Co-founded by Fara Ashiru and David Peterside in 2019, Okra initially began as an API provider that allows the real-time exchange of financial information between customers, fintech applications, and banks. However, as is the current trend among open banking startups, Okra has also begun providing payment APIs to businesses in diverse sectors such as finance, e-commerce, and insurance, among others. Okra is also a payment checkout option on GooglePay.

The company has focused on the Nigerian market for four years, but it is currently working to expand to South Africa and Kenya.

Okra is governed by a board of directors and executively led by Ashiru, who was previously a software developer before the startup was founded, and wears two hats—chief executive officer and chief technical officer. She explained to TechCabal that she currently holds both roles because as an infrastructure provider, “Okra’s business vision and the technology are closely intertwined, and often blurred into each other.” However, she looks forward to having someone else join the team and take on the CEO reins in the near future. 

Ashiru’s co-founder, Peterside left his office as chief operating officer in 2022. Now every executive team lead directly reports to Ashiru. The leads include Bodunrin Akinola (head of people), Gbenga Oyedele (senior financial analyst),  Abiodun Oni (business development lead), Dayo Fasan (customer success lead), and Habib Akinpelu (senior legal counsel).

This TechCabal org chart details the leadership at the startup.

Babatunde Akin Moses, Mayowa Adeosun, and Onyinye Okonji co-founded the startup in 2019. Governed by a board, three co-founders lead the Sycamore team who refer to one another as Sytizens—a play on Sycamore and citizen.

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The CEO is informed by three key executives: Daniel Anyaegbu (CTO), Kingsley Makinde (head of product), and Adebayo Adenaike (head of investment). Adeosun, the COO, manages a team including Mercy Dada (head of risk), Segun Afuwape (head of collections), Elizabeth Oyelae (head of finance), and Chukwuemeka Ikpa (head of internal control). Meanwhile, the CCO, Okonji, leads Mojisola Fagbohunlu (head of marketing), Francis Agim (head of sales), Adewunmi Awofadeju (head of customer experience), and Atiti Timi (Head of HR).

This TechCabal org chart details Sycamore’s leadership structure.

If you would like to showcase the leadership structure of your startup in this way, contact the author of this article: ngozi@bigcabal.com.

“In 2023, we moved from negative to positive gross profit, and we want to be profitable by the end of the year,” Abdul Hassan, founder & CEO of Mono, told TechCabal. The startup expects to achieve profitability by scaling the adoption of its open finance tools. “We have more partnerships like this in the pipeline.”

The startup, like its competitors, has been expanding its focus from providing lenders with open banking APIs to servicing a wide range of fintechs to increase revenue. 

Before partnering with Mastercard, it had partnered with Flutterwave, one of Nigeria’s largest payment providers, to enable merchants to receive payment through the account-to-account (A2A) option which it calls DirectPay Pay with Bank. According to Mono, this payment option has facilitated payment transactions exceeding ₦5 billion since it launched in 2022. Mono can expect to facilitate even more volume as the Mastercard Payment Gateway System services numerous merchants across several African countries, including Kenya, Ghana, South Africa and Nigeria, where Mono currently operates.

On the other hand, this partnership is advantageous for Mastercard, as it has been finding new ways to digitalise spending. Through partnerships with payment providers, Mastercard has been exploring non-card payments in Africa for years: mobile money wallets, contactless payments, and QR payments. Around 2020,  over 1 million merchant locations across Africa were accepting  Mastercard QR payments.

”In three years, cards will mostly be used for offline payments,” said Hassan, who claims that Mono has connected more than 3 million financial accounts across Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya. He predicts that this account-to-account payment method will see even quicker adoption, especially in Nigeria, where  QR payments and contactless payments have slower uptake rates.

This optimistic outlook might be a breath of fresh air for established card networks like Mastercard and Visa, whose deployment of account-to-account payment in developed markets like the US and UK has met reluctance from users. Experts believe the consumer market in those regions favours the familiarity and ease of card payments for everyday spending and argue that users might require more incentives to adopt A2A options.

In contrast, in Nigeria, a lot of merchants are enabling the pay with bank option, which is repeatedly used even when there are USSD and card options, according to Hassan. “I think it is because of the ease and perceived security.”  Also, the settlement is instant and much faster than cards.

Hassan reasons that the success of this payment method for Mastercard spells good tidings for Mono’s dream to become a household name. 

