Nigeria’s investment star Aboyeji prepares for tech city takeoff

It is going to be a busy and testing year for multi-millionaire Nigerian investor Iyin Aboyeji – one that’ll test both his legendary enthusiasm and his sense of humour. Aboyeji has been called a disruptor, a fintech king and the prince of payments. Whatever you want to call him, he is one of the youngest and shrewdest investors to come out of West Africa.

The co-founder of Andela, a job placement service for software developers, and before that of payments service Flutterwave, Aboyeji has been at the heart of some of African tech’s biggest success stories.

He won over Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and drew him to Nigeria with a dash of chutzpah before the age of 30. He turned 33 in March.

In October, his next challenge awaits. He plans to turn the first sod of his ambitious high-tech city in Nigeria. It is likely to take more investment, nerve and patience.

“That is the holy grail that we are praying and hoping and working for. We are getting closer and closer,” he says.

The 50,000 square metre facility will be brimming with infrastructure and workspaces for entrepreneurs and creatives. It’ll be built in Alaro City, 65 km from downtown Lagos, and will be called Itana from the Yoruba word meaning the “kindling of a fire”. Aboyeji says he owns the land and has incorporated a company to run the project. Some are promoting it as a largely deregulated “charter city”.

“It is more like a visible structure of what we are really trying to do. I love it, the city is incredible, it is important, and we have an agreed partner coming to build the infrastructure for the city.

“The part we have been spending a lot more time on is the policy platform, in particular the digital free zone side, where a company sells digital goods or services. You can locate yourself within this zone and you can sell your goods from there, all over the world, with the benefits that should accrue to an export-led business,” he says.

Aboyeji wants Itana to rival international tech hubs like those found in Estonia and Mauritius. He also wants it to take over from Delaware, the tax-friendly state in the US where Silicon Valley venture capital (VC) investors are keen on registering their corporations. “That is the vision really, we will replace Delaware with Itana,” he says.

Political headwinds have wrecked many a well-meaning infrastructure project in Africa. With his trademark optimism, Aboyeji doesn’t appear too concerned.

The Nigerian government is “working very closely with us,” he says.

“I think we have come at it from a very different place. Our point of view is we are here to support government with whatever capacity we have, we are not here to replace them. This is about attracting foreign investment into the country.”

A knack for the big calls

Aboyeji has made a lot of big decisions in his short career as an entrepreneur. He possesses that youthful enthusiasm and humour that gives you the impression he has quipped and laughed through the down days – and he’s had a few in patriarchal and conservative Nigeria.

“It is poetic to watch the tides change there. Because, yes, when I was coming up in the industry… a lot of people were like: ‘Who is this kid? He doesn’t have an MBA; he doesn’t have enough life experience. Can’t do anything’,” he laughs.

After early schooldays in Nigeria, Aboyeji attended a small prep school in Canada followed by law studies at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. He returned to Nigeria with a desire to make his fortune investing in African entrepreneurs.

His family had other ideas. Aboyeji’s father was a pastor and conservative, and wanted him to get a “proper job”.

“I always joke that he serves God and I serve people! That’s how we split it!” laughs Aboyeji.

The senior Aboyeji was also a corporate man for Shell – in those days the first name in oil in Nigeria – and wanted his son to follow him into an equally secure corporate job.

“It’s so funny. When I first moved back to Nigeria, he got me an interview with a big oil corporation. I skipped the interview three times. And the other day he said:

“I am so glad, I hated you at the time, but I’m glad you didn’t take that interview!’”

Instead, Aboyeji found an angel investor in the form of a US college drop-out by the name of Jeremy Johnson.

The entrepreneur dropped out of Princeton, aged 21, to build his businesses, including a highly successful educational technology company called 2U.

At the time, Aboyeji was a penniless young hopeful in New York. By contrast, it was a busy time for Johnson; he was celebrating his 30th birthday in the same week as taking his company public.

Luckily for Aboyeji, Johnson, who had spent time in Accra, was friendly towards the confident and persistent young stranger from Nigeria.

“I had this bad habit when I was growing up, I was bugging people with email. You don’t want to be on the other side of my email! I was just emailing him and hen the responded out of the blue as I was about to leave New York and he said: ‘let’s go out for fresh [salad] and coke.’ That was the meeting that changed my life.”

Did it go down well?

“I didn’t eat the salad. Us Lagosians like our meat!” he says with a laugh.

Enter Zuckerberg

Aboyeji convinced Johnson to invest. Once Johnson was on board, the American’s networking expertise kicked in when the partners landed an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal.

“My co-worker is an expert networker, which is the biggest thing I learned from him… how to talk to capital. Jeremy Johnson, the American… we wrote this piece called ‘Will the next Mark Zuckerberg come from Africa?’ It was a very refined piece.”

That led to an introduction to Mark Zuckerberg, the biggest tech investor of all.

