Fintech Tycoon, Olugbenga Agboola’s Shrewd Move

As one of the leading tech entrepreneurs in Africa, Olugbenga Agboola is a young man unarguably imbued with a great deal of knowledge and more qualifications than one can count.

For the co-founder of Flutterwave — one of the continent’s most prominent tech brands — he has built a Fintech unicorn that has rapidly gained prominence in the payments landscape, providing a single-use solution infrastructure for a lot of people in Nigeria and across Africa.

Founded in 2016, in almost a decade, Agboola’s Flutterwave has become Africa’s largest payments startup, helping merchants accept local and cross-border transfers across more than 30 African countries.

Along the way, it has recorded significant milestones in its journey within the African tech ecosystem and secured investments from renowned venture capital firms, forged strategic partnerships with industry giants, such as Alibaba’s Alipay, Uber Technologies Inc., Audiomack, and Netflix Inc.

For interested followers of the Deepseek chatter on X (formerly Twitter), AI is kind of a big deal. But while everyone’s talking about it, Agboola is doing something about it. The tech mogul has been betting big on Nigerian AI startups, which he believes have what it takes to be global players.

He has put his money where his mouth is through his venture fund, Resilience17 (formerly Berrywood Capital). Agboola recently launched ‘Go Time AI’—an accelerator designed to support African startups working on artificial intelligence products.

The first cohort of the accelerator, launched in 2024, provided participating startups with financial support, technical resources, and guidance from industry experts. It offered up to $200,000 in funding and mentorship to selected startups, in exchange for eight per cent equity.

Also recently, he bought Mono, a Nigerian open-banking startup, in an all-stock deal reportedly worth between $25 million and $40 million.

The acquisition brings together two of Africa’s leading fintech infrastructure companies. Founded in 2020, Mono has built APIs that allow businesses to access bank data, initiate payments, and verify customers. Both Y Combinator-backed companies count Tiger Global —the lead investor in Flutterwave’s Series C and Mono’s Series A— among their backers. With this deal, Agboola’s stock in one of the continent’s biggest payment networks— with an estimated net worth of over $200 million— is expected to soar to a new mind-boggling figure.