Flutterwave is an African fintech payment company that has risen to unicorn status and is the fastest African startup to achieve unicorn status. In 2016, Olugbenga Agboola and Iyinoluwa Aboyeji started Flutterwave as a payment infrastructure across Africa for service providers and traders. Its headquarters are based in San Francisco, California and Lagos, Nigeria, and it has a staff capacity of at least three hundred members across its offices.
Olugbenga Agboola worked as a PayPal engineer and a Product Manager at Google, then shifted his attention to Flutterwave. Within two years, Olugbenga Agboola became Flutterwave’s first Chief Executive Officer in 2018, working with his team to grow Flutterwave. At 12.12 am on Wednesday, March 10, WAT, Flutterwave was a trending topic in major African cities’ tech Twitter with more attention being driven to Olugbenga Agboola, the founder of the startup.
TechCabal’s analysis report shows that in 2021, African startups raised $566 million, and 60% of African startups deal with fintech. From a roughly sketched idea in 2016, Flutterwave has taken off and offers products to 290,000 merchants in twenty countries. Agboola credits the growth to individuals and firms who believed in Flutterwave’s unlikely mission and gave it life by investing, funding and providing accelerator programs.
Angels, Partnerships and Accelerators
Aboyeji congratulated Agboola on Flutterwave achieving unicorn status by celebrating the investors, angels and rebels that believed in Flutterwave’s ambitions. Agboola celebrated the unicorn status by writing on the Company’s blog, thanking the timely Series A funding that effectively helped Flutterwave scale up and support its growth.
In 2016, YCombinator accepted Flutterwave into its accelerator program after a partner, Aaron Harris, noted that Flutterwave was a game changer in how money moves in Africa. Flutterwave received a $125,000 seed investment, a network of startups and expertise from partners.
Zachariah George, Barclays’ former investment banker, invested in Flutterwave upon learning and being convinced that Flutterwave provided a solution that made it easier for African merchants to make and receive payments. George is an investor in African startups, and he believes that having global investors is a high-value but indirect benefit to proliferating. He adds that it is a perception that having international investors equals fast growth. Still, it is an advantage to having global investors as they give more confidence to insurance companies and banks working with a startup.
Flutterwave has ten bank partners and has processed over fourteen million transactions worth $1.5 billion. For Series B funding, Flutterwave secured strategic partnerships, including Mastercard VISA, in 2019 to create GetBarter, a financial management and money transfer app. Flutterwave has collaborated with Alibaba for the eFounders Fellowship and became Ant Group’s partner for Africa-China payments.
Olugbenga Agboola joined Endeavor Nigeria, an international network of startup entrepreneurs in emerging markets. Endeavor Catalyst invested in Flutterwave in monetary and non-monetary support on their operational activities through talent performance strategy, recruitment and consulting.
Olugbenga Agboola is looking forward to reaching unprecedented African fintech levels by listing Flutterwave on the New York Stock Exchange market. He looks forward to investors getting returns on their capital and making Flutterwave a public unicorn to raise money from individuals while remaining accountable to its investors, staff and customers.