Olugbenga Agboola Teamed up with Lyinoluwa Aboyeji in 2016
To create Flutterwave, Olugbenga Agboola teamed up with Iyinoluwa Aboyeji in 2016. Agboola, a former PayPal developer and Google app manager, has taken his firm beyond any other African startup.
Given this success, 2021 has the potential to break all fundraising records in the African fintech industry. Many people want to cash in on the boom on the continent, thus many of them will travel there. Tyme Bank, Adumo, Diool, and Stitch all helped to unleash the deluge this year. Fintech businesses received 60% of the total $566 million in funding that African startups raised in 2021, per data compiled by TechCabal. In August 2016, only a few months after its initial debut, Flutterwave was chosen as one of only two African firms to join the YCombinator accelerator program. Flutterwave was formerly regarded as having the ability to “transform how money moves for an entire continent” by Y Combinator partner Aaron Harris.
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Startups apply to Y Combinator not only for the $125,000 in seed money offered but also to gain access to the program’s partners and network of other startups. Zachariah George, a former investment banker for Barclays, heard about Flutterwave through connections at Stanford and Y Combinator. After realizing that their product would make it easier for company owners in Africa to accept and send payments, he decided to invest.
For more than seventy African entrepreneurs, George has invested in their formative stages as the chairman of the Africa branch of Startup Bootcamp, an accelerator similar to Y Combinator, and a total of €727 million in 950 different companies. He believes that most entrepreneurs are energized by the approval they receive from Y Combinator and other such organizations.
To prove the viability of a startup, many submit their business plans to Y Combinator and present their products on demo day. It’s an open invitation to both large financial institutions and individual investors. Since several major tech companies were interested in expanding into the African market, Flutterwave was in a prime position to get direct funding from these companies. In addition to the two weeks of intensive instruction in San Francisco, cohort members also received expert mentoring, equity-free help, and credits for Google goods even after the program ended. In 2020, twenty African startups participated in Google for Startups, even though the event had to be organized online because of constraints imposed by the epidemic.
To create Flutterwave, Olugbenga Agboola teamed up with Iyinoluwa Aboyeji in 2016. Agboola, a former PayPal developer and Google app manager, has taken his firm beyond any other African startup. Given this success, 2021 has the potential to break all fundraising records in the African fintech industry. Many people want to cash in on the…