- Meet Tosin Eniolorunda, Co-founder & CEO of @moniepoint . - Self made millionaire. - Built one of Africa's first fintech unicorns. - Studied Mechanical Engineering... not computer science. - Grew up in Ibadan, Nigeria. - Father was an engineering contractor. - Mother was a teacher. - Went to Obafemi Awolowo University... he fell in love with something outside his major. - Coding. - He taught himself to build software on the side. - After graduating... he joined Interswitch as a software engineer. - Nigeria's biggest payment processing company at the time. - There, he met two people who'd change his life: - Felix Ike, his future co-founder. - His future wife. - For years, he built backend systems for banks. - Learned exactly how broken Nigeria's payment infrastructure was. - Saw the gap. Decided to fix it. In 2015, he quit Interswitch - him and four other ex-Interswitch engineers to build TeamApt. -No investors. Just personal savings. - They worked out of a flat in Lagos. The plan was simple: - Build the backend banking software Nigerian banks were too slow to build themselves. - Their first client wasn't even a bank - It was Computer Warehouse Group, an IT infrastructure firm. That deal is what got them bootstrapping -Fidelity Bank became their first actual bank client. - Then Zenith, GTBank, Access, FCMB, Sterling, UBA followed. But the early years were rough. - Banks were slow to trust a small unknown startup with their systems. -Contracts took months to close. - Cash was always tight with no outside funding to fall back on. Then they pivoted: - Instead of only serving banks... - they built a product for small business owners directly. - They called it Moniepoint. - It let market women, shop owners, and agents across Nigeria... - accept digital payments in places banks had ignored for decades. -Adoption was slow at first. - Then it wasn't. By 2019 - They raised their first funding, $5.5 million, four years after starting. - By 2023, it was processing trillions of naira a month. - By 2024, Google's Africa fund and DPI backed them - Pushing its valuation past $1 billion. - Moniepoint became a unicorn. -From four men in a rented flat. -To a platform now running inside almost every bank that once made them wait for a meeting. A true builder's story. 🔥

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