someone exchanging serious volume: a business, a trader, a remittance operator processing hundreds of transactions monthly, that difference compounds into something that would make any CFO wince.

The good news is that competition is working. Premium fintechs like ChipperCash, Eversend, and Luno have made significant rate adjustments since Monierate launched, partly because transparency creates pressure. When users can see the spread between providers in real time, the expensive ones have to respond.

That is exactly what market transparency is supposed to do.

How they actually get the data

This part is genuinely interesting and worth explaining because it shows how much work goes into something that looks simple on the surface.

Monierate works directly with most of the providers on the platform. The focus is on liquid providers, ones where the rate being quoted is actually tradable, not a theoretical number. Because if a user makes a decision based on a rate that cannot actually be executed, the whole thing is useless.

Some providers give Monierate direct API access. Some share their rate data through Google Sheets. Yes, literally a Google Sheet, via Google Scripts. And some Monierate built scrapers for pulling rates directly from their websites.

“To tell you the level of access — some we even get their rate data from their Google Sheet via Google Scripts,” Jeremy said.

That patchwork of integrations is unglamorous and technical and completely invisible to the person checking a rate on their lunch break. It is also exactly what makes the product work. You do not build reliable real-time FX data aggregation by waiting for the market to hand you clean APIs. You build it by solving every integration problem one by one.

Monierate now covers over 90 sources across the African exchange market, including recent additions like Textile, Gate Exchange, MavaPay, Zobo, Vban, Karsa, and Doux Finance. Corridors now covered include NGN, KES, GHS, ZAR, and BRZ.

Who is using it and what the numbers look like

In the first week Monierate launched, it had about 1,200 visits. Twelve months later, it was doing over 200,000 monthly visits. Today, the platform averages between 70,000 and 145,000 monthly visits depending on market conditions.

That last part is telling. The single highest traffic day in Monierate’s history was 21,000 visits, the day USDT to naira hit ₦1,700 in 2024. When the naira moves, Nigerians run to Monierate to figure out what is actually happening. That is the clearest possible signal of what the platform has become: not just a comparison tool, but a market reference point.

Over 10 million page views across three years. Over 400,000 API data requests in the last six months alone.

On the API side, where Monierate is seeing its sharpest growth, the users are fintechs, trading firms, VC firms, and e-commerce platforms. Names like Quidax, Bitnob, BoldSwitch, Spenda, Cedar, and Shiga are all pulling Monierate’s data to power their own products.

When a fintech needs a reliable, real-time reference rate for Nigerian FX, Monierate is increasingly where they go.

On the consumer side, the users are OTC traders, international merchants, remittance operators, research students, and ordinary Nigerians who want to know the real rate before making a move.

The bigger problem they are actually solving

Here is where Monierate’s vision extends beyond a comparison table.

Ask Google what the naira to Ethiopian Birr rate is, and it will tell you something like 8.13. That number is not exactly wrong; it is just completely useless.

Because when a Nigerian named Tayo is actually travelling to Ethiopia or sending money there, nobody will give him that rate. He has to message a currency peddler on WhatsApp. He gets quoted something closer to ₦14, almost double what Google showed him. And he has no choice because there is no platform to discover the real market rate.

That scenario plays out across dozens of African currency pairs. Egypt. Ethiopia. Kenya. Countries where official rates and real trading rates exist in completely different universes.

“Currency price data in Africa is unstructured,” Jeremy said. “There are a lot of markets.”

Monierate is working to change that by building structured FX data across African and Asian currencies, accessible as JSON and CSV, through a web portal, and through mobile.

The Intelligence Dashboard gives businesses and treasury teams a comprehensive view of rate movements, spreads, and market dynamics that was previously only available to institutions with expensive Bloomberg terminals or informal WhatsApp networks.

The business model

Monierate operates a usage and subscription API billing model. There is a pay-per-call plan starting at ₦10 per request, low enough that individual developers and small fintechs can access the data without a large upfront commitment. Pro and Max subscription plans serve higher-volume users. Brand partnerships and promotions add a second revenue layer.

The model is built around a simple truth: the more the market needs reliable FX data, the more valuable Monierate’s infrastructure becomes. And as African cross-border commerce, remittances, and stablecoin usage all continue to grow, that need is only going in one direction.

Olayinka described the goal as simply as it can be stated.

“Our goal has always been to be a transparent and independent source of truth across supported currencies. Every provider we add makes the market a little more transparent for the businesses that depend on accurate pricing.”

The naira rate is one of the most watched numbers in Nigeria. For years, knowing the real rate, not the official rate, not the WhatsApp peddler rate, but the actual live market rate across every platform where it trades, required either expensive institutional access or a lot of manual work.

Jeremy and Olayinka built the shortcut. 10 million page views later, it turns out to be what a lot of people needed.

But even then, there were clues that his career might eventually take a different direction.

Dolapo was deeply involved in leadership. He served as a class governor and later took part in student legislative activities, including serving as a speaker. Outside school, he was also running different businesses.

He was already spending his time organizing people, solving problems, making decisions and figuring out how to get things done.

He just didn’t know that these were skills he would eventually use as a Product Manager.

He stumbled into product management

Dolapo’s entry into product management was almost accidental.

In 2021, while he was still in school, an academic strike gave him some extra time. But the idea had actually appeared in his mind shortly before then.

He had attended a tech event where someone asked participants what they did and what areas of technology interested them. A few days earlier, Dolapo had come across a breakdown of different technology career paths.

Product management was one of them.

“I remember reading about it and thinking, ‘Okay, this is a career I could potentially explore,’” he says.

The idea stayed with him.

So when someone at the tech event asked him what he did, he remembered product management. “I told the person, ‘I’m getting into product management.’”

At that point, he hadn’t formally started working in product. But saying it out loud made the idea feel real.

When he got home, he began learning properly. He took courses, researched the role and started understanding what Product Managers actually did.

The more he learned, the more he noticed that some of his existing experiences already looked like pieces of the job.

His leadership roles had taught him how to work with people. His businesses had taught him how to organise and solve problems. His interest in technology gave him the technical curiosity to understand products.

What began as something he stumbled into slowly became a career.

“Honestly, I stumbled into product management,” he says. “But I stayed because I found a connection between what I was naturally interested in, what I had already been doing, and the kind of work product management allowed me to do.”

Today, he works as a Product Manager at PaidHR.

And along the way, he discovered that the job was very different from what he had imagined.

He thought the Product Manager was almost the CEO

Product management can be a tricky role to understand, and Dolapo learned this firsthand. At first, he pictured a Product Manager as a mini-CEO, someone with all the power to boss people around and make things happen.

"One of my biggest misconceptions about product management was that the Product Manager was basically the next after the CEO," he admits. He thought that leading a product meant having absolute authority, directing teams, and ensuring every task was completed.

However, once he stepped into the role, reality quickly set in. He discovered that responsibility doesn't automatically grant you the power to dictate. A Product Manager must understand the problem, set the course, make key decisions, and unite diverse teams. Yet, they don't necessarily have the authority to simply order everyone around.

This means a huge part of the job revolves around conversations. Dolapo even has a playful way of describing it, calling the PM an "errand person." He's not talking about literal errands, but rather the constant back-and-forth between individuals, teams, discussions, and challenges, all in an effort to keep everything cohesive.

This "errand running" is often overlooked. People see the finished product, the new feature, when it's released.

What they don't always see is the Product Manager diligently moving between the customer who brought up the issue, the designer crafting the user experience, the engineer constructing it, and the business stakeholders debating whether it's even worth building.

It's a behind-the-scenes hustle that keeps the product journey on track.

A normal week? Expect chaos

Dolapo's week as a product manager is far from predictable. It's a dynamic role, constantly shifting based on the product's current stage. A week dedicated to understanding customer issues bears little resemblance to one focused on building or launching a new feature.

During the discovery phase, Dolapo immerses himself in customer conversations, gathering feedback to pinpoint their genuine needs. He then collaborates with internal stakeholders to align with business objectives, ensuring the team tackles the most impactful problems.

Next comes crafting the roadmap: prioritizing tasks, deferring others, and integrating new initiatives within the product's broader vision. There's also the unseen effort of execution: meticulously writing tickets, dissecting requirements, clarifying build specifications, and fielding engineers' questions.

He works closely with designers, ensuring everyone grasps not just the 'what' but also the 'why' behind their work.

Data plays a crucial role. Dolapo analyzes analytics to understand user behaviour: which features are popular, where users disengage, and if anything deviates from the team's expectations. Sometimes data provides clear answers; other times, it sparks further questions.

The unexpected is a constant companion. A new stakeholder request, an engineer's concern, a customer unearthing an unforeseen problem, or a business shift that re-evaluates a recent decision- these are all part of the job.

As Dolapo puts it, "Product management comes with a certain level of chaos. You have a plan for the week, but you also have to be comfortable with the fact that the plan can change."

This adaptability, he believes, is perhaps the most vital aspect of the role.

The product is only part of the problem

Product courses can teach you frameworks.

They can teach you how to gather requirements, understand customers, build roadmaps and collect feedback. But some lessons only become clear when the product leaves the whiteboard and meets the real world.

For Dolapo, one of those lessons is what happens when you actually take a product to customers.

“You eventually learn that being a Product Manager isn’t just about building a product; it’s about understanding the environment it operates in and being able to navigate everything that comes with putting that product into the real world,” he says.

The product itself is only one piece.

There is the business around it. There are customers with different needs. There are internal expectations. There are limitations around resources and execution.

A good product can still run into problems if the team doesn’t understand the environment around it. That is the kind of thing a job description rarely captures.

When everybody wants their request first

One of the hardest parts of product management is deciding what not to do. Almost everyone around a product has a reason why their request matters.

A customer wants something fixed. An executive has a new idea. Sales needs a feature. Engineering has its own priorities. Suddenly, everything is urgent.

Dolapo doesn’t believe the loudest person in the room should automatically get their way. Instead, he looks at the bigger picture.

What does the business need most right now? What problem is the team trying to solve? How many customers are affected? How serious is the problem? Then comes the practical side.

How much engineering capacity is available? How difficult will the work be? What resources are required? And, perhaps most importantly, what will have to wait if this request moves to the front of the queue?

For Dolapo, prioritization means putting those requests beside each other and judging them against the same factors. Business value. Customer impact. Effort. Capacity. Resources.

