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. [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 Y Combinator'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]
Paul Graham is an English-American computer scientist, writer, entrepreneur and investor. His work has included the programming language Arc, the startup Viaweb, co-founding the startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, his essays, and Hacker News.
Y Combinator Management, LLC (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator and venture capital firm 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.
Babcock University is a private Christian co-educational Nigerian university owned and operated by the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Nigeria. The university is located at Ilishan-Remo, Ogun State, Nigeria, equidistant between Ibadan and Lagos.
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.
Olamide Brown, née Orekunrin, is a British-Nigerian medical doctor, healthcare entrepreneur, and founder of the Flying Doctors Healthcare Investment Group and a director of Greentree Investment Company.
Michael Seibel is a partner 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.
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.
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, entrepreneur, and business leader. He is the CEO and co-founder of Flutterwave, Vice Chairman of the U.S.-Africa Business Center Board, and a member of prominent business organizations including the Milken Institute Africa Business Leaders Council, the Wall Street Journal CEO Council, and the Fast Company Impact Council.
Sporting Lagos FC is a professional football club from Lagos, Nigeria founded in 2022. The club currently competes in the Nigeria National League. the second tier of Nigeria's football league system, following relegation from the 2023–24 Nigeria Premier League. Nicknamed "The Tech Boys", Sporting Lagos played their home games at Mobolaji Johnson Arena also known as Onika Stadium.
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.
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.
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.
Tosin Eniolorunda is a Nigerian software engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded and is the CEO of the Nigerian fintech bank, Moniepoint Inc. He began his early career with Interswitch as a software engineer before starting TeamApt in 2015.
Grey, formerly known as Aboki Africa, is a financial technology company headquartered in Delaware, US. Founded in 2020 by Idorenyin Obong and Femi Aghedo during the global pandemic of 2020, the company focuses on creating global financial products for digital nomads. Grey is registered and licensed in Canada by FinTrac and the USA by FinCen and operates in the financial service market. The business model of Grey revolves around offering an online platform that facilitates international transactions and currency exchange for users in countries across Africa, the United States, Europe, and now Latin America and South East Asia