“We currently have a web-based app that allows users to see how many fintech apps their bank details are linked to.” The four-year-old startup hopes to gain familiarity with the larger consumer market and eventually launch the web app as a mobile app with added features.

Since its launch in 2020, Bamboo has announced $19.4 million in VC investment from investors like Greycroft, Tiger Global, Motley Fool Ventures, Saison Capital, Chrysalis Capital, and Y-Combinator’s Michael Seibel.

The co-founders are Richmond Bassey and Yanmo Omorogbe.  Bassey steers the ship as CEO, focusing on the long-term vision and strategic direction of the company. Richmond Bassey CEO. His direct reports aside from Omorogbe,  chief operating officer (COO),  include George Imoedemhe, head of product & engineering, and  Dubai-based Oleg Medvedev who is head of design.  Meanwhile, Omorogbe, chief operating officer (COO), is in charge of the company’s day-to-day operations.

All team leads: Damilola Akinyemi (head of finance), Ebi Wanapere (head of platform), Jennnifer Abah (head of customer experience), Misan Omagbitse (head of people), and Oluwakemi Idowu (head of legal) report directly to her.

This TechCabal Org Chart details Bamboo’s leadership.

If you would like to showcase the leadership structure of your startup in this way, contact the author of this article: ngozi@bigcabal.com.

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Jude Dike and Temitope Ekundayo founded the investment platform in 2021. Chigozirim Ugochukwu, a risk and compliance expert, joined the co-founding team in January 2023. Before joining the team, she informally advised the company at a time when a viral article questioned the legal compliance of the crowdfunding the startup facilitates. She is currently the chief operating officer (COO) of the startup, and she reports directly to Dike, the chief executive officer (CEO). Ekundayo is head of growth and also reports to the CEO. 

The startup claims to have about 15 staff including the cofounders. There are no team leads by title. However, some team members are often counted on to make strategic decisions for the company.  

This TechCabal org chart details the leadership structure of GetEquity.

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If you would like to showcase the leadership structure of your startup in this way, contact the author of this article: ngozi@bigcabal.com.

As once well-funded startups struggle and shutter, it is becoming clear to retail investors how difficult venture investing is. GetEquity, whose primary offering has been a platform for retail investors to buy equity in startups, will now offer investors the opportunity to buy relatively safer asset classes like commodities and bonds. 

The startup says it is raising $1 million to make it happen.

The startup’s cofounders, Jude Dike, Chigozirim Ugochukwu and Temitope Ekundayo are making this change after a clear-eyed look at the data on how customers have been investing. 

“Only 20% of investment portfolios are in high-risk investments like venture capital. 50% of these portfolios are low-risk investments, and the rest are in medium-risk investment vehicles,” said Jude Dike, the startup’s CEO.

Specifically, only 12% of GetEquity’s 14,000 registered users actively invested in equity deals, Dike shared, pointing out the need to raise investment activity if the startup is to reach its revenue goals. 

The company claims it generated $320,000 in revenue in 2022 and planned to reach profitability by 2023. It didn’t hit that target despite facilitating 31 funding rounds and three exits. 

Avoiding the well-beaten path 

“We are ignoring the popular VC advice that you need to conquer your niche first before expanding and realigning the platform to operate the way traditional investment companies for high net-worth Investors do.” 

It will compete with wealth management platforms like  Risevest, which recently acquired Chaka, Cowrywise, and Piggyvest. However, unlike these companies, GetEquity will not manage funds. Instead, it will pool users’ funds to meet minimum thresholds set by fund managers.

“If you want to speak to invest in an ARM dollar fund, for instance, you need at least $100,000 as an individual. But if GetEquity was providing that access to you at $100, this means we are compiling at least $100 from 1000 People to meet that threshold. It’s a win-win situation for everybody.” 

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In Nigeria, the startup’s home country, this method of fund aggregation elicited concerns and a viral WeeTracker article that questioned if the company had the requisite licence. 

“Nothing the company does is tied to crowdfunding,” Dike said, although the platform pools funds from retail investors to invest in startups.

“The article got us face-to-face with one of our current largest investors.” This investor, according to Dike, “had been trying to also talk with the SEC about regulations for such a platform as they thought it was the new frontier.”

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“In Europe, there is just one license for it all, but in Africa, you have 54 distinct countries, where there’s not even a regulatory framework yet, in about 52 of those 54.”