Sometimes the answer is simply:

“This is a valid request, but it’s not the priority right now.” And that doesn’t mean the idea is bad. It just means something else needs attention first.

“I don’t know” is part of the job.

Product managers like Dolapo don't need to know everything. They connect teams (engineers, designers) and understand customers. "It's okay for them to ask questions when they don't understand something, rather than pretending."

This prevents mistakes. "They also need to be open to changing their minds if new information comes up."

The goal isn't having all answers, but helping the team find solutions. "Not admitting what you don't know can lead to bigger problems for the product, team, and customers."

You can’t manage people with a framework.

Product management has plenty of frameworks. But people don’t always fit neatly into one. Dolapo has learned this through working with different personalities.

Some people are easy to work with. Others require more patience. Some communicate directly. Others need more time or a different approach. And sometimes, there are things happening in someone’s life that you simply don’t know about.

That has changed how he thinks about leadership.

“As a Product Manager, you’re often the person facilitating the room,” he says. “You’re leading meetings, running briefs, having conversations, and trying to get everyone moving in the same direction.”

But facilitating a room isn’t the same as controlling it. “You have to understand them and learn how to work with them.”

For Dolapo, that has meant becoming more patient, listening more and learning not to react too quickly. “What works with one person might not work with another,” he says.

At the end of the day, “it’s different folks, different strokes.” It is a lesson no product framework can fully teach.

The PM people don’t panic when they see calling

Dolapo, a seasoned Product Manager, envisions a leadership style rooted in approachability. He strives to be the kind of PM whose name on a phone doesn't incite panic, but rather fosters open dialogue and collaboration.

His motto: "Whenever you see my call or my text, no pressure. Don’t panic."

This humorous quip underscores a profound philosophy. Dolapo champions an environment where challenging ideas, constructive disagreement, and alternative suggestions are not just tolerated, but encouraged. He aspires to be a PM people enjoy working with, someone who can "have a conversation, figure things out, and get the work done."

While seemingly simple, this approach, refined through years of experience, is deeply intentional. Product management, for Dolapo, transcends roadmaps and features; it's about navigating uncertainty, discerning when to lead and when to listen, embracing humility, and adapting to change. It's about instilling order without instilling fear.

Dolapo recognizes that the journey of learning is continuous, especially in an ever-evolving landscape of technology, business, and work dynamics. His honest acknowledgement of still "figuring it out" is perhaps the most powerful testament to his authentic leadership.

Bolu Dada is the co-founder and CEO who thinks about what the product should feel like for the person building on top of it. Tega Akpojiyovwi, co-founder and CTO, thinks about everything happening underneath that experience to make it possible.

They are not two people doing different jobs inside the same company. They are two people with the same conviction, approaching the same problem from two different angles.

That problem is this: moving money on the internet from Africa is still harder than it should be. Not because the technology does not exist. Because nobody has assembled it properly for the people who need it most.

Bachs is that assembly.

Where the idea to build Bachs came from

Bolu was building a product around paid Telegram communities before Bachs existed. His customers had their own customers scattered across multiple countries.

Getting paid by those customers, and then getting that money back to the right business owner, required stitching together tools that were not designed to work together.

“We became very familiar with the complexity of payments very quickly,” Bolu said.

One late-night session working through a particularly stubborn payment problem with Tega, it clicked. The problem they were solving for their own product was the same problem thousands of other internet businesses were dealing with, just with slightly different details.

They stopped building the original product. They started building Bachs.

The founding thesis was straightforward but important. The world needed another payment product, not to do something new, but to do something that already existed in theory far better than it was being done in practice.

Specifically for internet entrepreneurs in emerging markets who were being left out or left behind by infrastructure that was not built with them in mind.

“We weren’t trying to invent payments,” Bolu said. “We were trying to make them dramatically easier and more accessible.”

What Bachs actually is

Bachs is a payments platform for internet entrepreneurs, software founders, digital product creators, freelancers, agencies, community builders, creators, and anyone else building a business that lives online and needs reliable ways to collect, manage, and move money.

The connecting thread across all of those users is not what they build. It is their situation. They are building for the internet. Their customers can be anywhere. And right now, getting paid by those customers and moving that money where it needs to go requires more technical complexity than it should.

Bachs handles checkout, subscriptions, global payouts, virtual accounts, cards, FX, and stablecoin payment rails, all in one system rather than five separate integrations with five different providers, each with their own documentation and their own ways of failing.

“What if you could give an internet entrepreneur one place to collect, manage and move money, without having to figure out all the complexity underneath?” Bolu said. “That is the approach we took with Bachs.”

The infrastructure underneath

Tega is the person who has to make that promise real. And he is unusually honest about how hard it actually is.

When a customer clicks “Pay,” what can go wrong? Tega walked through it without softening anything.

Naira bank transfers are generally reliable; delay is usually the worst case, not outright failure. Mobile money has more friction points: the customer might decline the prompt, the prompt might not arrive, or they might abandon the flow.

Cards introduce a different category of problems entirely: a local Verve card might not work for an international payment, authentication might fail, the bank might block it, or the card simply might not support that transaction type.

“A payment passes through several systems before it reaches the business,” Tega said.

“If any one of them has a problem, the transaction can fail or be delayed.”

The complexity of payment infrastructure lies in reliably connecting disparate systems such as banks, processors, card networks, wallets, and mobile operators, each built with unique standards, APIs, and response time assumptions.

The hardest part is not connecting them. It is maintaining visibility across all of them simultaneously.

“You need to know what is happening at every stage of a transaction,” Tega said. “When something goes wrong, you need to know where it happened and why.”

The fragmentation problem, and why it has not been solved

One of the most consistent things Bolu heard from founders before building Bachs was this: getting paid globally is much harder than it should be. Some are excluded from international payment options entirely because of where they are based.

Others have to integrate multiple providers just to cover the currencies and payment methods their customers use. Then they have to manage different settlement times, different failure modes, and different customer support contacts for each one.

“The internet has made it possible to sell to almost anyone in the world,” Bolu said. “Getting paid by that customer shouldn’t be the hard part.”

Tega explained why the fragmentation has persisted. The first reason is genuine technical complexity; different payment methods work in fundamentally different ways.

The second is commercial reality. A Nigerian payments company handling mobile money from Uganda might not see enough volume to justify deep investment in that corridor. If it breaks, fixing it may not be urgent. “The problem is not just technical,” Tega said. “It also comes down to business priorities, local rules and customer demand.”

What Bachs is doing is absorbing all of that complexity on behalf of the businesses using it. The developer building on Bachs should not need to understand the difference between how a Kenyan mobile money provider and a Dutch bank process a transaction. That is Bachs’s problem to solve, not theirs.

Subscriptions, settlement gaps, and the money that disappears quietly

Two specific problems come up repeatedly when Bolu talks to the internet entrepreneurs using Bachs. The first is the gap between “payment successful” and “money I can actually use.” The second is recurring revenue that silently leaks through failed subscription renewals.

On settlement: a customer pays, gets a confirmation, and the money still is not in the merchant’s account. Tega explained why. Some payment partners clear funds the same day. Others take a day or longer. Card fraud reviews add deliberate time to some USD transactions.

“At Bachs, we have done a lot of work to make naira payments available immediately,” Tega said. “Once we confirm the money, the merchant can withdraw it.”

On subscriptions: the biggest culprit is failed renewals. Cards expire. Customers forget to update them. Banks decline payments for reasons that have nothing to do with whether the customer wants to stay subscribed.

“There is no point repeatedly trying a cancelled card,” Tega said, “but a payment that failed because of low funds may succeed a few days later.”

Bachs built its subscription engine around that distinction, retrying intelligently, reminding customers when action is needed, and understanding failure types well enough to know when to keep trying and when to stop.

Bolu’s version of the same point: businesses should not be losing customers because of technical failures they had no way to prevent. Bachs should be the thing that catches it before it becomes churn.

FX and the cross-border bottleneck

For cross-border payments, Tega named the hardest part clearly.

“For us, FX is the biggest bottleneck.”

The challenge is not showing the right exchange rate. It is managing everything that comes after. A business might price in one currency, receive payment in a second, and want to be settled in a third.

Bachs has to calculate the conversion, manage exchange-rate risk as rates move, make sure there are enough funds available in each currency, and still deliver the amount the business expects.

“This becomes even harder when rates are changing quickly, or there is not enough liquidity available in a particular market,” Tega said.

Bolu describes the goal from the business side: a founder in Lagos accepting payment from a customer in Berlin should not write a single line of FX-handling code. They should just receive the money. Bachs handles everything between those two points.

Stablecoins already inside the rails

One of the more interesting details about how Bachs actually works is that stablecoins are not a future feature. They are already part of the infrastructure.

“A lot of our money movement and payouts already run through stablecoins,” Tega said. “We have hidden most of that complexity so customers do not need to know which system is being used underneath.”

Bachs supports payments in cNGN, USDT, and USDC, with some dollar settlements arriving as stablecoins. Partners can easily integrate stablecoin transactions, allowing customers a seamless payment experience without needing to understand the underlying blockchain infrastructure.

Bachs Connect, a product facilitating money movement between customers, sellers, and users on various platforms, was re-engineered and relaunched with significant improvements.

“When you’re building financial products, you can’t optimise for shipping quickly at the expense of getting the foundations right,” Bolu said.

That decision to pause something with real momentum and fix what was underneath reflects how both founders think about what they are building. Not fast. Right.

Where Bachs is going

Bolu is clear that Africa is the starting point, not the ceiling.

“Africa should be our proof of concept, not our ceiling,” he said. Bachs addresses fragmented payments, limited access, multiple currencies, and cross-border money movement for internet businesses in underserved markets.

Tega envisions a data-driven payments system, leveraging open banking and enhanced financial data to combat fraud, a major impediment to cross-border payments in Africa. Improved risk data would facilitate more accurate fraud detection, approve legitimate transactions, and enable market expansion without supply chain disruptions.

“At Bachs, we are investing heavily in our fraud systems because we believe better risk tools will help us grow into a global payment platform,” Tega said.

Early customers like Bid9ja, Werbstore, Pxxl, HagFish, and Gamms App have already taught both founders something important: reliability matters more than features. When real businesses run their revenue through your product, what they need most is to know the money will be there when they need it.

