E-Business

Paystack, Nigerian Startup Raises $1.3m

Published

9 years ago

December 20, 2016

Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi-paystack-co-founders..... photo credit Forbes

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Paystack, one of Nigeria’s most hotly anticipated tech start-ups, has just secured $1.3m seed investment from both international and homegrown investors, according to Forbes.

This is coming after Andela, a Nigerian start-up company based in Lagos and New York, blazed the trail with a $24 million Series B funding round from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

Paystack, a company, founded by Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi, however initially caught the eye of industry commentators as it was one the first Nigerian tech company to be accepted into the world-famous Y Combinator progamme, based in Silicon Valley.

Since then, having taken Paystack through Private beta, and securing $120,000 early-stage investment from Y Combinator, Akinlade [CEO] and Olubi [CTO] have quietly been building the company, working to secure this Seed investment round, whilst also building a network of partner merchants in Nigeria, over 1,500, who are now using the platform to accept online payments.

Mfonobong Nsehe of Forbes spoke to Paystack’s CEO, Shola Akinlade, to find out how the company is working to fix Nigeria’s fragmented online payments system.

Introduce us to Paystack – how did the idea come about?
We started Paystack because we knew online payments in Africa were essentially broken and someone definitely had to do the hard work of fixing it. Ezra Olubi [Paystack Co-founder and CTO] and I graduated from Babcock University 10 years ago, and after that, I worked on Precurio, a collaboration software for businesses in emerging markets which was downloaded over 150,000 times and made available in six languages.
Ezra on the other hand, started off working in payments with Eyowo, and then went on to become the CTO of Jobberman, and Delivery Science. But we were both from solidly tech backgrounds.
Sometime in 2014, I was helping a few banks with financial software and realised I had a great chance of solving the payments problem; firstly because I had built world-class software before, and now, I had a little access to the financial industry.
I started speaking with people in the tech ecosystem and then put up a waiting list, which was really just a call for those who wanted to try out what we were working on. Within one month, we had over 300 people join the waiting list. From this, we felt that we had tapped into an issue that was experienced by many, so we grew the idea from there.
The challenge was to solve the issue of online payments in Africa, somehow connecting the super-fragmented aspects of the sector. What we did was develop multi-channel payment options for merchants across the country, enabling them to accept payments from around the world, via credit card, debit card, and direct bank transfer on web and mobile. It’s taken two years of non-stop hard work to grow it from idea stage, to the product we have today.

You were accepted into the tech accelerator Y Combinator at an early stage. What was the process and how did it help your company?
Y Combinator is amazing. I had applied for the tech accelerator with my first company, in 2007 and, sadly, didn’t get in. I applied again last year with Paystack and got invited to Silicon Valley for a 10-minute interview.
We packed our bags, took our laptops, got on a plane, shared our vision with YC applications team, showed them what we were building and, to our surprise, we got in, making us the first Nigerian company to be accepted into the program.
The YC program basically changed our company’s trajectory. They funded us with $120k and advised us to focus on building our product and talking to our customers, noting that almost everything else involved in building our ideas and company, would be a distraction.
They helped us focus on the detail; the core structure of the company that was going to help us scale. YC also helped with fundraising, as at the end of Y Combinator, there’s a Demo Day where each company has to present to the top early stage investors in the world.
It seems we were able to capture the attention of investors who understood the scale of the challenge, as well as our solution for fixing the problem of payments in Africa, as we were able to raise our seed round on the back of Demo Day.

You’ve just come out of beta, but you already have over 1,500 Nigerian companies using your service – how have you been able to grow so quickly?
Paystack opened up its beta in January, and in less than a year we’ve processed well over 1 Billion Naira. It’s really people telling other people about what we offer, how we can help them build their business, by using paystack. We’re already working with some of Nigeria’s top platforms, such as iROKOtv, Jobberman, Payporte, and Hotels.ng – now we want to continue to build out our list of homegrown companies.
When we tell people that they can start receiving payments within 30 minutes from sign-up, I think many are, initially, a little cynical. So many merchants in Nigeria have faced so many challenges with receiving payments over the years, I think perhaps they thought it sounded a little too good to be true.
But they had faith, they tried us out, our product worked for them. Our customers have been our evangelists, and that has really helped us grow quickly. Y Combinator told us to talk to our customers and we did. It seems that our customers then went on to talk about us.

