About

It was early morning in Lagos. The kind of morning where the heat is already a presence before the sun has fully committed to the day. I was on a bus — the specific bus doesn't matter, but the experience does. Cash passed hand to hand down the aisle. No receipt. No record. The operator at the front collecting fares with one hand and navigating with the other. Millions of naira moving through the city every day, leaving no trace of where they came from or where they went.

I had been thinking about payments infrastructure for months before that morning, but it was on that bus that the abstraction became concrete. This was not a problem of consumer behaviour or product design. It was a problem of infrastructure. The city was moving without being measured. The money was flowing without being counted. And without counting, there was no capital, no credit, no compound growth. The bus was the bank — and it didn't know it yet.

I failed my SSCE three times between 2008 and 2011. Not once — three times. In Nigeria, where your exam results are the first hard gate between you and a university place, that is a significant failure. It is the kind of failure that causes families to have quiet conversations about what to do with a son who cannot seem to pass.

There were other failures. I lost money in crypto before losing money in crypto was a well-documented way to lose money. I tried a fish pond. The fish pond failed too. I am not telling these stories to perform vulnerability — I am telling them because they are the most accurate record of how I think. I keep trying things that seem structurally correct even when the first iteration fails. I don't experience failure as evidence that the direction is wrong. I experience it as data about what needs to change.

I eventually passed my exams and got into university. That pattern — fail, recalibrate, persist — has not changed. It is now applied to larger stakes and shorter feedback loops.

The Erasmus Mundus scholarship took me across three countries — France, the United Kingdom, and Sweden — in the span of a single academic programme. Each move stripped away another layer of assumptions I had about how institutions work, how money moves, and what ambition is allowed to look like in different cultures.

The road trip happened somewhere in this period. I won't describe it in full here, but the specific conversation it produced has stayed with me: a question about whether the businesses we build should outlive us. Not in the sentimental sense — in the infrastructural sense. A road, a bridge, a payment rail. These things outlive their builders because they were designed to carry weight, not just to demonstrate capability. That question reoriented everything I subsequently built toward infrastructure and away from applications.

Stockholm became home. I stayed because the environment suited the work I needed to do: a city that takes systems seriously, where the gap between idea and institution is small enough to cross without losing momentum.

Weyz Mobility is approaching its first deployment — a campus transport operator in Nigeria, the first real-world test of the tap-to-pay system that puts transaction data on routes that have never been measured. Avancier Technologies works with founders who are earlier in their process, making sure the technical decisions they make in the first eighteen months don't constrain the company for the next ten years.

Both companies are operating. Neither is finished. The work continues. Read more about what I'm building →

The benchmark I hold myself to is Dangote. Not the person specifically, but the principle the name represents: that an African entrepreneur can build something of civilisational scale. Something that changes not just who has money, but how money moves. Infrastructure that outlives the builder because it was worth building in the first place.