The company currently lists all its offerings through Regulation S offerings of the US Securities and Exchange Commission and says it expects to do a lot of handholding with the regulators as it threads this new path.

Editor’s note: This article was updated to reflect that GetEquity will not be offering stocks.

An analysis of trades between February 19 to February 21 identified a cluster of Nigerian retail traders making large buy orders for USDT they didn’t eventually buy. Authorities believe these traders manipulated prices to benefit from the resulting arbitrage opportunity. 

The analyses conducted by research teams are still ongoing, according to a person close to the matter. An internal report of the aforementioned three-day analysis linked what it said was an artificial demand for USDT with the naira’s quick drop from $1/₦1,500 to $1/₦1,950.  

The Central Bank did not respond to TechCabal’s request for comments. 

Hamma Bello, an operative of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, told a court on Monday that a special investigative team surveilled the Binance platform. 

“The team uncovered users who have been using the platform for price discovery, confirmation, and market manipulation, which has caused tremendous distortions in the market, resulting in the Naira losing its value against other currencies,” Bello said in an affidavit. 

It’s similar to a claim in the internal presentation seen by TechCabal. “The marketplace shows only people willing to buy USDT and an almost non-existent selling side. A $132 million worth of ads for buying USDT with less than $800,000 to match on the other side for 2/22/2024 is an example of this.” 

Binance did not immediately respond to TechCabal’s request for comments.

The report claimed that more than 40% of the buy offers came from the same accounts. While some traders repeatedly were looking to buy as much as  $1.9 million, others posted much smaller trades as low as $500 on a rolling basis. 

On March 12, the Financial Times reported that the federal government asked Binance for information on its top 100 users in the country and all transaction history for the past six months. This may be a bid to identify the traders listed in the internal report seen by TechCabal. Today, a court in Nigeria ruled that Binance must hand over the data.

On Thursday, Binance released a statement signaling it would cooperate with the government. It claimed that since 2020, it has responded to over 626 information requests that have assisted the government’s investigations into financial crimes such as scams, fraud, and money laundering. 

Since Nigeria floated the naira in 2023, price discovery for the US dollar has increasingly happened through P2P trading on crypto exchanges like Binance and Bureau de Change operators. The apex bank shared amendments to its policy on BDC operators and revoked licences for over 4,000 operators as FX volatility worsened in February.

Regulators believed that Binance, one of the most popular crypto exchanges in the country, played an outsized role in price discovery and attendant volatility. Olayemi Cardoso, the CBN governor, said “expediting genuine price discovery” would solve the problem. It prompted an investigation into Binance. 

The Binance website is no longer available to Nigerians, and the platform has also delisted its NGN/USDT trade option. Aside from Binance, other crypto platforms like Onboard Wallet also disabled the USDT/NGN pair on their platforms. 

The two Binance executives, Nadeem Anjarwalla, a UK citizen,  and  Tigran Gambaryan, a former US Internal Revenue Service special agent, who came to Nigeria when the government threatened to block access to the company’s website are still in the custody of the authorities. According to the Financial Times, the court order that permitted a 2-week detainment of both executives expired on Tuesday, but they have not been released.

Gambrayan, who leads the Binance criminal investigations team, and his colleague arrived in Nigeria one week after telecom companies were told to block the websites of several crypto exchanges. According to several reports, they were arrested on their arrival in Abuja, with their passports seized. The government has shared very little about their arrests, and it is unclear if they have or will be charged in court.

Their arrests are in connection with a push by the Nigerian government to halt speculation on forex trading, following volatility in the price of the naira. After a decision to remove artificial controls, the naira’s plunge only worsened.

Regulators have historically blamed those plunges on speculators. At one point, it blamed Abokifx, a website that published FX rates.

The Central Bank has also pointed fingers at Bureau de Change operators and the banks. Several policy changes by Olayemi Cardoso, the CBN chief appointed last year, have purportedly aimed to stop such speculation.

Of these speculators, none has quite been treated like Binance. In a press briefing after a February monetary policy meeting, Cardoso claimed $26 billion of suspicious monies had passed through Binance.

It provided a justification for the government to make the arrests.

Several reports claimed the government asked for data on Binance users, while claims of a $10 billion fine were later denied.

The global crypto exchange has responded by suspending all trades in naira but has not publicly responded to the arrests otherwise.

