Olugbenga Agboola is the co-founder and CEO of Flutterwave. He is a serial entrepreneur with two successful exits under his belt. He is a software engineer with a master’s degree in information technology security and behavioral engineering and an MBA.
Prior to Flutterwave, Olugbenga contributed to the development of Fintech solutions at several tech companies and financial institutions such as PayPal, Standard Bank, among others. He has also worked with different establishments including GTBank, Sterling Bank Plc, Access Bank, and a host of other organizations where he has excelled.
In 2020, when COVID-19 lockdowns across the world hit brick-and-mortar businesses hard. Africa’s small shops and restaurants, very few of which have an online presence, were particularly vulnerable. Enter Flutterwave, a tech startup based in San Francisco and Lagos, Nigeria, is known for helping companies process customers’ online transactions during checkout.
Amid lockdown, Flutterwave expanded from specializing in digital cash registers to hosting digital storefronts, helping some 20,000 small businesses suddenly without foot traffic set up online shops, receive payments, and arrange delivery options.
“We called it ‘Keeping the Lights On,’” says Olugbenga Agboola, Flutterwave’s co-founder and CEO, who lives in Washington, D.C. The company processed more than 80 million transactions, worth $7.5 billion, in 2020, establishing it as Africa’s premier payment solution provider.
Now Flutterwave—which already has a presence in 17 African countries—is planning to leverage that momentum into greater expansion, so that a customer in South Africa, for example, can seamlessly use her Kenyan digital wallet to buy products in Senegal.
(Sources: time.com, linkedin.com, and crunchbase.com)
