The Triple Unicorn Builder: How Iyinoluwa Aboyeji Built Africa’s Tech Giants
When you hear the word “unicorn,” do you picture a mythical horse with a spiral horn? Or a private startup valued at over one billion dollars? This article tells the story of Iyinoluwa Samuel Aboyeji, a Nigerian entrepreneur who built not one, but three billion-dollar companies.
About Him
Iyinoluwa Aboyeji was born on 28 March 1991. He attended St. Saviour’s Primary School in Ebute-Metta, Lagos, then moved on to Loyola Jesuit College in Abuja. He later earned a Bachelor of Arts in Legal Studies from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.
Aboyeji co-founded Andela and served as Flutterwave’s former managing director. Today, he serves as CEO and General Partner of Future Africa. He also co-founded and chairs Learn2Earn, a tech training initiative.
The Unicorns He Founded
Andela
Aboyeji co-founded Andela in 2014 alongside Jeremy Johnson, Nadayar Enegesi, Brice Nkengsa, Ian Carnevale, and Christina Sass. The company launched its first recruitment cycle in Lagos that May. A single call for applications on Twitter drew 700 applicants for just four spots.
The idea behind Andela was simple: tap overlooked technical talent across Africa and connect it with global companies. This lets technologists work with international employers without leaving home, helping counter brain drain. Andela describes itself as a private marketplace for technical talent, focused on sustainable careers and long-term placements. It gives companies access to skilled developers across roughly 135 countries, covering app development, AI, cloud, and DevOps.
Andela runs as a two-sided marketplace. It sources, vets, and onboards developers, then places them with client companies as individual contractors or full teams. Vetting includes technical assessments through its own Qualified platform (acquired in March 2023), soft-skills evaluations, and leadership assessments that feed into a “match fitness score.”
The original entry point was a four-year fellowship for junior engineers. However, Andela broadened its hiring to mid- and senior-level engineers in 2019 and went fully remote in 2020. It also acquired Casana, a Munich-based IT talent network, in 2023 to expand into Europe. Clients have included GitHub, Goldman Sachs, and Paramount, and by 2024 its contractor pool topped 150,000 people, 60% of them based in Africa and Latin America. In August 2024, former Uber executive Carrol Chang took over as CEO from co-founder Jeremy Johnson.
On funding, Andela raised capital across several major rounds. It secured a $10 million Series A in 2015, led by Spark Capital, followed by a $24 million Series B in 2016, led by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the foundation’s first-ever lead investment. A $40 million Series C followed in 2017, led by CRE Venture Capital and considered one of the largest African VC-led deals at the time. A $100 million Series D came next in 2019, backed by Generation Investment Management and Serena Williams’ Serena Ventures, bringing total funding to $180 million. Then, in September 2021, SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led a $200 million round that valued Andela at $1.5 billion. This made it the first unicorn talent marketplace and one of Africa’s seven unicorns.
Flutterwave
Aboyeji then co-founded Flutterwave in 2016 alongside Olugbenga Agboola and Adeleke Adekoya. The fintech company provides payment infrastructure for global merchants and payment service providers. It’s headquartered in San Francisco, with a second base in Lagos, and operates across more than 30 African countries, including Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, and South Africa, plus the U.S. and Canada.
Flutterwave’s core offering spans a payment gateway, APIs, mobile money, POS, virtual cards, and merchant services. Put simply, it lets businesses accept and move money across fragmented African payment systems. In September 2022, the Central Bank of Nigeria granted Flutterwave the country’s highest payment processing license, letting it move funds between banks and cards without intermediaries.
Flutterwave raised a $170 million Series C in March 2021, then the largest round ever secured by an African tech startup. This pushed its valuation past $1 billion, making it a unicorn, with backing from Y Combinator, Visa Ventures, Mastercard, Avenir Growth Capital, and Tiger Global. It followed up with a $250 million Series D in 2022 at a valuation of over $3 billion. Since then, the company has expanded its product line, launching Send App, a remittance service, in late 2021, and acquiring Mono, a Nigerian open banking infrastructure provider, in January 2026.
