Flutterwave recently attained unicorn status after the payment services fintech received $170 million in its Series C funding. The injection of funds pushed the fintech’s valuation past a billion dollars, making it the third African unicorn in fintech.
Interestingly, this funding series comes about a year after the Series B funding of about $35 million in January 2020. The co-founder and current CEO of the payments company, Olugbenga Agboola, recorded both achievements under his leadership as Chief Executive Officer.
Our profile for the week looks at this serial entrepreneur who has had two successful exits.
Education
Agboola was born in Lagos, Nigeria, and had his early schooling in Nigeria before traveling to the United States of America. He bagged an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of Management, Cambridge. He also has a master’s degree in information technology security and behavioral engineering. He got the standard IT security certi
When Nigerian businessman and philanthropist Tony Elumelu, in his keynote address before world leaders, at the 2019 Invest for Growth in Africa Conference in Paris argued that “Africans do not need aid – rather our young people need investment,” the business tycoon and thought leader spoke confidently on sustainable means to grow the economy through real-time empowerment and investment.
Today, away from aids, Nigeria in 2020 is proud of what venture investments from tech have added to its GDP. From disclosed raisers to undisclosed investments, Nigerian tech startups in the year under review closed millions in cash to scale and expand their ventures, thus -facilitating increasing employment opportunities for citizens with possibilities of cutting down on Nigeria’s poverty index which stood at 40.1% in 2019.
News
Nigeria-based API startup raises almost 1 USD mln in pre-seed funding Thursday 17 December 2020 13:50 CET | News Nigeria-based API fintech startup, OnePipe, has announced that it raised almost USD 1 million in pre-seed investment.
The round was led by the team at US seed-stage accelerator, Techstars, and African impact-focused VC fund, Atlantica Ventures. Several institutional investors like Future Perfect Ventures, Raba Capital, P1 Ventures, and others also participated.
While participating with the Open Banking Nigeria group to bring awareness and drive policy around it, OnePipe created a gateway that pools APIs from multiple sources under a unified specification. According to the startup, this specification can be refined to fit the final standards once the awaited policies are actualised.