“Not that someone says they like Bachs,” Bolu said, “but that they’ve trusted us with a small part of their business, seen that it works consistently, and then decided to trust us with the rest.”

That trust, earned transaction by transaction, is what Bachs is building toward. Not a payment processor. A financial platform that internet businesses in Africa and beyond can rely on.

Bolu builds what you see. Tega makes sure it never breaks. Together they are building something the ecosystem has needed for a long time.

David Igbe was nine years old when his mother died. She had been given counterfeit insulin from a local pharmacy. She trusted the pharmacy. The pharmacy failed her. And there was no system in place, no review, no rating, no public record, that would have warned her or anyone else that this could happen.

David grew up. He went to the United States. He built a career at IBM and the New York Stock Exchange, working in software engineering and technology leadership. He became the kind of person who knew how to build things that worked at scale.

And he came back to Nigeria to build what might have saved his mother’s life. That thing is Maoni.

So what exactly is Maoni?

Maoni is Nigeria’s review and discovery platform. Think of it as the honest answer to the question Nigerians are always asking each other on Twitter, in WhatsApp groups, and at family dinners: has anybody used this place before? Can I trust them?

Right now, when a Nigerian wants to know whether a hospital is any good, whether a contractor will actually show up, whether a skincare brand is genuine, or whether that new restaurant in Lekki is worth the drive, they ask someone they know.

If they don't know someone who's used that business, they are basically guessing.

That guessing has real consequences. Money lost to businesses that did not deliver. Health affected by products that were not what they claimed. Time wasted on services that underdelivered. Trust broken, repeatedly, in a market where trust is already one of the hardest things to build.

Maoni fixes this by putting verified customer experiences in one place where anyone can find them before they spend their money, not after.

How it actually works

You have just used a business, a restaurant, a hospital, a logistics company, an online store, a pharmacy. You go to Maoni, find the business, and leave a review. What did they get right? What went wrong? Would you go back?

That review goes onto the business’s Maoni profile. The next person considering that business finds it before they commit. They read real experiences from real customers. They make a better decision.

And the numbers show people are doing exactly that.

Maoni has recorded approximately 10,000 app downloads across iOS and Android, with 2,500 registered users who have collectively contributed more than 3,000 reviews covering real experiences with places they have visited, products they have used, and services they have paid for.

The platform’s website received approximately 25,000 visits in the last month alone, which tells you something important: people are discovering Maoni not just through the app but through search, through links, through word of mouth. The discovery loop is already working.

The platform’s strongest usage is currently in Lagos, Rivers, Enugu, Ogun, and Abuja Nigeria’s most commercially active cities and an in-house data team is continuously expanding coverage across more cities, states, and business categories.

Maoni currently lists more than 30,000 businesses, including smaller and informal ones that have little to no digital presence anywhere else. That last part matters enormously.

The businesses that most need accountability infrastructure are often the ones least likely to appear on existing platforms.

What the product has become

Maoni has grown well beyond a simple review app. The platform now includes category-specific ratings so that a hospital review captures different things from a restaurant review.

AI-powered review summaries and Pro Tips surface the most useful information from what users have written, so you do not have to read every single review to get a clear picture.

Collections let users curate lists of trusted businesses they want to share. Businesses can respond directly to reviews, adding context or addressing concerns publicly.

And then there is the Maoni Rewards Marketplace, where users earn points for contributing reviews and can redeem those points for products, vouchers, and experiences. That one feature does something subtle but important: it makes leaving a review feel like it is worth something, which increases the volume of contributions, which makes the platform more useful for everyone.

On the business side, Maoni is developing tools that turn customer feedback into structured insights, sentiment analysis, engagement tracking, and competitive performance benchmarking. A business owner should be able to look at their Maoni dashboard and understand not just what customers think but how that compares to similar businesses in their category and what is driving the gap.

David’s title is Chief Happiness Engineer. It is not a gimmick. It reflects a specific philosophy: the goal is not to build a platform for complaints. It is to build a system where businesses that treat customers well get rewarded with visibility, and businesses that do not get honest feedback that forces them to improve or get left behind.

The verification question

The obvious challenge with any review platform is fake reviews. Businesses paying for five-star ratings. Competitors leaving false one-star attacks. Random people reviewing places they have never visited.

Maoni built verification into the core of how the platform works, not as an afterthought. Reviews on Maoni are tied to verified customer interactions; the platform uses multiple layers of checks to confirm that a review comes from someone who actually transacted with the business before it goes live.

This is what separates Maoni from a simple comment section. The reviews carry weight because they are earned. A five-star rating on Maoni means something different from a five-star rating that anyone can post without any accountability.

For Nigerian consumers who have been burned before by fake products, by businesses that overpromise and underdeliver, by services that look great on Instagram and fall apart in reality, verification is not just a feature. It is the entire point.

Why Nigeria specifically needs this

Nigeria processes an enormous volume of consumer transactions every single day. Food delivery. Healthcare. Construction. E-commerce. Financial services. Education. Beauty and personal care.

In almost every one of these sectors, the gap between what a business claims and what customers actually experience is significant, and the information to bridge that gap has never been properly organised.

Google reviews exist, but they are sparse, unverified, and often irrelevant to the Nigerian context. Social media word of mouth works, but it is chaotic, temporary, and only reaches people who happen to see the right post at the right time.

Referrals from friends and family are the most trusted source of information, but they only cover the businesses your specific social circle has used.

Maoni is building the layer that sits above all of that. Not replacing word of mouth, but organising it. Making it searchable. Making it persistent. Making it available to everyone, not just people with the right connections.

David’s experience at IBM and the NYSE shaped how he thinks about building this. Systems at that scale live or die on data integrity and trust. You cannot build the world’s most powerful stock exchange on unreliable information.

You cannot build a review platform that actually changes behaviour if the reviews themselves cannot be trusted. The technical infrastructure of Maoni reflects that background, built for accuracy and reliability, not just speed to market.

What this means for Nigerian businesses

A business with a strong Maoni profile is not just collecting reviews. It is building a public trust asset, one that compounds over time as more customers leave verified experiences that future customers can rely on.

For small and medium businesses especially, this matters enormously. A well-known pharmacy chain in Lagos can survive a bad experience because its brand carries weight.

A neighbourhood pharmacy that has been doing honest business for ten years cannot easily communicate that reputation to a new customer who has never heard of them. Maoni gives that pharmacy a way to show its track record, not through advertising, but through the accumulated testimony of the customers who have actually walked through its doors.

There is something quietly powerful about that. In a country where consumer protection infrastructure is still developing, and the consequences of misplaced trust can be severe, as David’s family learned at enormous personal cost, a platform that helps Nigerians make better decisions about who to trust is not just a useful product.

It is infrastructure.

David Igbe built a career at some of the most trusted institutions in American finance and technology. Then he came home and started building the kind of trust infrastructure Nigeria has been missing.

Maoni is where that work lives. Every review on the platform is a small act of accountability: someone who paid money, had an experience, and chose to share it so the next person would have better information than they did.

That is how trust gets built in a market. One honest review at a time.

His siblings teach across different levels of the Nigerian school system. His family’s relationship with education is not professional; it is personal, almost ancestral. And for Clinton, teaching is the activity that makes him feel most alive.

“Teaching is when I feel most alive,” he said, simply and without decoration.

That background makes it easy to understand why, after building technology across payments, logistics, e-commerce and AI-powered conversational commerce, he kept coming back to the same problem. Not because it was a good market opportunity. Because he cared about it in a way that was hard to explain to people who did not.

What he kept seeing made him uncomfortable.

Someone joins an online course. They get added to a WhatsApp group. Two PDFs land in their inbox. And then, silence. No structure. No follow-up. No accountability. No real way of knowing whether anything was learned.

“Many people are selling content,” Clinton told in60, “but content alone is not education.”

That gap, between what people were selling and what learning actually requires, became Lightbulb.

What Lightbulb actually is

The simplest way to understand Lightbulb is to understand what it is not.

It is not another platform where you upload videos and hope people watch them. It is not a course marketplace where creators list their content and learners scroll through options. It is not a basic learning management system designed to administer classes.

Lightbulb is the infrastructure that holds the entire education experience together, from the moment a learner discovers a programme, through enrolment, payment, learning delivery, assessment, progress tracking, and credential issuance, in one system.

Clinton described the current reality for most educators and institutions without it: “They combine payment links, spreadsheets, messaging groups, video-conferencing tools and assessment systems to run a single programme.” Every tool is separate.

Nothing talks to anything else. The educator spends more time managing logistics than actually teaching. The learner gets a fragmented, confusing experience and often drops out before finishing.

Lightbulb connects all of those functions. An institution or independent educator can create a branded programme storefront, manage applications and enrolments, collect payments, deliver live and self-paced learning, track attendance and progress, support struggling students with AI, conduct assessments, and issue credentials, all without leaving the platform.

The keyword Clinton keeps returning to is outcomes. Not enrolment numbers. Not content views. Whether the learner actually completed something, learned something, and can demonstrate it.

“Our goal is not simply to help people access more content,” he said, “but to help them complete programmes, demonstrate what they have learned and achieve meaningful outcomes.”

The institutions and the educators

Lightbulb currently works with 20+ institutions and independent educators and has 5,000+ students on the platform. Those numbers tell part of the story. The details behind them tell more.

In July 2026, Lightbulb signed a partnership agreement with the Institute of Education at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, one of Nigeria’s most established teacher education institutions, becoming the Institute’s technology partner for remote and outcome-driven professional learning programmes. The rollout covers approximately 20+ professional courses. That is not a pilot. That is a full institutional adoption.

The platform also deployed infrastructure supporting academic administration and learning delivery at Shanahan University, supported two other tertiary institutions with similar systems, and processed more than ₦1.5 billion in institutional school-fee transactions. The Femi Jubal Foundation recently adopted Lightbulb to host and manage its coaching and learning programmes.

Clinton’s systems, across his decade of building education technology, have reached over 200,000 people and processed billions of naira. Lightbulb is where that experience has been concentrated and rebuilt into a single, coherent platform.

The recognition has followed. The Institute of Education at UNN gave him an Education Innovator and Mentor Award in 2026.

He was named Emerging Tech Platform Builder of the Year at the Titans of Tech Awards in 2025, and Best Tech Emerging Visionary at the Achievers Awards International in 2023.