Flutterwave has drawn recognition and scrutiny in roughly equal measure. It’s been named to CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list and Fast Company’s list of most innovative companies, and it won “Fintech of the Year” at the 2024 African Banker Awards while pursuing a planned IPO announced in April 2024. At the same time, it faced a 2022 Kenyan High Court freeze on over 6.2 billion shillings tied to money-laundering allegations, a case the Assets Recovery Agency withdrew in 2023, clearing Flutterwave of wrongdoing. The company also faced lawsuits from former employees over stock rights and workplace culture, plus a 2023 dispute over a reported hack that it denied caused customer fund losses.
Moove
Aboyeji is a founding investor in Moove, a mobility fintech that finances vehicles for ride-hailing and delivery drivers. The company was founded in Lagos in 2020 by Ladi Delano and Jide Odunsi. Several sources also credit Aboyeji as a co-founder of the business. Moove lets drivers access vehicle financing through a credit-scoring system tied to their income. Repayments come from a percentage of their weekly earnings, cutting the barrier to car ownership. The model addresses a real gap, since less than 2% of Nigerians own cars.
Moove grew steadily through multiple funding rounds after its 2020 launch. In March 2024, Uber led a $100 million Series B round that valued the company at $750 million. This marked Uber’s first direct investment in Africa. The company kept expanding, entering the UAE, India, the US, and the UK. It also partnered with Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving unit, to build an autonomous vehicle business.
In August 2026, Moove raised $250 million in a Series C round, pushing its valuation to $2.1 billion. This confirmed the company’s long-pursued unicorn status. The round was led by Mubadala Investment Company, with Woven Capital and Ion Pacific co-leading. The deal made Moove the tenth company to join Africa’s unicorn club, alongside Flutterwave and Andela. The fresh funding will help Moove scale its autonomous vehicle fleet. It will also support expansion into new markets.
His Other Businesses
Aboyeji’s entrepreneurial streak started well before Andela or Flutterwave existed. In 2010, while still a university student, he co-founded Bookneto Incorporation with Pierre Alrs. Bookneto was a social learning platform that let students share and organize study resources, and the Canadian Innovation Centre acquired it in 2013.
He followed that with Fora, co-founded with Ian Carnevale and Nadayar Enegesi, the same pair who later helped start Andela. Fora gave African universities access to online course materials from top international institutions. Both ventures predate Andela (2014) and Flutterwave (2016), and they’re widely seen as the proving ground for the ideas around access and talent that later shaped his bigger companies.
After stepping down from both Andela and Flutterwave, Aboyeji kept building. In November 2018, about a month after leaving Flutterwave, he co-founded Street Capital, a venture connecting international investors with African entrepreneurs. In March 2019, he launched Future Africa, where he serves as General Partner. It has since grown into a venture platform that provides capital, coaching, and community to early-stage African founders; Future Africa says its 100-plus portfolio companies are collectively worth over $6 billion.
Later that year, in October 2019, Aboyeji founded and chaired Talent City Inc, aimed at building infrastructure and opportunity for African tech talent. It has since been rebranded as Itana. Future Africa also runs the Future Africa Leaders Award, recognizing young African entrepreneurs and innovators. More recently, Aboyeji co-founded Learn2Earn, a free, apprenticeship-style programme training African engineers for the AI economy.
Iyinoluwa Aboyeji’s journey shows that building one unicorn is rare, but building three puts him in a league of his own. From a university side-project like Bookneto to continent-spanning giants like Andela, Flutterwave, and Moove, his ventures share one thread: closing Africa’s access gap, whether in education, talent, transportation, or payments. Through Future Africa and Learn2Earn, he’s now investing that experience back into the next generation of African founders and engineers, suggesting his impact on the continent’s tech ecosystem is far from finished.