You’ve just announced that you have closed on seed funding of $1.3M – how will you be investing this into the company?
We will use the investment to build out our engineering team, grow our sales and marketing operations and accelerate our product development.
It’s exciting because more than ever, we feel like we now have the capacity to solve the problem of making online payments in Africa – ensuring a smooth interaction between merchants and customers.

What can Paystack offer online merchants and sellers that the likes of Paypal or other international fintech companies can’t?
Payments are really fragmented in Africa and Nigeria, because people pay in different ways here and our problems are a bit different from the rest of the world. Paystack offers support for local payment methods, like Verve Cards, USSD payments like GTBank’s *737#, and direct bank connections.
More than that, I think we are just better positioned to meet the needs of the Nigerian merchant and that’s why were are able to build features like the transaction timelines to help them visualize and understand card failure rates, or payment pages to help them accept payments without a developer, and we will continue to go deeper. We understand the challenges of the African fintech market and we feel that we are best placed, as Africans, to solve said challenges.

Paystack is available in Nigeria at the moment – do you have any plans to scale the company outside of Nigeria and across Africa?
Oh yes, we are already having early conversations in Ghana and should support a few more countries in 2017. 2016 has been a brilliant year for us, and we’re happy to close it out with this funding announcement, but we’re also always thinking several steps ahead, and building out across the continent is absolutely critical to our growth strategy. The entire African payments market is, I believe, up for grabs.
There’s a lot of buzz around fintech in Africa at the moment, what does the wider market and growth potential look like for Paystack and other fintech start-ups.
The growth potential for fintech is enormous. Nigerian businesses collected about $150B last year, most of which was collected offline. However the digital economy on the continent is growing fast, and Nigeria alone currently sees 6 million new Internet users every year. Such a high proportion of payments are still conducted offline, but with more people coming online every year, the growth trajectory is staggering. It’s easy to see that there will be more digital transactions this year than last year, and this is a trend that will continue for a very long time.

Raising investment / seed funding for an African start-up in this economic climate cannot be easy. Can you give us an idea of the current investment landscape?
Funding is difficult and distracting for early stage businesses. We had over 60 calls and meetings and only about 15 were positive. However, I’m excited that Silicon Valley is now paying attention to African companies, with Mark Zuckerberg, Y Combinator and 500 startups all betting on African startups this year. I’m optimistic that as long as African startups keep building great businesses, funding will continue to flow in our direction.

You recently announced that Paystack has built an online payments gateway for one of the world’s largest e-commerce companies, Shopify. How did this meeting of two minds occur?
We had been getting requests from customers that wanted us to build a direct integration for Shopify and so we decided to build it. While we were building it, I think people were also telling Shopify that they needed to get Paystack in Nigeria and so the partnerships team reached out to us and really helped us get this done smoothly. This is super interesting because businesses can now setup an ecommerce store in hours using Shopify and start accepting payments that same hour with Paystack. That’s the power of collaboration.

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E-Business

Lagos Unveils Cybersecurity Guidelines to Tackle Rising Digital Threats

Published

21 hours ago

April 20, 2026

Ebere Melum-Nwogbo

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Lagos state government has unveiled a comprehensive set of cybersecurity guidelines designed to enhance digital safety for businesses, public institutions, and residents across the state.

Lagos Unveils Cybersecurity Guidelines to Tackle Rising Digital Threats

Babajide Sanwo-Olu, Lagos State Governor

Gbenga Omotoso, commissioner for Information and Strategy, said the initiative represents a significant step in Lagos’ ambition to establish itself as a smart, secure, and globally competitive digital hub.