The harder problem: keeping people

When I asked Clinton which side of the market had been harder to serve, institutions or learners, his answer revealed something important about how he thinks about the problem.

Institutions are harder to convince. They have multiple stakeholders, established processes, and legitimate concerns about data ownership and long-term dependence on an external provider. “They do not only need good software,” Clinton said. “They need confidence that the company behind it understands education and will remain accountable after deployment.”

But learners present a different kind of challenge. They are harder to keep. “Access to content is not the same as access to learning,” Clinton said. People start with genuine enthusiasm. Then work happens. Financial pressure happens. Life happens.

The momentum that felt strong in the first week begins to slow, and without structure, community, and someone noticing when things go quiet, learners drift away before they finish.

That tension between institutional trust and learner engagement has shaped almost every decision inside the product.

Where AI fits and where it does not

Clinton is careful about how he talks about AI in Lightbulb, and that carefulness itself says something.

He does not use it as a marketing claim. He uses it where it solves a specific, real problem: the delay between a learner needing help and actually getting it, and the difficulty of an educator keeping track of what is happening across a large cohort.

Inside Lightbulb’s learning communities, AI acts as an assistant teacher, grounded in each programme’s materials. It can understand questions, provide explanations based on the course content, and handle routine enquiries when the educator is not available.

Questions that need human judgment or context get escalated to the educator. The learner gets faster help. The educator stays in the loop without being overwhelmed.

AI also transforms learning documents into bite-sized, multimedia experiences, simpler explanations, audio, and assessments, adapted to where the learner currently is. The same material, made more accessible without changing what is being taught.

The roadmap extends into AI agents that build learner progress profiles and flag early signs of disengagement, so educators can intervene before a student becomes invisible inside a growing class.

“The goal is not to replace teachers or attach a chatbot to every screen,” Clinton said. “It is to make learning more responsive, help educators intervene earlier and ensure that fewer students become invisible inside a growing class.”

Where this is going

Clinton is direct about the ambition. African institutions are the starting point, not the ceiling.

Five years from now, he wants Lightbulb to be part of the infrastructure through which institutions and trusted educators create, distribute and deliver modern learning programmes, helping them reach learners beyond physical campuses, operate sustainably, and understand whether students are genuinely progressing.

But the larger vision is a global commerce and outcomes network for education. Any credible institution or expert should be able to transform their knowledge into a structured programme. Any learner should be able to discover it, receive personalised support, complete meaningful assessments, and carry verifiable evidence of what they learned.

“We are beginning in Africa because we understand the market, its institutions and its challenges,” he said. “But the problem of fragmented education, weak accountability and uncertain learning outcomes is global.”

A software engineer and four-time founder who grew up around teachers, built across five different industries over a decade, and came back to education because the problem was still broken.

That is the version of the story that makes sense when you read it backwards. Clinton Mbonu was always going to build this. It just took a decade of building everything else first to know exactly how.

Try Lightbulb:

Website: lightbulb.study
Instagram: @lightbulb.study
LinkedIn: Lightbulb Study Email: hello@lightbulb.study

Before building the company, James had a regular 9-to-5 job. On Sundays, whenever he had the time, he would sit down to code, experiment with technology and, in his words, “break things just for the fun of it.”

Cybersecurity had always been something he was passionate about, so when he eventually decided to build something of his own, security felt like the obvious place to start.

But the more he explored the space, the less interested he became in thinking about security as something that existed only on computers.

He began looking at personal safety, intelligence, geopolitics, and the ways events happening outside the digital world could affect people’s lives.

That shift in perspective became the foundation for Cybershield Hub.

James was no longer thinking about building another cybersecurity company. He was thinking about whether technology could help people understand risks and stay safer, both online and offline.

Security is bigger than cybersecurity

The cybersecurity market is already crowded, and James is aware that simply adding another company to the ecosystem would not be enough.

For Cybershield Hub, the difference is in who security technology is being built for.

A lot of security products are designed primarily around organisations, businesses and technical teams. James wants to bring some of that technology and intelligence closer to ordinary people.

That means combining three things: technology, security and intelligence.

The company’s products, including Red AI and Sentinel, reflect that broader thinking.

Red AI is focused on digital security, giving users a more accessible way to interact with security technology and intelligence.

Sentinel takes a wider view. It focuses on geopolitical and security intelligence, looking at developments beyond purely digital threats and helping users understand situations that could have implications for safety.

They are different products, but they come from the same idea: information becomes more useful when people can understand what it means and what they can do with it.

That distinction is important to James because, in his view, information alone is not intelligence.

“Information by itself isn’t intelligence,” he says. “Intelligence becomes valuable when you can put information into context and turn it into something that can influence a decision.”

That is the problem Cybershield Hub is trying to solve.

Rather than overwhelming people with endless security updates, the goal is to make sense of what is happening, why it matters and, where possible, what someone can do about it.

Building for people, not just institutions

Cybershield Hub is still early, and James is deliberately cautious about measuring its progress simply through user numbers.

People are already using Red AI and Sentinel, but the company is still in the process of understanding how users interact with the platforms and which parts of the products provide the most value.

That process has already produced an important lesson. Users do not always use a product exactly the way its builders imagined.

Some features naturally attract more attention than others. Sometimes users find uses for a tool that were not part of the original vision.

For James, that is part of the appeal of building.

“You don’t completely control how people use what you’ve created,” he says.

Instead, users show you what the product can become.

That feedback is particularly important for a company operating in a category where trust and understanding matter almost as much as the technology itself.

The hardest part isn’t necessarily the technology

Building security technology for everyday people comes with a problem that cannot be solved with better code alone.

Trust.

When a product deals with security, people are being asked to trust it with information and situations that can be deeply personal.

James believes this is one of the biggest challenges Cybershield Hub faces.

The technology can work perfectly, but if people do not understand what it does or why they should trust it, adoption becomes difficult.

That means Cybershield Hub has to solve two problems at once: building technically capable products and making those products understandable enough for ordinary people to actually use.

For James, accessibility is therefore not just about interface design. It is about helping people understand security itself. If someone does not understand why a particular threat matters, they are unlikely to consistently take action against it.

Building without charging users, for now

Cybershield Hub is also taking an unusual path for an early-stage technology company. Its users are currently not paying for Red AI, Sentinel or its other products.

James is funding the company through his personal work because he believes strongly in what Cybershield Hub is trying to build. That does not mean the business model is settled.

The company is still figuring out how to create sustainable revenue while keeping its technology accessible to the people it wants to serve.

For now, the focus is on building the products, understanding users and proving that the technology can genuinely contribute to better security decisions.

It is a difficult balance: security products need to be sustainable, but putting too much of the technology behind a paywall could limit the accessibility that James considers central to the company’s mission.

Then James discovered geopolitics

Perhaps the biggest change in James’ thinking since starting Cybershield Hub has had little to do with cybersecurity itself.

It was geopolitics.

Before getting deeper into security and intelligence, he says he was not particularly concerned about geopolitical issues. Building the company changed that. Security, he realized, has always been bigger than computers and networks.

It has influenced wars, political decisions, territories, migration and the movement of people throughout history. The digital world is simply another layer of that much larger security picture.

A cyberattack can affect a company. A political decision can affect an entire population. A conflict can disrupt infrastructure, economies and access to technology. These things are connected. That realization has shaped the way James now thinks about Cybershield Hub.

The company is not trying to treat digital security as an isolated problem. It is trying to understand the relationship between technology, people, governments, physical safety and the geopolitical events that influence all of them.

What Cybershield Hub could become

James does not expect Cybershield Hub to eliminate insecurity. That would be an unrealistic ambition. Instead, he wants to build systems that can reduce its impact, improve people’s awareness and give them better tools to respond when risks emerge.

There is also an African ambition behind the company. James wants Cybershield Hub to create jobs and opportunities while building technology in Africa that can eventually have relevance beyond the continent. For a company still finding its place, that is a sizeable ambition. But the foundation of the idea remains relatively simple.

People cannot prepare for risks they cannot see. And they cannot make better security decisions if the information they need is either inaccessible, too technical or stripped of context.

Cybershield Hub is betting that technology can close some of that gap.

Red AI approaches the problem from the digital security side. Sentinel looks at the wider geopolitical and security landscape.

The products may evolve as users continue to interact with them, but James’ broader thesis is already clear: security should not be something people think about only after something goes wrong.

If Cybershield Hub succeeds, it wants to make security and intelligence part of how people understand the world around them, and give them better tools to stay safe within it.

A deadline slips. A client changes their mind overnight. A designer saves a file in the wrong folder. Someone is clearly talented, but the work just isn’t landing. And every team has that one little thing nobody thought to write down, until it blows up three weeks later.

This is the side of creative and tech work nobody really talks about.

We celebrate the product, the campaign, the launch, the numbers. But underneath all of that is another story: the mess it took to make it happen. The coordination. The follow-ups. The work behind the work.

That’s what this new in60 series is all about. So, Get in!

Every week for four weeks, we’re sitting down with the people who actually make teams, products, and campaigns move. Not for polished leadership speeches; we want the real stuff. What happens when the Slack messages pile up, the deadline refuses to budge, and someone has to step up and make the call?

And since keeping track of what everyone is actually doing is one of the hardest jobs in running a modern team, this series is powered by Eodly, an AI end-of-day report built for founders and team leads juggling mixed teams.

Eodly plugs into the tools your team already uses and turns the scattered traces of the day into a clear, sourced picture: what shipped, what didn’t, who’s making progress, and where things might be quietly slipping.

If you’re building or running a team, give Eodly a quick look. Then come back; we’ve got plenty more work to unpack.

For episode one, we sat down with Saamu Eleja, a marketing, PR, and events pro who’s spent years building teams and running projects through HYPE EMPIRE. And Saamu is refreshingly candid about what that actually looks like on the ground.

First, get everyone looking at the same thing

For Saamu, managing a team starts with something surprisingly simple: everybody needs to understand what success looks like.

He calls it the team’s “northstar metric”, the bigger outcome that ultimately determines whether the work is considered successful.

Every person’s task, even the tiny ones, needs to connect to that outcome. But Saamu has also learned that leadership isn’t just about making people afraid of missing the target. He wants his team to know that he is someone they can relate to when things go wrong.

“I’m not just a boss to fear,” he says.

