Bad goods from China. Broken payment rails. Omolara Sanni fixed both.
Meet Omolara Sanni, the co-founder quietly making China-Africa trade work for the everyday Nigerian business owner.
Let me tell you something about Omolara Sanni that she said so casually it almost slipped past me.
She said: “I’ve never had to fight to be taken seriously as a woman. What I’ve experienced is being underestimated. Mostly before I even speak.”
And then she said: “But when I eventually do, they can’t help but take me seriously.”
That sentence is Midddleman in a nutshell, a company that most people probably scrolled past before realizing what it actually does. And then looked back.
Omolara Sanni and her co-founder Adeola Owosho spent about five years in the e-commerce industry in Lagos, dabbling in three different businesses, one of which made about ₦20 million in revenue towards the end of the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020.
They were not rookies. They were building, learning, and getting burned, the way every real founder does.
The burning that mattered most came from China. While running their e-commerce businesses, they ordered a product that arrived with terrible quality. Customers complained. Returns piled up.
Omolara only recently disposed of the leftover stock, while renovating her apartment. That detail is funnier and more painful than any pitch deck slide could ever capture.
But before the quality disaster, there was the payment problem. When Nigerian naira cards stopped working for dollar payments, they had to start funding Alipay wallets to pay Chinese suppliers, and getting that done was a nightmare. No clear process. No trusted system. Just confusion, middlemen, and money disappearing into the gap between Lagos and Guangzhou.
They had lived the problem. So they built the solution.
What Midddleman actually does — explained simply
Omolara put it better than I could. Imagine you sell clothes and you source from China. You don’t speak Mandarin. You don’t know which suppliers are real. You don’t know what RMB means, it’s the Chinese currency, by the way, the yuan, and you’re terrified of sending money and getting nothing back.
Midddleman handles the entire process for you. You discover products on the app, get connected to a verified procurement agent in China who physically inspects the quality of what you’re buying, Midddleman processes the payment securely, and then connects you to a trusted logistics company to ship it home. Air or sea, your choice.
The procurement service costs between 5 and 10% of the value of goods you’re buying. The shipping cost depends on your method. That is the whole model. No mystery, no complexity. Just a reliable bridge between a Nigerian business owner and a Chinese supplier, with a human on the ground in China making sure what arrives is actually what was ordered.
Before building Midddleman, Omolara had over five years of experience in product marketing across fintech and social commerce. She wasn’t a first-time founder guessing her way through go-to-market strategy.
She had spent years inside startups figuring out exactly how to build trust with customers and drive adoption. That experience is visible in how Midddleman communicates, clearly, accessibly, and without the jargon that makes most trade-tech companies feel like they’re for someone else.
The numbers that made people stop underestimating
Midddleman has processed over $1.6 million in transactions. They have over 12,500 registered users. Google for Startups named them a Top AI Startup in 2025.
The Lagos Angel Network just backed them with investment. And most recently, Omolara walked into the Female Founders & Funders Year 3 Demo Day and walked out with the ₦5 million first prize.
Not a small woman. Not even close.
What the investment unlocks
The Lagos Angel Network cheque is not just validation, it is runway. And Omolara is thoughtful about how she uses it. The operational base in Guangzhou comes first.
Getting the procurement system right in Nigeria before expanding. Then Ghana. Then Kenya. Two years from now, she wants Midddleman operating in both countries with real market share, not just a flag planted on a map.
“We’re taking it one step at a time,” she said. “We’re still learning a lot with our procurement system so we’re giving it some time before we expand.”
That kind of discipline, knowing what you don’t know yet and refusing to scale before you’re ready, is rarer than most people think. And it’s probably why the Lagos Angel Network wrote the cheque.
The China-Africa trade corridor moves over $300 billion a year. Most of the Nigerian business owners on that corridor are navigating it alone, wrong goods, lost money, no recourse. Midddleman is building the infrastructure to change that, one verified supplier and one secured payment at a time.
Omolara Sanni was underestimated before she walked into the room. She usually is. And then she speaks, or her work speaks first, and the room adjusts.
That’s the whole story. And it’s just getting started.
Find Midddleman → @OurMidddleman
Are you a founder building something for African trade, commerce, or logistics? I want to hear your story. 📩 in60spotlight@gmail.com