He noted that as one of Africa’s fastest-growing technology ecosystems, Lagos is increasingly exposed to cyber threats, necessitating stronger and more coordinated security measures.

Citing data from the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Omotoso, said Nigeria loses over $500 million (about N250 billion) annually to cybercrime, emphasizing the urgency of proactive interventions.

According to him, while the state’s transition into a smart city offers vast opportunities, it also heightens vulnerability to digital attacks.

“The guidelines, available online, provide practical and scalable recommendations for small businesses, large enterprises, and Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs),” he said.

He added that the framework aligns with key national regulations, including the Cybercrime Act (2024), the Nigeria Data Protection Act (2023), and the National Cybersecurity Policy and Strategy (2021).

Omotoso emphasised that the document is not intended as a regulatory instrument but rather as a resource to equip stakeholders with actionable and context-specific guidance.

He reiterated the state government’s commitment to fostering a secure digital environment that supports innovation, attracts investment, and strengthens public confidence.

The commissioner commended the Lagos State Cybersecurity Advisory Council, led by Prof. Fene Osakwe, for its contribution to the development of the guidelines, and also acknowledged Tubosun Alake, commissioner for Innovation, Science and Technology, for his support.

He added that the framework is expected to boost collaboration between the public and private sectors, enabling organisations, from small enterprises to multinational firms, to operate more securely.

Omotoso further noted that the guidelines would be reviewed periodically to keep pace with emerging threats and evolving technologies, stressing that cybersecurity remains central to Lagos’ digital transformation agenda.

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E-Business

Laundry Without Interruptions: Why LG Auto Restart Washing Machines Are Perfect for Nigerian Homes

Published

21 hours ago

April 20, 2026

Chike Onwuegbuchi

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In many Nigerian households, laundry day often comes with an added challenge, unpredictable power supply. A washing cycle that suddenly stops due to a blackout can leave clothes half-washed, soaked, and inconveniently delayed. For families with busy schedules, restarting laundry from scratch is not just frustrating, it wastes time, water, and electricity.

LG Electronics addresses this everyday concern with a simple but powerful innovation: the Auto Restart feature in LG Twin Tub Washing Machines. Designed with real-life Nigerian conditions in mind, this feature ensures your laundry continues seamlessly, even after an unexpected power outage.

Understanding the Auto Restart Feature in LG Washing Machines

The Auto Restart feature allows an LG washing machine to automatically resume its wash cycle from the exact point it stopped when power is interrupted. Instead of resetting the cycle or requiring manual input, the machine retains the previous settings and continues washing once electricity is restored.

This intelligent design removes the need to:

Restart the wash cycle manually
Guess how long the clothes were already washed
Repeat washing unnecessarily

For households experiencing frequent power cuts, Auto Restart turns a common inconvenience into a non-issue.

Why Power-Friendly Washing Machines Matter in Nigeria

Power outages remain part of daily life across many parts of Nigeria. From urban centres to rural communities, sudden electricity interruptions can disrupt household routines, especially when appliances are running.

Traditional washing machines often reset completely after power failure. This can result in:

Incomplete washing
Over-washing clothes when cycles are restarted
Increased water and electricity usage
More time spent monitoring the laundry

LG’s Auto Restart feature is designed specifically to overcome these challenges, making it a highly practical solution for Nigerian homes.

Key Benefits of LG Auto Restart for Nigerian Households

Uninterrupted Laundry Experience

With Auto Restart, you don’t need to stay close to your washing machine or worry about power restoration while you’re away. The machine takes care of itself and resumes washing automatically.

Saves Time, Water, and Energy

Restarting a wash cycle means using extra water and electricity. Auto Restart ensures that no part of the wash is wasted, helping households operate more efficiently.

Protect Your Clothes

Repeated washing or incorrect restarting can lead to fabric wear. By continuing from the correct wash stage, LG Auto Restart helps maintain proper fabric care.

Ideal for Busy Families and Professionals

Whether you’re managing a large household or balancing work and home responsibilities, Auto Restart ensures laundry doesn’t become another task that demands constant attention.