There is structure, though. Regular meetings. Task updates. Impromptu check-ins when necessary. Everyone should know there is a “judgement day” coming, a point where the work will be reviewed, so there is a reason to keep moving.

It sounds straightforward. In practice, it is one of the hardest parts of managing people: turning a group of individuals with different personalities, motivations and working styles into one team moving towards the same destination.

Give creatives room to be creative

This becomes even more complicated when the people you’re managing are creatives.

Saamu believes creative freedom isn’t something a manager should simply announce. It has to exist inside the working relationship. His approach is to make his own methodology clear, understand how each person thinks, and then create enough room for both to work.

His video editor, Dhaveid, is a good example.

Saamu says he barely gives Dhaveid concepts anymore because Dhaveid has become good at creating ideas from scratch. After working together since 2024, he understands where Saamu is likely going with a deliverable and can often prepare ahead of time.

But Saamu is clear that this didn’t happen overnight. Dhaveid is calm and gentle, he says, and that meant Saamu had to understand that clarity worked better for him than a “jimjim” approach. That is an important distinction.

Good managers don’t necessarily manage everyone the same way. They learn what makes different people work. Clock it.

When things go wrong, don’t start panicking

Events are particularly good at exposing bad systems. Something will go wrong. The question is what happens next.

Saamu’s first move is usually an urgent conversation with his “right-hand man”, someone he can quickly review the situation with before deciding how to respond to the client. But his bigger lesson came from making mistakes himself.

He has lost money and peace of mind by failing to account for things going sideways before a project even started. Now, he tries to build contingencies into the agreement with clients from day one. If there is a possibility that the plan changes, the client needs to know. And, importantly, it needs to be documented.

Because verbal agreements have a funny habit of disappearing when everyone remembers the conversation differently. For Saamu, experience helps, but systems built from previous experience are even more valuable.

The things you cannot delegate

So how does he decide what he should personally handle?

His answer is brutally practical:

What can get spoilt now and ruin the entire work or the client’s trust in me?

Those things stay within his sight. He delegates because people need to grow and because a manager cannot possibly do everything forever. But budgets are different.

“Na me client go hold first when time reach to report,” he says. Funny, isn’t it? But true.

Translation: if something goes seriously wrong with the money, the client is probably coming to him first. So he isn’t handing that responsibility away just yet.

Busy is not the same as productive

We asked Saamu how he knows whether a team is genuinely progressing or simply drowning in work. His answer was probably the shortest of the entire interview:

“Progress in KPI achievement. FULL STOP!!!”

And honestly, there isn’t much more to add.

A team can have meetings all day. Send hundreds of messages. Stay late. Have twenty tasks open at once. None of that necessarily means anything is moving.

The question is whether the team is getting closer to the outcome it was brought together to achieve.

And yes, sometimes the problem is money

Saamu believes poor communication, unclear ownership and too many priorities can all destroy momentum. But he adds another problem that managers sometimes avoid talking about: incentives.

Especially money.

His argument is simple: people work differently when there is a clear promise attached to the work. When that promise disappears, disengagement can follow.

And even with the right incentives, Saamu admits that some people simply aren’t suited to working within a particular team.

After three years of building HYPE EMPIRE, he has seen enough to know that there isn’t a perfect management system that will make everyone fit.

What happens when someone isn’t delivering?

This is where leadership gets uncomfortable.

What do you do when someone is hardworking and talented but the work still isn’t good enough? Saamu starts with communication. Clearly, but diplomatically.

Before blaming the person, he looks at himself too. Was the instruction unclear? Was something overlooked? Can the goal be broken down further?

Sometimes, he says, reducing the person’s goal into smaller wins helps them experience what successful delivery actually looks like. But patience has a limit.

If the problem continues, the conversation becomes firmer, consequences are attached, and eventually, letting the person go becomes a possibility.

“Capitalism is real,” he says.

Talent and hard work are valuable, but they are not the final objective. The team still has to succeed.

When everyone is tired

Deadlines don’t care that your team is exhausted. Saamu’s response is to remind people why they started and make them understand what happens if their part of the work isn’t done. But he also believes a leader has to show some humanity.

Sometimes that means unwinding with the team. Sometimes it means spending from the project budget. Sometimes, he says, it may even come out of the leader’s own pocket.

Because people remember how you treated them when the pressure was high.

And then, in classic Saamu fashion, he adds:

“PRAY TOO ABEGGGGG!!!”

There are apparently some project management frameworks that don’t make it into the Harvard Business Review.

The lesson he learned the hard way

Perhaps the biggest thing Saamu got wrong about leadership was assuming people would automatically buy into his vision just because it made sense to him.

HYPE EMPIRE taught him otherwise.

People arrive with different cultures, different experiences, different ways of thinking. What’s obvious to one person isn’t obvious to the next. And then there’s over-familiarity; a leader can be approachable and still need clear structure.

Saamu describes the danger of losing that structure like Bayern Munich’s infamous 8–2 demolition of Barcelona in 2020. (Sorry, Barca fans.)

The point lands hard: get too comfortable, and you can wreck the very thing you’re trying to lead.

If there’s one takeaway Saamu wants every project leader to carry, it’s this: never start a project without an agreement that holds everyone accountable: the client, the manager, and every person doing the work.

That goes for communication too. In Saamu’s view, spoken instructions are useful, but written instructions are safer.

A conversation fades. A written record stays. And that matters when the client changes the brief, when an event time shifts, when a designer needs to dig up an old file, or when someone suddenly says, “And I no see/hear am oo.”

The record is there to fall back on. And according to Saamu, that alone can spare you plenty of trouble.

The manager’s job changes when the team grows

One of the biggest transitions in leadership is moving from being good at the work yourself to getting other people to be good at it. Your success is no longer measured only by your personal output. It is measured by what the people around you are able to achieve.

That is where delegation becomes unavoidable. And, for many managers, uncomfortable. Saamu admits that micromanagement is something many good managers go through because it is difficult to hand over something you’re personally good at and trust somebody else to do it differently.

But eventually, you have to let go. Otherwise, the manager becomes the bottleneck. His solution isn’t simply delegation, though. It’s documentation.

A good manager, he says, should document processes and build methodologies from them. Because when leaders leave, what often disappears isn’t just the person.

It’s how they knew to get things done.

Consideration before confrontation

Saamu has one message for founders and senior managers: Consideration before confrontation.

Before deciding someone has failed, give them room to explain. Before deciding your solution is the only solution, understand what happened.

And while founders should be ambitious, he believes they should also be realistic about what they are asking their teams to achieve. Be as careful with your goals as you are with your budgets. Because the people executing the idea are the ones who eventually have to make the idea real.

So, what would Saamu do with a new team?

Give him a fresh team tomorrow and 30 days to make it high-performing?

He wouldn’t open with a pep talk. He’d start by studying the room.

Their strengths. Their weak spots. Their existing culture. How they actually get things done. Only then would he shape his approach around what he found. Because after years of leading teams, Saamu has learned something that sounds obvious but is surprisingly easy to forget: you can’t lead people properly until you truly understand the people you’re leading.

And maybe that’s the real work behind the work.

It’s the thousands of small calls about people, expectations, communication, trust, pressure, and accountability: the quiet decisions that decide whether the big things ever actually get finished. That’s what we want to uncover here.

This is just the first edition of The Work Behind the Work.

Next week, we’ll meet another person who makes things happen behind the scenes, and ask a different kind of question: what does it honestly take to make a team work?

That is the score Decide Agent 2.0 posted on SpreadsheetBench V2, a global AI benchmark that tests how well AI models handle the kind of spreadsheet work businesses actually do every day. Financial modelling. Completing templates. Debugging formulas. Creating visualizations. Real tasks. Real pressure. Real evaluation.

And sitting above GPT-5.2 on that leaderboard is a Nigerian startup.

Above Gemini 3.1 Pro. Above DeepSeek V3.2. Above GLM-5.0, Kimi K2.5, Qwen3.5, and other models backed by some of the most well-funded AI research teams on the planet.

A team in Lagos, building with significantly less funding, significantly less infrastructure, and significantly less global attention than every company it just outranked, put its model on the same leaderboard and came out ahead.

That is not a small thing. That is the kind of result that makes you stop and actually pay attention to what Abiodun Adetona is building.

The result did not happen by accident. It happened because Abiodun spent months doing something that most AI companies skip in the rush to ship: listening carefully to the people actually using the product and rebuilding based on what they found.

The engine behind the score is DAX-1, Decide’s proprietary AI system developed specifically for business intelligence and data work. SpreadsheetBench V2 is designed to test exactly the kind of tasks businesses throw at AI tools every day, and DAX-1 handled them better than GPT-5.2 and Gemini on the official evaluation.

Decide Agent 2.0 is now available on the web, in Excel, in Google Sheets, and through its API.

Before the benchmark result, before the global leaderboard, there was a much simpler observation that Abiodun could not stop thinking about.

He grew up watching businesses, especially African businesses, make decisions that felt confident in the moment and turned out to be completely wrong in hindsight. Not because the people making them were careless. Because the information they were working from was incomplete, delayed, misread, or just sitting unexamined in a spreadsheet nobody had time to properly analyse.

The data existed. It always existed. The problem was always the gap between having numbers and understanding what those numbers were actually saying in time to do something useful with them.

Traditional business intelligence tools were built for companies with dedicated data teams, large IT budgets, and analysts who spend entire careers interpreting outputs. They were not built for the founder running a mid-sized business in Abuja who needs to know by Thursday whether to expand her branch or wait another quarter.

They were not built for the finance manager trying to understand why this month’s numbers look different from last month’s without spending three days rebuilding a model.

Abiodun’s answer was to build an AI that could sit on top of a business’s existing data: spreadsheets, financial records, databases, and answer real questions in plain language. Not produce dashboards that need explaining. Not generate charts that require interpretation. Actually answer the question you asked, with the reasoning behind the answer, based on your specific data.

“Most business failures are not caused by bad ideas,” he said. “They are caused by good ideas executed on bad information.”

Here is what Decide AI actually does in practice, stripped of any jargon.

You connect it to wherever your business data lives. Your sales records. Your financial system. Your inventory logs. Your spreadsheets. Then you ask it questions the way you would ask a knowledgeable colleague.

Which products are actually making money this quarter? Which customer segment is leaving fastest? If the current growth rate continues, when does this branch break even?

