For a young man who first showed interest in business as a 12-year old kid by selling pre-registered Yahoomail and Hotmail accounts to people, Olumide Soyombo’s success as an entrepreneur and angel investor should not come as a surprise. A staunch believer in business, Soyombo is one of the few who had faith in tech-based startups right from their early days when not many people expected them to amount to much. Still in his thirties, he has now invested in over 60 startups, several of which are raking in revenue in their millions.
Olumide Soyombo was born in September 1983 in Nigeria, and just like many kids growing up in the 90s, he dreamed of becoming a medical doctor. His interests gradually shifted after he was given a personal computer and started having access to the Internet, even at a time when the technology was not yet ubiquitous.
“At first I wanted to be a medical doctor but in secondary school, I got exposed to using the computer and then I knew I was going to do something in technology,” he once said.
When he was done with his secondary education, he applied for and was admitted to study Systems Engineering at the University of Lagos in 2000. It was a newly launched degree program in the university, and Soyombo was part of the pioneer set. While still an undergraduate, he enrolled and sat for professional exams such as MCSE, MCP, CCNA and CCNP and passed them before he was 19.
This helped improve his knowledge of tech as a profession, and also gave him headway. He added another feather to his cap when he went on to get a Master’s degree in Business and Information Technology from Aston Business School. This further exposed him to using technology to solve business problems.
Upon his return to Nigeria, he consulted for a bank that needed to build a data warehouse, and it was on this project that he met Kazeem Tewogbade, the lead consultant on the project, and his soon-to-be co-founder.
Founding Bluechip Technologies
In 2008, Soyombo and Tewogbade founded Bluechip Technologies, a system integrator that provides premier analytics, business application, infrastructure, consulting and managed services. At the core of Bluechip operations is business analytics—bringing data from disparate sources and building models from that data to help businesses to predict things like customer churn, lifetime value of the customer and generally make better decisions.
They got a seed investment of US$30,000 from Soyombo’s father, in an equity deal for 50% of the company, with a share buyback agreement, and went on to build a multi-million dollar business. Bluechip has partnered with companies like Oracle, Microsoft, and several banks, building data warehouses and providing business intelligence solutions for them. Bluechip Technologies has implemented solutions for several establishments, including Etisalat Nigeria, Access Bank Plc, MTN Zambia, Airtel Nigeria, Multi-links Telkom, UAC, NNPC, and NDIC.
The company has now grown from having two employees to employing over 70 consultants, and has expanded into other African countries like Kenya, DRC Congo, Zambia and Ghana. Though the space has been competitive, Soyombo notes that referrals have played a huge role in Bluechip technologies’ growth.
“Referrals are the building blocks for success in the B2B world. For example, we deliver a data warehouse in bank A, when the chief information officer leaves there and goes to bank B, he remembers that we delivered a project successfully for him and he reaches out to us. The price of failure in enterprise startups is high. If you fail on a large project you’re out. So everyone tries to rely on a vendor who can deliver consistently.”
The road to angel investing
Becoming an investor in over 30 tech startups has been the result of a very intentional process for Soyombo. He started in 2014 when he took some profits from Bluechip and got other mentors to join him. The first step was launching Leadpath and using it as a vehicle to invest in local tech startups, using a model that bore similarities with the Y-combinator accelerator model. But Soyombo and Tewogbade soon left this model and started investing individually in tech startups.
Since then, he has invested in startups like Paystack, PiggyVest, TeamApt, Accounteer, Bentol, Bitnob, Intelligra, Gloo, Engage, Powercube, Trove, Mono, and VertoFX among others.
To institutionalise his investing, Soyombo, in July 2021, co-founded Voltron Capital with Abe Choi, a US-based entrepreneur and investor. The Pan-African VC firm is a pre-seed & seed firm for elite tech founders tackling critical problems in the continent’s largest markets, with focus on Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and North Africa.
Explaining the rationale behind Voltron Capital, Soyombo said, “People, including high net worth individuals, tell me to carry them along anytime I’m investing, and then I have startups looking for capital as well.”