Odun Eweniyi – Co-founder and COO of Piggyvest

COO and Co-Founder of Paga

Country: Nigeria

Sector: Technology

Piggybank.ng is an online savings platform that enables savers to put away funds that they don’t want to withdraw easily. They can save as little as $1 a day and then restrict when they withdraw their savings to specific set dates they choose.

It was co-founded by odun eweniyi in 2016 with her business partners Somto Ifezue and Joshua Chibueze and ever since the business has been doing well.

Early Life and Education

Ms. Eweniyi was born in Abeokuta, Ogun State, South West of Nigeria. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the Covenant University, also in Ogun state. she has three younger siblings

PROFESSIONAL LIFE

Eweniyi began her career as a social media manager for Somto Ifezue, with whom she later cofounded PushCV. The company was their first big break, having raised enough venture capital.

She graduated first in her Computer Engineering class in 2013, and her parents, like many middle-class Nigerian families, wanted her to pursue a Masters degree next. “I started applying to schools, and I was accepted into two Ivy League universities, which was really cool,” Odunayo said.

Odunayo was on her way back from a job interview two weeks after graduating from university when her would-be co-founder, Somto, saw her through a window and called out to her. She had been thinking about the job she had just interviewed for (and gotten), so when she met Somto and learned about their discount card startup, Parolz, she decided to join them instead.

Somto had been a pretty awesome engineer since their days at Covenant University (Odunayo claims he once built a miniature airplane that could fly in college), so she figured she had nothing to lose. Odunayo’s life would be forever altered as a result of that event.

“The idea behind PushCV was that there were at least 380 people in Nigeria for every job advertised in 2009.” This entailed sifting through hundreds of CVs. Employers had to sort through the first 10 or 20 applications, conduct interviews, and move on, leaving the majority of applications unanswered. “At PushCV, we developed a system in which job applications are pre-screened, and the top ten applicants are identified and referred to employers for interviews,” she explains.

Eweniyi gained valuable experience as a social media manager at SAJ Parolz Ent, a junior editor at TechCabal, editor-in-chief at Tech Point, and a founding writer at Zikoko; these positions were critical to her success at PushCV.

Odunayo was working at Parolz while also conducting interviews with Bankole Oluwafemi and writing for Techcabal (yes, that happened). Meanwhile, Somto was developing CV Flash to assist people who couldn’t write CVs properly or did so in poor English.

Somto needed help with the CV service he was building at some point, and Odunayo joined him to help write CVs for people, effectively becoming a co-founder. Customers soon began asking them not only to write CVs, but also to send them to employers. So they did exactly that. “That’s how PushCV was literally born,” she told Dotun Olowoporoku in February.

By March 2014, the team (which included the other four members of the group) realized that the discount card business was failing, so they shifted their focus to PushCV. But Jobberman was already a thing, and they needed to stand out. They reasoned that rather than simply sending job applications to employers (as Jobberman does), a great differentiator would be to screen the applicants first and then send the best candidates to the employers, thus becoming a platform for pre-screened job candidates rather than just candidates.

They had formed a team and applied to Olumide Soyombo’s Leadpath Nigeria by August 2014. He invited the team to a meeting and then wrote a check for $25,000 – their first investment – and provided them with office space.

PushCV was profitable by the end of 2015, and the team was already planning the next step. It was wonderful to assist people in finding work, but the team felt they could do more. Not long after PushCV, she collaborated with Joshua Chibueze to co-found PiggyVest, an online savings and investment platform with over two million customers.

Then, on the last day of the year, someone on Twitter shared pictures of her kolo, in which she had saved N1000 every day of the year. Josh Chibueze, one of Odunayo’s co-founders, immediately began looking for a way to digitize this concept. They asked PushCV users what else they could do to help, and saving salaries was the most popular response. By mid-January 2016, version one of the Piggybank product was ready.

Honors

In 2018, Odun won the Future Awards Africa Prize in Technology. In 2019, she was on Forbes Africa 30 under 30 Technology list. She was named as one of 30 Quartz Africa Innovators for 2019.

She was on Forbes Africa’s list of 20 New Wealth Creators in Africa 2019. She was nominated for The Future Awards Africa Prize for Young Person of The Year in 2020. Odun was also listed on Bloomberg 50 2020. She was listed on Time 100 Next 2021 for her joint contributions during the End SARS protests of October 2020. In March 2022, Odun won the Forbes Woman Africa Technology and Innovation Award.