Decide reads the data, understands the question in context, and gives you an answer in plain language, with the reasoning, not just the conclusion. You do not need to know what a pivot table is. You do not need to export anything, build a formula, or wait for an analyst to come back to you. You ask, and the system tells you what your data is actually showing.

The difference between this and a generic AI assistant is important. A generic AI answers based on what it has been trained to know about the world in general. Decide answers based on your specific business data, your numbers, your customers, your history.

The intelligence is grounded in what is happening inside your business right now, not in general knowledge about businesses.

That specificity is what the SpreadsheetBench V2 evaluation was testing. Not general intelligence. Not how well a model writes an essay or explains a concept. Whether it can actually do the spreadsheet work that businesses need done, and do it accurately, reliably, and better than the alternatives.

Decide Agent 2.0 passed that test ahead of every major competitor on the leaderboard.

The types of problems Decide AI solves will feel familiar to anyone who has run or worked inside a business.

Inventory decisions that should be straightforward but somehow always end up being wrong because the sales data is spread across three different files and nobody has time to reconcile them.

Pricing questions that never get properly answered because building the model to test scenarios takes longer than the window to actually act on the result.

Customer analysis that reveals something important too late because nobody was watching the right signals. Financial planning that relies on assumptions nobody has properly stress-tested because the tools to do it properly are either too expensive or too complicated.

These are not exotic problems. They are the daily friction of running a business. And Decide AI is built to remove that friction, specifically for African businesses operating in environments with more volatility, more informal data collection, and more complexity than the enterprise software market typically designs for.

One early customer, a retail business running multiple locations, had been tracking inventory across branches using WhatsApp messages and shared Google Sheets. They knew the system was broken but had not found anything better that was actually simple to use.

After integrating Decide, they could see stock levels across all branches in real time, get alerts before stockouts happened, and understand which branches were performing differently and why, without anyone having to compile a report.

“I finally feel like I know what is happening in my business,” the founder told Abiodun.

That feeling of actually knowing, rather than assuming, is what Decide AI is built to give every business owner who uses it.

The global AI race has a familiar cast of characters.

OpenAI. Google. Anthropic. DeepSeek. Alibaba. Companies with billions of dollars in compute budgets, research teams of hundreds, and the kind of infrastructure that makes the work of building competitive AI models feel almost inevitable when you have access to it.

Decide AI does not have any of that. What it has is a specific, deep understanding of a real problem, the problem of business intelligence for companies that have data but cannot use it, and months of patient iteration based on feedback from the businesses actually using the product.

That combination was enough to land Decide Agent 2.0 above GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3.1 Pro on a globally recognised evaluation.

Abiodun’s longer ambition goes beyond individual businesses. He sees Decide AI eventually serving as an intelligence layer for African business at sector level, giving not just individual companies but investors, ecosystem players, and policymakers clearer, real-time pictures of what is actually happening across entire industries and markets on the continent.

The data to build that picture already exists. It is scattered across thousands of businesses, unconnected and mostly unread. Decide AI is building the infrastructure to surface it in ways that are actually useful.

Nigeria just showed up on a global AI leaderboard. Above companies that have been doing this longer, with more money, and with more people.

The team that made it happen is in Lagos. And they are just getting started.

First, they need to find a platform they can trust, which already eliminates half the options because too many of them have disappeared with someone’s money at some point.

Then they download an app. Create an account. Go through verification. Top up a wallet. Wait for the wallet to reflect. Place the order. Wait again. And if anything goes wrong at any point in that chain, good luck reaching anyone who actually picks up.

Ibrahim Pelumi Lasisi watched this happen enough times to decide someone needed to fix it. So he did.

Ibrahim is a full-stack developer based in Sheffield, UK. Before Cardron, he was doing client work through his company Devloopr Web Solution Ltd and building side projects like WorqNow.ai and OnlineQuickTools.com, the kind of builder who is always watching for a problem worth solving and then quietly going ahead and solving it.

The problem that became Cardron was not something he researched from a distance. He saw people around him, in Nigeria especially, struggling to buy digital products that should have been straightforward. Gift cards, virtual dollar cards, gaming credits, eSIMs. Things that exist to make life easier, gated behind processes so frustrating they became problems in themselves.

Worse, some of the platforms selling these products were outright scams. People sent money and got nothing. And even the legitimate ones made the experience feel like jumping through hoops just to spend your own money.

“I saw people get scammed,” Ibrahim told in60. “That frustration is what made me build Cardron.”

The idea Ibrahim landed on was not to build another platform with a better interface. It was to not build a platform at all, at least not one anyone has to find, download, sign up for, or learn how to use.

Cardron lives on WhatsApp.

You message the number, say what you want, a $10 iTunes gift card, a $25 virtual dollar card, an eSIM for travel, and Cardron handles everything from there.

The bot picks up the message immediately, reads it using an LLM built directly into the system, processes the payment through bank transfer or crypto, checks the code against real suppliers, and sends the delivery back to your WhatsApp chat within minutes.

The whole interaction feels like texting a friend who happens to be very fast at sourcing digital products.

“Why make them download another app, create another account, learn another interface?” Ibrahim said. “Just meet them on WhatsApp. No app fatigue, no new sign-ups. Just a quick chat, pay, and you’re done.”

Behind that simple WhatsApp conversation is a backend doing real work, admin tools handling inventory, payment tracking, order management, and automated alerts that flag failed orders before a customer even has to ask. The customer sees a smooth chat. The system behind it makes sure nothing falls through the cracks.

The products Cardron brings together: gift cards, virtual dollar cards, eSIMs, gaming credits, might look like a random collection to someone looking from the outside. Ibrahim sees them as the same thing in different packaging.

Someone needs a gift card to send a friend abroad. Someone else needs dollars to pay for a Figma subscription or a Netflix plan that does not accept Nigerian cards. Another person is travelling and needs mobile data without a local SIM.

A teenager wants to top up their Roblox account. Different situations, same underlying need: get me digital access, right now, without stress, from somewhere I actually trust.

Cardron’s answer to all of them is the same interface. One WhatsApp number. Whatever you need.

The payment options are designed with the same logic. Some customers prefer bank transfer in naira. Others hold crypto and find it faster. Both work on Cardron. Ibrahim was deliberate about this, digital commerce in Africa has to meet people where they are, financially speaking, not where a platform would prefer them to be.

Trust is the part of this business that cannot be automated away, and Ibrahim knows it.

“A simple message saying ‘your code is on the way’ on WhatsApp does more than any big marketing we could do,” he said.

That is the insight that shapes how Cardron is built. Speed builds trust in digital commerce the way nothing else does, because speed removes the window in which doubt grows. Every code is verified before it is sent.

The system automatically detects failed orders and triggers alerts. If something does go wrong, a real person responds on the same WhatsApp chat, no support tickets, no email threads, no waiting.

The early customers reinforced this. They were not looking for the cheapest platform. They were looking for the one where the thing they paid for would actually arrive, confirmed, immediately. “People will pay extra just to not have to stress about whether their order is coming,” Ibrahim said. When that is what your customers tell you, you know exactly what to protect.

What those early users also did was expand the ambition.

They kept asking for more. eSIMs. Other access products. Things beyond gift cards. Ibrahim listened. Cardron now handles event ticketing too. Event organizers are already onboarded on the platform, selling digital tickets through the same WhatsApp flow.

That expansion revealed something important. The appetite is not specifically for gift cards, eSIMs or tickets. It is for a place where you can get any digital thing you need, fast, without the scam feeling that makes most of these transactions feel like a gamble.

“Cardron should be the platform Africans think of when they need something digital, and they want it to work,” Ibrahim said. “That’s the goal.”

Not a gift card seller. Not just a WhatsApp bot. The platform Africans trust with their digital needs, whatever form those needs take next.

Ibrahim built the first version of that from Sheffield, watching a problem he knew from Nigeria, and deciding the best thing he could do about it was to make it go away.

So far, it is working.

Try Cardron:
Message Cardron on WhatsApp to get started
Find Cardron online to explore what’s available

You see a phone on WhatsApp or Instagram. The pictures look good. The seller swears it is original, barely used, no fault. You agree on a price after going back and forth in the DMs. You send the money. The phone arrives, and the battery barely holds a charge, or the IMEI is flagged, or it is simply not what was described. And the seller has already gone quiet.

Or you are the seller. You agree on a deal. The buyer sends a screenshot of a transfer that never actually hits your account. By the time you realise, the phone is gone.

This is not an edge case. This is how the market works for millions of Nigerians every single day, fragmented, informal, unverified, and quietly bleeding value on both sides of every transaction.

Prince Paul Omogie has spent over two decades in Nigeria’s digital commerce space watching this problem persist. He pioneered NairaPurchase, one of Nigeria’s earliest e-commerce frameworks, published infoPreneur magazine, and trained over 10,000 Nigerian youths in digital literacy through The Youth Project Nigeria. He has seen enough of how digital commerce has evolved on this continent to know what the electronics market is missing.

Together with Idris A. Hassan, a product designer and data analyst whose work spans fintech, e-commerce, and payments platforms across Nigeria, Cameroon, Morocco, and beyond, Paul built Kasdaq to fix it.

The name is worth explaining upfront, because people assume it is a play on the American stock exchange. It is not. Kasdaq stands for Kasoowa’s Digital Asset Queue, a live, real-time trading platform specifically for new and used electronics in Nigeria.

The stock exchange comparison is actually not far off in spirit, though. Kasdaq works on a matching queue system where buyers can bid within the range of the seller’s set price and last asking price. Real-time. Competitive. Transparent. You see what the market is actually paying for a device right now, not what one seller decided to post on a slow Tuesday.

That price transparency alone solves something the informal market has never been able to offer: an honest signal of what something is actually worth.

The harder problem is trust. And Kasdaq’s approach to it is where the product earns its place.

Every device listed on the platform goes through a verification process that requires detailed information about the device’s current condition. Phones require an IMEI check. Other electronics go through their own identification methods. This is not optional. The listing does not go live without it.

On the payment side, Kasdaq uses an escrow system powered by Paystack DVA. The buyer’s money does not go to the seller the moment a deal is struck. It is held until the buyer physically receives the device, confirms that everything matches what was listed: condition, specs, the full story and only then does the seller get paid.