“I think Mark saw it, and Vivian [Wu], who manages his money at the Mark Zuckerberg foundation [the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative]… And they reached out and started the conversation about Nigeria, the Zuckerberg foundation investing in Andela and Facebook being a big part of Nigeria. It’s been amazing ever since,” says Aboyeji.

In 2016, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative led a new $24m Series B round of funding into Andela, boosting its profile immensely. Months later, staff cheered as Zuckerberg walked into the company offices in downtown Lagos.

“You can only imagine how inspiring that was to have Mark visiting us in Lagos and investing in our company. That was pretty cool, like full circle,” says Aboyeji.

“He is intensely mission driven. He is still for me like a huge mentor and role model… I mean it is incredible just to watch him work, and to watch him think. We got to see a lot of that when he came to Nigeria. He is just so far ahead in what he is thinking. In many ways he is responsible for the avalanche of attention that African technology got.”

A wave of success

The year 2016 proved to be something of an annus mirabilis for Aboyeji. At an industry conference that year, surrounded by entrepreneurs, Aboyeji realised the huge potential lying dormant in Africa’s payment space.

“Basically, all the industry people in one room… were complaining about payment,” recalls Aboyeji.

“One guy on stage said: ‘you are too small for us to even bother with. Forget about us trying to deal with your issues. Somebody has to do it, but it is not going to be us, because we have bigger fish to fry.’ I left that conversation thinking ‘wow that’s incredible’, that their fish is that big and perhaps they are missing something. It’s never going to happen if everybody just complains and nobody goes out and does something about it.”

With co-founders Olugbenga Agboola and Adeleke Adekoya, Aboyeji formed Flutterwave in a bid to close the gap.

Aboyeji oversaw the raising of over $10m in capital for Flutterwave before resigning as CEO in 2018.

Since his exit from the firm – which is about to list, a move he feels will be good for the market – he has led his own investment outfit, Future Africa. The current external environment is tough, he says.

“We are going through a tough time. We have had a period of exuberance, there was a lot of money flowing everywhere and people weren’t doing the hard work to sort things out. I see now chickens are coming home to roost,” he says.

“I think it is the perfect time to invest, if you ask me. We know this because of our track record: 2014 is when we started Andela; in 2016, Nigeria had a financial crisis, that is when we started Flutterwave; in 2020 there was Covid and that was when we started Future Africa.”

Future Africa is currently finalising a $30m fund. It has 400 investors and invests in 110 entrepreneurs, he says.

“We are building a business environment where we really can enable innovators who are taking our continent’s more difficult programmes to global businesses. We have evolved a lot since we started.

“We started small and most of the cheques were $2,000 and $2,500, $5,000, $10,000. So now, where we are, we have a lot more institutional investors, we have less individuals, we are more institutionalised than we were before.

“We are writing bigger cheques as well. Before we used to write $25,000 cheques, now we are writing $500,000 cheques.”

Aboyeji always grills the people who come to him for capital.

“What is your own life experience, where’ve you been and how have you set yourself up for success? How do people regard you? What assets do you have?” he says.

“Are you a trickster? I don’t want to work with a trickster.”

Mooving on

When you ask Aboyeji for his most successful investment the answer comes back immediately it is Moove, a platform which provides Uber drivers with access to vehicle financing and other financial services. “For the most part you can’t afford a car, so you go rent a car for 25 bucks a week, which is insane because you have no hope of owning that car.

“You earn maybe 60 bucks a week, which is not much, right? So the drivers end up with not very much to show for many, many, years of work on the Uber platform. “We are partnering with Uber to change that story to where if you drive on the platform for three to five years you can own a car,” he says. “We started it in Lagos in the middle of Covid-19 and now it has become a global business – it is in India and Japan and London. We put in the first $50,000 into the business and we are very proud of that business.”

Aboyeji is reluctant to name the entrepreneurs who disappoint, but admits it happens.

“Multiple times. I always say you never know a founder until you give them money! Often, we do see a rapid transformation in that person. Either they take the opportunity that it is, or see the money that they receive as a reward, which it is not – it is an investment, right? Depending on their attitude, you quickly see whether they are going to succeed or not,” he says.

“This is the time to keep building. Don’t be distracted by the difficulties and the noise. Don’t be distracted by the privations and recriminations. Just keep building because the time will come when values will be realised.”

For the future, Aboyeji’s outfit is working on tech which can allow low-paid workers to get paid daily through WhatsApp.

“Get your money every day so you don’t have to go to loan sharks to pay your bus fares and such like. I think it could be a game changer.”

Aboyeji once told me of his desire to retire before the age of 40. But with his investments and the tech city keeping him busy, that prospect looks more distant than ever. It’s clear he’s not done yet.

“I’m still seven years away!” he protests. “I can see myself giving myself to charitable causes, or public service, but not as a politician. I’m working on it,” says Aboyeji.