Tosin Olaseinde came back to Nigeria broke. Then she built Ladda.
The founder of MoneyAfrica and Ladda on what it actually took to go from financially lost to building Africa's investment ecosystem.
Let me tell you who Tosin Olaseinde is before we talk about anything she has built.
She sings. Badly, by her own admission, “with her crooked voice” is how she put it. She loves food with the kind of passion that makes you trust a person. She will pick an experience over a gift every single time. She loves God, loves her people, loves to travel.
On a Sunday morning when nobody needs anything from her, she is just Oluwatosin, an optimistic, go-getting woman who genuinely enjoys being alive.
I am telling you this first because the story of Ladda only makes sense if you understand who built it. And who built it is someone who knows exactly what it feels like to have nothing, not as a theory, but as a lived, uncomfortable, humbling reality.
Tosin spent about ten years in South Africa. She studied there, worked there, was completing her training as a chartered accountant. Nice flat. Her own car. Decent income. From the outside, it looked like the life.
But she mentioned something that hit differently: she was consuming everything she earned. No savings. No investments. Just a comfortable lifestyle with no foundation underneath it.
Then CNBC Africa Nigeria came calling. There was a role. She had made the top ten traders in CNBC Africa South Africa and the opportunity felt like a sign. She took the leap.
“I knew it was time,” she said. “I was mentally in Nigeria, physically in South Africa.”
The first year back was not what the highlight reel suggests. She moved back into her parents’ house. No car, this was before Uber, so yellow buses it was. No savings, because she had never built any. The freedom that came with having her own income, the kind you don’t fully appreciate until it’s gone, disappeared overnight.
“It was then I got the lightbulb moment,” she told in60. “I had to learn how money works. This must never happen again.”
That sentence is the whole origin story of everything that followed.
She started teaching people about money on Instagram, breaking down personal finance in plain language for everyday Nigerians who had never been taught how any of it worked. MoneyAfrica grew from that. But somewhere along the way, she noticed something that changed the direction of everything.
People were learning. They were nodding. They were sharing the posts. And then they were going right back to their old habits, because education alone does not change behaviour. Knowing what compound interest is does not make someone invest. Understanding diversification does not open a brokerage account.
“We will educate but sometimes people will not apply the knowledge taken,” she said. “So I thought, let’s scrap this cost of teaching and embed them into the ecosystem. We teach for free and they invest with us. So from start to finish, we journey with them.”
That insight became Ladda.
If you asked Tosin to explain Ladda on a Lagos bus to someone who has never invested a naira, she would not reach for jargon. She told me exactly what she would say:
“It’s your money or your life. Save your money now so it can save you tomorrow.”
She means that literally. Savings and investments buy you time. They buy you peace of mind. They help you move between opportunities without panic. They let you go after your goals without waiting for permission.
They help you buy a house, handle an emergency, make a bold career move. “You owe it to yourself to look after yourself,” she said simply.
Ladda is an investment platform built for Africans who have never invested before, people who earn, but have no system for making what they earn work harder than they do.
The platform combines the education and the action in one place, so nobody learns and then gets lost trying to figure out what to do next.
They launched a children’s app too, gamifying how money works, because Tosin has decided to catch people early enough that they never have to go through what she went through when she moved back.
The challenge she does not usually say out loud? Hiring and funding. The two things that quietly test every founder.
“The right hire is a game changer but they don’t come cheap,” she said. “With the right team you will hack it. And the founders have to keep the spirit up as they steer the team towards the desired outcome.”
There is something in that sentence, the part about keeping the spirit up, that tells you more about what building actually costs than any financial statement could.
Before Ladda, before MoneyAfrica, there was a version of Tosin applying for jobs in South Africa, trying to pivot from auditing into corporate finance, and being told, politely and consistently, that South Africans would be prioritized.
She eventually landed a similar role at a top multinational in Nigeria. That younger Tosin, the one sending CVs and being turned away, is someone she thinks about.
“Now we hire about 30 people and continue to create jobs across our businesses,” she said. “So to younger Tosin, yes we are doing it. So proud. And there’s lots to uncover.”
Where is Ladda going? Tosin did not reach for a five-year plan. She reached for something bigger.
“We are building towards an ecosystem of financially independent Africans,” she said.
“From low income earners to mid income earners. Let’s teach you compounding and watch you reap the fruit of your labour.”
She is clear that it is early. “We barely just started,” she said. But the vision is not small. Africans building sustainable wealth through investing, not through luck, not through one big break, but through consistent, informed decisions made possible by a platform built by someone who once had to learn all of this the hard way on a yellow bus in Lagos.
That is Ladda. And that is Tosin.
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