That sequence is the whole game. The seller knows the payment is real before they hand anything over. The buyer knows their money is protected until they can verify what they are actually getting. Fake transfer screenshots do not work here. And neither does a seller describing a cracked screen as “minor wear.”

If there is a dispute about condition or description, it is handled before the money moves. Not after.

One feature that Idris was particularly deliberate about designing is swapping, and understanding why reveals something important about how this team thinks about the Nigerian market.

“In Nigeria, the average person doesn’t buy new devices,” Paul told in60. “They either look for a used phone or trade in their old one. Swapping has always been a significant part of Nigeria’s local market, even before the rise of electronics.”

Most platforms built around electronics commerce treat swapping as an afterthought, a feature added later for completeness. Kasdaq built it in from the start because it reflects how Nigerians actually behave, not how a designer in a different context imagined they might.

That instinct, building for how the market actually works rather than how it theoretically should, runs through every decision on the platform. The fact that buyers and sellers can agree to meet at a designated location for a physical handover before payment is released is another example. Kasdaq does not fight the offline instincts of the Nigerian buyer. It makes those instincts safer.

The business model stays lean on purpose. Trading fees are the primary revenue stream, kept low enough not to add another burden to people operating in an economy that already extracts enough from them.

Kasdaq is not only for individual buyers and sellers either. Businesses and vendors looking for a reliable sales channel and access to a broader market can list on the platform too. More users mean more competition, which drives prices toward their real value and gives sellers more opportunities to move inventory.

Paul and Idris's vision is specific. With over 850 customers on the waitlist, they want Kasdaq to be the name Nigerians say when they want to buy or sell electronics, the same way Nigerians have learnt to say certain names for food delivery or money transfers. Before any expansion beyond Nigeria, the goal is to own that mental real estate at home first.

“When people hear Kasdaq,” Paul said, “they should know it’s the first platform designed for safe and secure trading of new and used electronics in Nigeria.”

Getting there means buyers stop fearing fake or damaged devices, and sellers stop losing sleep over payment fraud. When both sides of a transaction trust the platform holding them together, the market starts to function the way it always should have.

Nigeria trades a remarkable volume of electronics every single day. Most of that value moves through channels that protect nobody. Kasdaq is the infrastructure that changes that.

Check out Kasdaq:

Kasdaq’s website: Kasdaq.io

Official Social Handles: Instagram – Kasdaq.io, Facebook – Kasdaq.io, Twitter(x) – Kasdaq_io, TikTok – Kasdaq.io, LinkedIn – Kasdaq HQ, Threads – Kasdaq.io.

He went on to study computer science in Germany, worked on IT infrastructure and security for a US state agency, and contributed to open-source projects including GitLab and OpenTelemetry.

The kind of career trajectory that takes you far from the daily reality of a Nigerian provision store owner or a fabric trader working from a roadside stall.

But the thing about growing up around small businesses is that certain questions never leave you. So when Oluwaseyi started asking business owners a simple question: how much profit did you make last month?, and found that almost none of them could answer, he was not surprised. He was just finally ready to do something about it.

Not because they were careless. The sales were in WhatsApp chats. The expenses were in their heads. The debts owed by customers were scattered across old notebooks, or just remembered, until they were not.

That is what Kudilo is built to fix.

The product has a deceptively simple premise. A business owner types what happened into WhatsApp, in whatever words they would naturally use, and Kudilo turns it into a proper record.

“Sold 3 wigs to Amaka, 8k each, she paid 10k.” One sentence. Four facts embedded in it: a sale, a customer, a total, and a balance still owed. Kudilo reads it, extracts all four, and gives the merchant a short confirmation card to check. If something is wrong, they say so in normal words, and it fixes it.

Most business tools ask the user to do the hard work, learn the structure, understand what a debit is, pick the right category, fill the right form.

Kudilo flips that completely. The merchant does the easy part, which is saying what happened. Kudilo does the hard part, which is understanding what that means and turning it into a record.

“Teaching a machine to pull those facts out of normal speech is much harder than building a form,” Oluwaseyi told in60. “But that’s the right place for the difficulty. Hard for us, easy for them.”

The choice to build inside WhatsApp was not an aesthetic decision. It was a practical one rooted in how small business commerce actually works in Nigeria.

The customer messages you on WhatsApp. You agree on the price there. They send the transfer receipt there. They tell you they will pay on Friday, also there. Asking a merchant to close that chat, open a separate app, log in, and fill a form is asking them to do four extra steps for something that does not earn them anything in the moment.

Most of them will not do it. Not because they are not interested in tracking their finances, but because the friction is just high enough to kill the habit before it starts.

Kudilo removes that friction entirely by being where the merchant already is. It also understands how they actually type: English mixed with Pidgin, amounts shortened, messages sent quickly between customers. “Sold 3 wigs to amaka 8k each she go pay balance friday” is a perfectly valid Kudilo entry. If it only understood the tidy version, it would work in a demo and fail in real life.

Samuel Abidakun, co-founder and CFO, brings the security layer that makes this work at the level of trust it requires.

A security expert with fintech experience at Moniepoint and Convexity, his background in penetration testing and application security means Kudilo is built to handle the kind of financial data small businesses are now trusting it with, seriously.

In less than three months since launching in June 2026, Kudilo has onboarded 534 merchants and recorded over 10,000 transactions representing roughly ₦500 million in business activity. Thousands of invoices and receipts have been generated through the platform.

The whole thing has been built entirely bootstrapped, no investors, no external funding, just two engineers who believed the problem was worth solving.

What those early merchants have taught the team has already changed the roadmap in three specific ways.

Fixing records matters as much as creating them. People make mistakes, duplicate entries, or realise something was wrong later. If they cannot correct it easily and in the same conversational way they recorded it, they stop trusting the product. So editing by chat has become just as important as recording by chat.

People send pictures. Receipts, transfer screenshots, supplier notes. Photo-based recording has moved from a planned future feature to a real part of the current product.

And once merchants trust Kudilo with their sales, debts, and expenses, they start asking for more: inventory, ordering, bookings, customer-facing tools. The product is being pulled in that direction by the people using it, which is usually a sign that you have built something that actually works.

The most common reason merchants come to Kudilo is not bookkeeping in the abstract. It is a specific, urgent question: who owes me, and how much?

Selling on credit is completely normal in Nigerian informal commerce. One customer pays part now, another promises next week, and after a while the amounts pile up in ways that become impossible to track from memory.

Asking Kudilo “Who owes me?” and getting back a clear, current list- that is the moment the product’s value stops being theoretical and becomes obvious.

The second most common need is looking professional. Merchants want to send proper invoices and receipts with their business name on them, not screenshots or handwritten notes. They come for the document, but the transaction gets recorded in the process.

Profit comes eventually, but it is usually the deeper need that surfaces once someone has been using the product for a few weeks and starts to see the full picture of their business for the first time.

The version of Kudilo that Oluwaseyi is building toward is bigger than bookkeeping. It is a business suite that any merchant, informal or formal, small or growing, can use simply by talking to it.

You should be able to ask how much you made this week, which products are actually making you money, who still owes you, and what you spent this month, and get a clear answer immediately.

For informal businesses especially, there is something more significant buried in that vision. Many of them are real, profitable operations that are almost invisible on paper because no records exist. If Kudilo is quietly structuring that business activity as it happens, merchants are building a financial history without ever having to think of themselves as people who need accounting software.

That history has implications beyond the business itself, for access to credit, for relationships with suppliers and landlords, for the ability to grow in directions that are currently closed off to businesses that exist only in memory and WhatsApp chats.

A hairstylist does not need to start seeing herself as a business that needs software. She needs to know that Ngozi still owes her ₦12,000 and that last week was better than the week before. If one WhatsApp message gives her that, everything else is just details.

in60. Telling the stories that matter.

430 million people around the world experience disabling hearing loss. These communities communicate through between 200 and 300 documented sign languages, full, complex, natural languages with their own grammar, syntax, and structure, expressed simultaneously through the hands, the face, the upper body, and space.

And almost none of those languages exist in any meaningful way inside the AI systems being built right now.

Not because the technology cannot handle it. Because the data is not there.

Edidiong Ekong understood this problem the way most people understand problems that matter, from the inside, not from a pitch deck.

He is the co-founder and CEO of Talksign, a Nigerian-founded company building AI-powered communication infrastructure for Deaf and hearing people.

Talksign has developed real-time AI that translates speech into sign language and sign language back into speech simultaneously, allowing both sides to communicate naturally without waiting for an interpreter.

The company’s current system supports American Sign Language and works across web, mobile, desktop and smart glasses, while an API allows other platforms to integrate its translation technology directly into their products.

“Speech models learn from hundreds of thousands of hours of data,” Edidiong said. “Sign language models learn from a few hundred. The high-quality, well-annotated data this work depends on barely exists.

That scarcity, not the technology, is why accessibility tools still fail the people they’re built for.”

So he built the infrastructure himself.

What the Talksign Marketplace is, in plain terms

Think about how AI learns to understand spoken language.

It listens to millions of hours of recorded speech, transcribed and annotated by humans, until it can recognize patterns and produce accurate responses.

The data is abundant. The pipelines for collecting and cleaning it are established. The economics work.

Now think about sign language. The data that would let an AI model learn Nigerian Sign Language, or American Sign Language, or British Sign Language sits locked in university archives with no commercial licensing pathway.

It sits with Deaf organizations that have never been offered a financial reason to share it. It sits uncollected, unannotated, invisible to the systems that are supposed to serve the people who use it.

The Talksign Marketplace is the structure built to change that.

It works across four simple functions. Deaf communities, independent signers, and organisations can contribute recorded video data and get paid for it directly.

That raw video is then processed into usable training data through annotation and labelling, work that Talksign routes to fluent signers rather than outsourcing to people who do not actually know the language.

Organizations that need the data can license it with clear, machine-readable terms and full provenance records.

And anyone building in this space can access diverse datasets across multiple sign languages and dialects from one place.

The result is a marketplace that puts money in the hands of the communities generating the data, gives AI builders the material they need to build responsibly, and creates the infrastructure layer that every serious sign language AI product has been missing.

The accuracy problem, and why it matters more here than almost anywhere else

Talksign’s internal models give you a sense of what becomes possible when the data problem starts to get solved.