“There’s no definite answer for anything: how’s he’s doing, what’s going to happen to him, when he’s coming back,” Wired quotes Gambaryan’s wife, Yuki Gambaryan, as saying.

The financial details of the deal are undisclosed, but the acquisition is the largest Deel has made to date.

This acquisition will further solidify the African presence of Deel, which has been providing services in all African countries except four—Congo Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, and the Central African Republic—through its native technology or that of other partner companies, including PaySpace.

Prior to the acquisition, PaySpace, a Johannesburg-based startup, had been providing payroll services for Deel in 10 African countries. This acquisition grants Deel—which previously had just 5 payroll engines of its own—full ownership of the 45 payroll engines that PaySpace has built over the past 15 years, according to Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz.

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“Our internal team was dying to acquire them and have the ability to do on-the-spot calculations. Theirs is one of the best technologies we’ve ever seen … We had to do a lot of convincing,” Bouaziz told TechCrunch.

Founded in 2007, PaySpace established itself as a cloud-based solution to address the inefficiencies of traditional payroll and HR software. The brainchild of Bruce, Clyde, and Warren Clark—brothers—alongside George Karageorgiades, the platform caters to over 14,000 customers across 44 countries across Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa.

According to managing director Sandra Crous, PaySpace has been growing by over 30% annually. This acquisition allows Deel to strengthen its footprint in Africa.

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It also signals the interest of global firms in Africa. Other similar acquisitions include private equity firm Medius’s $100 million purchase of expense management firm Expensya, Stripe’s purchase of Nigerian fintech Paystack, and BioNTech’s £562 million acquisition of InstaDeep, an AI firm founded in Tunisia. 

Got a tip? You can contact the authors of this article at ngozi@bigcabal.com. TechCabal protects the confidentiality of its sources.

“The funding winter and the economic situation in Nigeria affect the abilities of companies of our kind to support many customers after some time,” said Sola Akindolu, the company’s CEO.

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While Brass raised $2m in 2021, Akindolu acknowledged the expensive nature of running a fintech startup.

“You can say you want to disrupt banks; if you raise $1-2 million, you must raise $5-10 million in a few years. If it is overdue and you have not, things will get tricky,” said Akindolu. “You need access to ridiculous capital.” 

Brass approached Nomba as part of conversations around a fundraise, two sources said. One highly-placed person said the company also discussed raising debt financing and expects to close funding in two weeks.

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“It is not in any way new for fintechs to approach and support one another behind the scenes,” Brass said in response to questions about raising money from Nomba. “We have been approached and provided support too, even to competition. And you can generally confirm that. And no, we didn’t approach Nomba for equity financing.”

Founded in 2020 by Akindolu, Brass was generally loved by its customers until withdrawal delays began around October 2023, three people said.

“I could not pay my staff in Nigeria last month, and I also had to pause my building project because I could not buy materials,” said Samuel, a Brass user who claimed he could not transfer funds for over a month. TechCabal saw screenshots of his failed transactions. 

“I have over 10 million naira there and can’t even use my money.” 

Mercy, another Brass user, shared similar complaints after she tried to withdraw money from her account in December.

“When I contacted Brass [about the transfer issues], I always got the same response: “We’re working on it.“ She was eventually able to make withdrawals. 

Despite the widespread nature of these complaints—there have been social media callouts of the CEO—Akindolu insists that only 80 businesses have experienced these delays. “Once escalated, the resolution does not take over 24 hours,” Akindolu claimed. 

The company also says that it is working hard to resolve the issues. 

Resolving customer complaints

In February, Brass created a second Telegram channel to resolve user complaints, and screenshots showed that while customer complaints were acknowledged, they remained unsolved for weeks.  

The startup also changed the phone number of its customer care hotline several times without sharing it on social media. It forced users to share their complaints on X and Instagram, with at least several people sharing their frustration at the company’s poor communication. 

Akindolu disputes that characterisation. 

“I am very accessible. Customers even call me on my phone number to relay their complaints, and I attend to them as soon as possible,” Akindolu said.

Staff cuts at Brass

On Monday morning, Akindolu shared in a thread on X that Brass would furlough an undisclosed number of employees to cut costs. Impacted employees will continue to access “health insurance coverage and other benefits until we are able to bring them back in the following months,” Akindolu tweeted. 

“[Akindolu’s] communication with us on the matter was limited to the scope of the post he made online, an employee told TechCabal.

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