Tag Archives: Africa Startup

Olusegun Adeleke: The founder who heard a voice

At some point in the middle of the night, Olusegun Adeleke was walking down the stairs toward his bedroom, trying to force himself to sleep after hours of restlessness, when a thought arrived that didn’t feel like his own. It was the seed of PAAQ, which stands for Please Ask Any Question, a platform connecting knowledge seekers with verified experts …

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Precious Kolawole’s unlikely path to becoming a Machine Learning Engineer at Shopify

Precious had a clear plan: become like Ben Carson, the American neurosurgeon. She applied to study medicine at the University of Lagos, Obafemi Awolowo University, and the University of Ibadan. None of them took her. OAU offered her zoology instead. She negotiated her way into a physiotherapy programme and found she actually enjoyed it. Then COVID-19 hit, and everything stopped. …

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How Seun Koshoedo Is Building the Soul of African Brands

Most branding agencies will tell you they help companies grow. Seun Koshoedo, founder and Chief Visionary Officer of Xcentrique Media, says they do something deeper: they give brands a soul. In a market where African companies are either chasing global trends or struggling to translate their identity into something customers actually connect with, her seven-year-old agency has carved out a …

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Rita Enosegbe’s playbook for building a brand as a founder in Africa

When you see that 11,000 people follow Rita Enosegbe on X, It’s hard to imagine that she had only 11 followers a few years ago. It was a frustrating time for her. She had failed at network marketing, struggled for 11 months as an affiliate marketer, and had just lost the opportunity to pursue her master’s degree in the UK …

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How Sharon Ariyo-Adeoye helps African founders build high-trust brands in a low-trust economy

Sharon Ariyo-Adeoye has always been good at convincing people. “As long as I can remember, I’ve always been somebody who is confident about persuading people to believe or be involved in things that I do or things that I believe in,” she says. That natural gift led her into tech during the era when it “was the new rave.” She …

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Why Tosin Olugbenga gave up Ph.D to become a software engineer

Tosin Olugbenga grew up in Ekiti State, Nigeria, where academics were the pinnacle of success. It was only natural that after completing his first degree at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, he pursued a master’s degree in physics. His path seemed clear: get a PhD, become a lecturer, and join the ranks of the academics he admired, but the Nigerian …

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From Weekend Side Project to Global EdTech: The AI Examiner Story

It started with a casual offer between friends. Nengi Sagbe, a medical student and product designer, had run out of practice questions while prepping for exams. Sitting across from her was Richard Eradiri, a software engineer who’d spent five years building apps for Nigerian banks but was itching to create something of his own. “I could just build something for …

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Ronald Eguh Didn’t Chase Tech — Tech Found Its Way Back to Him

Ronald Eguh was the kid everyone called when something broke. A frozen phone, a dead laptop, mysterious Wi-Fi issues—he fixed them all. “I was the family IT guy,” he says with a laugh. Naturally, he wanted to study computer engineering. But like many Nigerian kids, what he wanted didn’t matter as much as what looked prestigious. His family pushed for …

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Kelvin Omereshone’s unconventional advice on forging your own path in tech

From a young age, Kelvin Omereshone’s interests marked him as a maverick. Unlike other children in Delta State, Nigeria, who listened to popular songs, he gravitated toward classical music. This distinct interest hinted at a mind that would chart its own path. At 10, his curiosity led him to search his father’s briefcase. Inside was a notebook filled with code …

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Eric Aprioku, founder of Asyncpay, on building local, while scaling globally

For as long as he could remember, computers had always fascinated Eric Aprioku. However, when his parents enrolled him in a computer school, it was as if his fingers were cursed. “I seemed to have an unrequited relationship with hardware because I spoiled every single system I tried to fix.” He was close to giving up when he discovered Python …

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