Engineer, founder and investor

Leadership began early. As a student at Adekunle Ajasin University, I led on campus and built software that my school put into live use.

I was president of the Computer Science Students' Association and an active member of Enactus. I created the Career Advancement Programme, which trained students in technology skills, and the Developers Festival, where people pitched their ideas to industry leaders.

An electronic voting platform I built conducted the students' union government election for a student body of more than 20,000, with the endorsement of the school management. A detector I built for forged school fee receipts caught fraudulent payments and saved the administration money. It was my first work in fraud detection.

I began my career as a software engineer, and that training still shapes how I think about systems. I worked as an engineer at Edves, then joined the early team at Accounteer as a software engineer and later moved into product management. We built tools for small businesses that were still forming the habits and systems to use them. The lesson was that understanding software is not enough. You have to understand the daily reality of the people you serve.

Not every venture worked. At Hojah, a food delivery app that launched in Nigeria before the market was ready, I was a founding engineer with equity. It was one of several ventures that did not succeed, and it taught me to treat timing as part of the product.

At Moniepoint, I helped build the product and led growth to build the distribution network that put banking and payment terminals in the hands of merchants the formal system had ignored. That work showed me that distribution decides outcomes as much as the product does.

Prembly began with a narrow question about enabling payments through biometrics and identity verification in Africa. It widened into a larger question about how trust works in digital markets. Today we build identity verification, fraud prevention and compliance infrastructure from Nigeria, Kenya and the United States, and more than a thousand local and global businesses rely on it. We were part of Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch.

As the company grew, my work shifted from building the product to building the teams and systems that build many products.

One conviction guides my work.

Economic participation in the global economy expands when people and businesses can create exportable value, prove who they are, move money, reach markets, and access capital, all resting on the dependable infrastructure that makes it work.

The aim is not a quarrel over the past. It is for Africa to become productively valuable to the world, and to move from dependence to genuine collaboration. You can read the full argument in my thesis. I write to work ideas out in public, and a good place to start is Making Sound Judgement When the Rules Keep Changing or The Ancient Wisdom of Joseph, or the full list of essays.