The tech space in Nigeria has seen significant growth in terms of investment and policy direction. It has also given birth to several enterprising companies that have stood the test of time, despite a turbulent operating environment.
The five companies we have selected have established themselves as trailblazers in their various sectors. They have so grown to become companies on which other organisations depend on to succeed.
Here are our top picks:
Interswitch
While it was not founded in the last decade – it was founded in 2002, the impact Interswitch has made during the period is remarkable.
In the last ten years, the payment system provider has gone from being one of the largest payment companies on the continent to become the first tech company from Nigeria to attain unicorn status without having to IPO.
The company has been nursing an ambition of listing on the London Stock Exchange in recent years. It had planned to consummate the deal in 2019. The payment company went as far as engaging JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., and Standard Bank Group Ltd to work on a tentative November IPO, which was expected to value Interswitch at between $1.3 billion to $1.5 billion. The process was postponed but not after Interswitch pocketed $200 million investment that catapulted it into unicorn status, the first indigenous African fintech company to do so. The IPO move was revisited in April 2020 but the COVID-19 would not let it.
While the company has put the lid on its IPO ambition, it has set its focus on acquisition. At a webinar session in September, Mitchell Elegbe, CEO of Interswitch disclosed that the company has certified a team and the plan is to begin to make “those kinds of investments again.”
LifeBank
Founded in 2016, this company has lifted a space that was once in obscurity into the consciousness of many Nigerians. Not too long ago, Nigerians would not willingly walk into a clinic to donate blood, and even when they do, getting the blood to the hospitals that need it is a very big challenge.
Nigeria needs up to 1.8 million units of blood every year, but the National Blood Transfusion Service (NBTS) collects only about 66,000 units per year, leaving a deficit of more than 1.7 million pints of blood, according to a 2017 report quoting the country’s health ministry.
Temie Giwa-Tubosun, the founder of the company solving the blood shortage in Nigeria would require a mesh of citizen education and a solution designed to connect blood banks to hospitals with the objective of decreasing delivery time from 24 hours to less than 45 minutes. LifeBank’s proposition and success have attracted to it much big corporate collaboration and most recently a partnership with Google which led to a documentary that is being aired globally.
Co-Creation Hub
From a little technology hub established in the heart of Yaba in 2010, a sub-urban part of Lagos State, Co-Creation Hub has emerged to become the biggest privately owned African technology hub with many thriving companies like LifeBank, BudgIT, Mamalette among many others birthed under its tutelage.
Apart from incubating startups, CcHub also runs one of the notable social innovation funds for startups known as the Growth Capital Fund. Since it was launched in 2019, the fund has invested in 6 Nigerian startups like LifeBank (N27.1 million); Riby Finance (N36 million); Delivery Science (N54.2 million); Edves (N21.6 million).
CcHub was the first technology hub in Nigeria and Africa to make an acquisition outside the country of origin when it acquired iHub in Kenya.
MainOne
MainOne changed the internet connectivity game in Nigeria and West Africa in two ways. First, it became the first West African company to lay a private subsea cable from Europe to the West Coast and deploy it to service.
“We pulled it off with a strong vision, superior governance and leadership, and relentless execution,” Funke Opeke, CEO of the company once told BusinessDay in an interview.
To achieve the feat the company raised $240 million and built a 7,000km submarine cable system with landing stations in Nigeria, Ghana, and Portugal. It plans to branch out units along the coast of West Africa in Morocco, Canary Islands, and the Ivory Coast as options to cater to the expected surge in demand in the future. The MainOne submarine cable currently delivers high-speed bandwidth of 1.92 Tbps and has been proven to provide a capacity of at least 4.96 Tbps. But much of the company’s capacity is yet to be taken up
Secondly, in 2015, MainOne launched MDXI, Lekki Data Centre, and Iaas Cloud Services, while pushing its Submarine Cable extension to Cameroun. In order to meet the IT needs of small businesses, MainOne launched SME-in-a-box in 2016 and further expanded its line of services to include more Cloud Services.
Flutterwave
If there is any company many analysts expect to hit the big times – acquired by a big tech company or have a big exit, it is Flutterwave.
The payment system provider founded in 2015 is one of the few fintech companies in Nigeria that has raised the most funding, about N64.5 million in three funding rounds. It was valued at over $200 million in 2019.
A major achievement for Flutterwave is that it has so positioned itself in Africa’s payment landscape that it is one of the go-to platforms for many global payment companies learning the market in Nigeria and Africa. Hence, the company has attracted partnerships from Ant Financial, Visa, WorldPay, Google among others.
As the country turns 60, experts are confident that the tech space in Nigeria will continue to get more attention from global investors. The policy environment is also evolving as regulators pay more attention to the solutions and innovations from local tech companies. Hence, it is expected that space will see new companies emerge to take large shares in the sectors where they operate, more private equity exits, consolidations, and mergers and acquisitions among players in the tech space.