LG Twin Tub Washing Machines: Built for Real Living

LG Twin Tub Washing Machines are widely appreciated in Nigeria for their durability, affordability, and strong washing performance. Combined with Auto Restart, these machines become even more responsive to local household needs.

Other features include:

Powerful wash action for tough stains
Separate wash and spin tubs for greater control
Long‑lasting build quality designed for frequent use
Efficient water usage, especially useful in water‑conscious households

These qualities make LG Twin Tub washing machines a popular choice among Nigerian consumers looking for reliability and value.

Ideal Washing Machine for Areas with Frequent Power Outages

If you live in an area where electricity supply can be unpredictable, choosing a washing machine with Auto Restart is no longer optional but it’s essential. LG washing machines with Auto Restart are especially suitable for:

Homes with irregular power supply
Large families with frequent laundry needs
Users who value convenience and efficiency
Households looking to reduce water and energy waste

Why LG Washing Machines Stand Out in Nigeria

LG continues to be a trusted name in home appliances across Nigeria due to its focus on durability, smart features, and customer-centric innovation. By designing washing machines that work reliably under local conditions, LG reinforces its position as a brand that understands and responds to everyday challenges.

From Auto Restart technology to powerful wash performance, LG washing machines provide practical solutions that simplify daily life.

Final Thoughts: Less Stress, More Control Over Laundry

Laundry should not depend on the perfect electricity supply and with LG Auto Restart washing machines, it doesn’t have to. By automatically continuing wash cycles after power outages, LG helps Nigerian households enjoy greater convenience, efficiency, and peace of mind.

For anyone searching for the best washing machine for power cuts in Nigeria, LG washing machines with Auto Restart offer a smart, reliable, and stress‑free solution – every wash, every time.

For more information, visit https://www.lg.com/africa/twin-tub-washing-machines

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E-Business

Access Holdings, Coronation Partner Tate Modern to Spotlight Nigerian Modernism

Published

3 days ago

April 18, 2026

Ugo Onwuaso

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Access Holdings Plc and Coronation Group have partnered with Tate Modern to commemorate World Art Day with a virtual session highlighting the global significance of Nigerian modernism.

Access Holdings

The event, titled “In Conversation with Osei Bonsu: Inside Nigerian Modernism,” featured a virtual tour of the Nigerian Modernism exhibition and discussions on the evolution of modern art in Nigeria.

The session brought together staff members across both organisations, reflecting growing institutional engagement with arts and culture as a driver of societal development.

Speaking at the event, Chief Communications and Marketing Officer of Coronation Group, Ngozi Akinyele, emphasised the role of art in shaping identity and national development.

She said that beyond financial capital, cultural and intellectual capital are essential in defining a nation’s prosperity and inspiring dialogue.

Akinyele noted that both organisations were committed to democratising access to art, ensuring it is accessible to a wider audience rather than a select few.

The discussion also featured insights from Tate Modern Curator, Osei Bonsu, and art expert Daniel Wallis, who examined the development of Nigerian modernism and its global relevance.

Bonsu said Nigerian modernism represents an independent reimagining of global art, rooted in the country’s diverse cultural heritage and expressed through unique visual languages.

According to him, the movement challenges narrow, Eurocentric definitions of modernism and highlights the richness of African artistic expression.

The session further underscored the growing international recognition of Nigerian art, particularly through exhibitions at Tate Modern.

Participants also reflected on the visit of Bola Ahmed Tinubu to the exhibition, described as a milestone in promoting Nigeria’s cultural heritage globally.

In his closing remarks, Chief Communications Officer of Access Holdings, Amaechi Okobi, reaffirmed the organisation’s commitment to advancing African narratives on the global stage.

He said the collaboration with Tate Modern aligns with broader efforts to promote dialogue, preserve cultural identity and support the creative sector.

The event reinforced a shared commitment by Access Holdings, Coronation Group and Tate Modern to elevate African art globally and ensure Nigerian cultural narratives continue to shape international conversations.

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