Shola Akinlade is a Nigerian software engineer and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Paystack, [1] [2] the company that he founded with Ezra Olubi. Paystack was acquired by Stripe in 2020 for $200m. [3]
Akinlade attended St. Gregory's College for his secondary education. In 2006, he graduated with a degree in Computer Science from Babcock University, Nigeria. [4] Shola's career started at Heineken where he worked on their database management as a management trainee and moved on to being a software engineer with banks. [2] In 2016, Akinlade and Ezra Olubi started Paystack. [1] [5]
Akinlade's company Paystack was a part of startup accelerator YCombinator's 2016 batch of startups. The company was created to help businesses in Africa get paid online and offline. [6]
In 2022, Akinlade founded a football club, Sporting Lagos F.C. which he notes is a platform for community development and social change. [7] In March, 2023, Akinlade further expanded his sports business by acquiring a 55% stake in the Danish 2nd division football club Aarhus Fremad. The plan is for Aarhus Fremad to support the professionalisation of Sporting Lagos F.C., relying on Sporting Lagos F.C. as a talent academy in return. [8]
In October 2022, Akinlade was conferred with the Officer of the Order of the Niger (OON) by President Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria in recognition of his contributions to the advancement of technology in finance and business. [9]
Y Combinator Management, LLC (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005 which has been used to launch more than 4,000 companies. The accelerator program started in Boston and Mountain View, expanded to San Francisco in 2019, and was entirely online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies started via Y Combinator include Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Reddit, Stripe, and Twitch.
The Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) is an Africa-wide technology entrepreneur training program, seed fund, and incubator headquartered in Accra, Ghana. The three-phased institution was founded in 2008 to provide training, investment, and mentoring for aspiring technology entrepreneurs with the goal of creating globally successful companies that create wealth and jobs locally in Africa.
Stripe, Inc. is an Irish-American multinational financial services and software as a service (SaaS) company dual-headquartered in South San Francisco, California, United States and Dublin, Ireland. The company primarily offers payment-processing software and application programming interfaces for e-commerce websites and mobile applications.
St. Gregory's College, Lagos, is a Catholic Boys' School with boarding facilities, located 1.0 km from Tafawa Balewa Square in the vicinity of Ikoyi – Obalende, Lagos State, Nigeria.
Wave is a company that provides financial services and software for small businesses. Wave is headquartered in the East Bayfront neighborhood in Toronto, Canada.
Michael Seibel is a managing director at Y Combinator and co-founder of two startups – Justin.tv/Twitch and Socialcam. He first joined Y Combinator in 2013, advising hundreds of startups, and has been active in promoting diversity efforts among startup founders.
Thomas Benjamin Blomfield is a British entrepreneur and a Group Partner at Y Combinator.
PayU is a Netherlands-based payment service provider to online merchants. The company was founded in 2002, and is headquartered in Hoofddorp. It allows online businesses to accept and process payments through payment methods that can be integrated with web and mobile applications. As of 2018, the service is available in 17 countries. The firm is owned by the Naspers Group, which also owns a stake in one of its sister companies, Tencent.
Nium is a Singapore-headquartered cross-border payments company. Initially founded by Prajit Nanu and Michael Bermingham, and launched as consumer-remittance platform Instarem in 2014. In 2016, the company introduced its B2B payments platform and rebranded as Nium in 2019, subsequently elevating Pratik Gandhi to co-founder in 2021.
Brex Inc. is an American financial service and technology company that offers business credit cards and cash management accounts to technology companies. Brex cards are business charge cards, which require at least $50,000 in a bank account if professionally invested, if not with $100,000 to open, and cardholders who default won't damage their personal credit or assets. Emigrant Bank issues the Brex cards.
Chukwuemeka Fred Agbata Jnr. also known as CFA is a Nigerian journalist and a former television presenter at Channels TV. He is into digital marketing and known as a technology entrepreneur with focus on business coaching and public speaking. He was said to have hosted the first virtual telehealth conference of Nigeria’s telemedicine company, CareClick with the theme ‘The Future Of Healthcare Today’ on 24 September 2020. He is said to be involved in the success of various ICT-related companies and organizations where he wielded positions and contributed to their development like the Founder Institute. He is known as the founder of Pacer Venture and has links with Climate Action Africa. He is the MD/CEO of Anambra State ICT Agency.
Dele Bakare is a Nigerian software developer and entrepreneur from Ibadan, Oyo State in Nigeria. He is the founder and CEO of Findworka, a Nigerian startup that hires software developers and builds custom software products. He formerly served as a senior software developer at Infinion Technologies and technology lead at BudgIT. In 2016, he was nominated for the Future Awards Africa Prize for Science and Technology.
Flutterwave is a Nigerian fintech company that provides a payment infrastructure for global merchants and payment service providers across the continent.
Olugbenga Agboola is a Nigerian software engineer and entrepreneur. He is the CEO and co-founder of Flutterwave.
Sporting Lagos FC is a professional football club in Lagos founded in 2022. They currently play in the top tier of the Nigeria football league system: the Nigeria Premier League after gaining promotion from the Nigeria National league.
Ryan Breslow is an American entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and chairman of Bolt, a one-click checkout technology company; a co-founder of Eco, a digital cryptocurrency platform; a co-founder of Love, a crypto pharmaceutical startup, and the founder of the dance non-profit, The Movement.
Mmobuosi Odogwu Banye, known as Dozy Mmobuosi, is a Nigerian businessman and tech entrepreneur. He is an advocate for technological advancement in Africa. He is the founder and former CEO of Tingo Inc.
Paystack is a Nigerian financial technology company that offers payment processing services to businesses and was acquired by Irish-American financial services company Stripe for $200M in 2020. Its headquarters is located in Lagos, Nigeria.
Kobo360 is an African tech-enabled digital logistics platform, headquartered in Lagos and connects cargo owners to truck owners, with a physical presence in 6 African countries, including Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Burkina Faso, and Ivory Coast.
Obi Ozor is a Nigerian entrepreneur, business executive, and public servant. He co-founded Kobo360, a Lagos-headquartered digital logistics platform whose investors include Goldman Sachs, the International Finance Corporation, and Y Combinator.