Their speech-to-sign model, Palm 1.0, reaches 84.2% semantic accuracy at roughly 29 milliseconds of latency.

Their sign-to-speech model, Echo 1.0, hits a 0.927 structural similarity score at 30 frames per second.

These are not vanity metrics. In accessibility AI, accuracy is not a nice-to-have. It is the entire point. A speech recognition model that gets things wrong 15% of the time is inconvenient. A sign language model that gets things wrong 15% of the time fails a Deaf person in a medical appointment, a job interview, a courtroom. The stakes are different.

“A model is only as good as the data underneath it,” Edidiong said.

That is why the Marketplace was designed not just to collect data, but to verify it. Every dataset on the platform can be independently checked, the fluency of the signers, the accuracy of the annotations, the consent and licensing terms.

Sign language data is inherently biometric, capturing a person’s face and body in ways that cannot be anonymized the way text can.

Talksign built an open verification portal specifically to address this, tying every dataset back to its source and ensuring that the communities contributing the data retain clear rights over it.

What this means for Africa specifically

Here is where Edidiong’s work connects to something much closer to home.

Africa is home to thousands of spoken and signed languages, including Nigerian Sign Language, that suffer from the exact same data scarcity problem. Developers building AI tools for Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, or Swahili consistently hit a wall where the language data simply does not exist in the form or volume needed to train a useful model.

The Talksign framework is a blueprint for how that problem gets solved. Not through slow academic grant cycles, but through a commercial marketplace that pays native speakers and signers for their contributions, creates clear licensing pathways for buyers, and builds the kind of data infrastructure that makes locally relevant AI possible.

“Sign language carries meaning across the hands, the face, the body, and space at once,” Edidiong said, “making it some of the richest multimodal training data in the world.”

An African founder building infrastructure for a language the global AI industry has ignored, creating economic value for the communities generating the data, and open-sourcing the verification so nobody has to take his word for it, that is the kind of story in60 exists to tell.

The Talksign Marketplace is live now

If you hold sign language data and want to list it, if you are a signer or organization interested in contributing or annotating, or if you are building something that needs licensed multimodal sign data, Talksign wants to hear from you.

marketplace.talksign.co

📩 sales@talksign.co

Moniepoint shut down MonieWorld. No, it was not a POS machine abroad.

The moment the news broke, the takes started flying. Moniepoint tried to replicate its agent banking model in the UK and failed. Moniepoint wanted to put blue POS terminals on London streets. Neither of those things is true, and both do a disservice to what actually happened.

MonieWorld launched in April 2025 as a remittance product, a mobile app that allowed Nigerians and Africans in the UK to send money directly to Nigerian bank accounts using a MonieWorld account, British bank cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay.

It was a clean, digital, consumer-facing remittance play. No agents. No POS machines. No cash. Just transfers from the UK to Nigeria through your phone.

The service recorded some early growth, monthly transaction volumes among UK customers rose 70%. The numbers were moving.

But Moniepoint made a call that more and more African fintechs are starting to make: the resources keeping this product alive in a highly competitive UK remittance corridor, where Wise, Lemfi, NALA, and others are well established, could generate stronger returns if redirected to Africa.

Moniepoint stopped transactions on and fully shut down MonieWorld. Most employees on the MonieWorld team will be moved into other roles within Moniepoint.

This is not a story about failure. It is a story about prioritisation. Moniepoint currently serves more than 20 million businesses and individuals monthly and processes more than $250 billion in annual digital payments through its subsidiaries.

The core business is enormous and still growing. MonieWorld was an experiment that did not earn the right to consume more of that attention at this stage.

The lesson here is simple: even when a product is growing, that does not automatically mean it deserves more capital than the core business. Moniepoint chose the core. That is a rational decision, not a retreat.

Ventures Platform just raised $83 million. In this market, that is remarkable.

Ventures Platform has announced the final close of its second institutional fund, VP Pan-African Fund II, at $83 million, exceeding its initial $75 million target.

To understand why this matters, you need the context. African startups have raised roughly $930 million across more than 200 deals so far this year, down from $1.16 billion across 447 deals over the same period last year.

The funding environment is genuinely difficult. LPs, the institutions and investors who put money into VC funds, are asking harder questions than they were in 2021 and 2022. Proof of returns, not just promise of growth.

The fund brings in four new institutional backers: the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Norfund, the Dutch family office Alphatron, and the Ashesi University Foundation, alongside a consortium of new family offices. 70% of Fund I’s LPs returned to back Fund II.

When most of your existing investors come back, it is the clearest possible signal that the first fund delivered something worth repeating.

The firm is expanding beyond Nigeria and has already written checks from Fund II to five companies based in Kenya, South Africa, and Egypt, with check sizes up to $3 million.

Ventures Platform’s portfolio already includes Moniepoint, PiggyVest, OmniRetail, and Raenest. Fund II is how they find the next set of those names, before anyone else does.

🤝 Collab Corner — Founders Rant X 2.0 is this Thursday

Most business events are built around performance. Polished panels. Carefully worded answers. Nobody talks about the month they almost shut down.

Founders Rant X 2.0 is the exception. Happening this Thursday, August 28 at Alliance Française, Ikoyi, Lagos from 9am, with Chude Jideonwo, Biodun Stephen, Bayo “Lion” Adedeji, Dr. Joachim Adenusi, Tochukwu MacFoy, Dare Aliu, Ashley Immanuel, and Dr. Chinonso Egemba in the room. Eight voices. Zero filter.

🎟️ Get your tickets → unwindfest.com

He launched a company called TellNig Data Services. The idea was simple: buy bulk data, break it into smaller, affordable packages, and sell it to people who needed connectivity but could not afford to buy it in large quantities. No grand ambition attached to it at the time. Just a clear market gap and a founder willing to fill it.

That business model: identify the friction, remove it, make it affordable, became the intellectual foundation that everything Sam has built since is standing on. SekiApp. ShopNig. And now, Plug.ng.

He did not build Plug.ng because he had a eureka moment in the shower. He built it because fifteen years of watching Nigerians juggle multiple apps just to handle the basics of daily life had made the solution obvious.

The question was never what to build. It was whether to stop experimenting and finally build it properly.

Here is the problem Plug.ng was created to solve, stated as plainly as possible.

The average Nigerian with a smartphone and a job is managing at least four or five different apps just to exist in the modern economy. One app for data. Another for electricity. A third for virtual cards when they need to pay for an international subscription. A fourth for event tickets. A fifth for travel eSIMs.

Each one with its own login, its own balance, its own customer support number to call when something goes wrong.

That fragmentation is not just inconvenient. It is expensive, in time, in mental overhead, and in the accumulated small fees that each platform takes for doing one thing that a single platform could do for you in one place.

“The core problem we identified wasn’t a lack of options, but extreme fragmentation,” Sam told in60. “We looked at that operational friction and built Plug.ng as a unified ecosystem, one single app that consolidates all these essential touchpoints.”

Airtime. Data. Electricity. Virtual cards. Event tickets. Travel eSIMs. Gaming top-ups. All of it under one balance, one login, one app.

Sam’s reference point for where Plug.ng is going is deliberate and worth paying attention to. “Look at what Alipay did in China,” he said. “They started with a single transactional focus and grew into the digital operating system for daily life. That is the trajectory we see for Plug.ng.”

What the market taught him

When Plug.ng launched, Sam’s assumption was straightforward: low pricing and speed would be the primary reasons people signed up and stayed. Cheaper data. Faster electricity payments. Beat the competition on the numbers and the users will follow.

The market taught him something different almost immediately.

“Convenience and versatility completely trump micro-discounts,” he said. Users did not want five separate cheap apps. They wanted one reliable place that handled everything without friction.

The moment Plug.ng shifted its focus from competing on price to building a comprehensive zero-friction ecosystem, retention moved sharply in the right direction.

“In African fintech, saving a user time and mental overhead builds far more loyalty than cutting a few naira off a transaction,” Sam said.

That insight, simple as it sounds, is one that most fintech companies in Nigeria are still learning.

The number that made people pay attention

52,000 active users in the Plug ecosystem at one year old is a solid milestone for any consumer platform. But it is not the number that made people genuinely stop and look at what Plug.ng is building.

That number is 120,000.

In the last eight months alone, Plug Events, the access and ticketing division of Plug.ng, has accredited over 120,000 event-goers without a single stampede or gate bottleneck. Events like the Food Fest at Tafawa Balewa Square in Lagos. Choc Party in Ibadan. Food Fest in Owerri.

And the nationwide accreditation for the Golden Penny Children’s Day Fest, where the platform processed 51,000 children simultaneously across four states.

That last one is worth sitting with. 51,000 children. Four states. Simultaneously. Zero incidents.

Accreditation at scale sounds like a logistics problem. It is actually a technology and trust problem, the kind that exposes every gap in your system the moment real crowds show up. Plug.ng has now run that test at scale multiple times and come out the other side with a track record that speaks for itself.

It is also why the nomination for Startup of the Year at the Ibadan Tech Expo landed the way it did. Not because of the recognition alone, but because it came from a city that watched Plug.ng execute on the ground, not just on a product slide.

What Sam is actually building toward

The technical architecture of Plug.ng was designed from day one to be lightweight and modular. That is not an accident, it is a deliberate choice that allows the team to add features without breaking existing ones and without making the app heavier than it needs to be. Reliability, Sam says, is the ultimate retention engine in Nigeria.

“When payments process instantly without network friction, users stop shopping around,” he said.

The roadmap from here includes train and flight bookings, hotel reservations, business transfers, and insurance, all inside the same ecosystem. But Sam is clear about the sequence.

“To get there, you have to earn the right to scale,” he said. “Right now, our focus is on setting the foundation right, robust infrastructure, the necessary licences, strict audit compliance, bulletproof reliability.”

His measure of success in ten years is not a revenue figure or a transaction volume. It is simpler and more ambitious than that.

“If ‘Plug Ng’ becomes an everyday verb in Nigerian households,” he said. A student in Enugu buying campus data. A family in Ibadan paying their electricity bill. A founder in Kano managing their business account. A traveller booking a ticket. All of it on Plug.ng, without a second thought.

That is what fifteen years of building has been pointing toward. And for the first time, it has a product that looks like it might actually get there.

Try Plug.ng:
Website: plug.ng
X: @aiyeboy · Instagram @samaiyesoro