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Over the last two decades, Nigeria’s technology industry has evolved from a small ecosystem of entrepreneurs actively solving local problems into Africa’s largest startup hub.
Today, the country has produced more tech unicorns than any other African nation, while Lagos has established itself as one of the continent’s leading destinations for venture capital and startup investment.
In fact, between 2019 and 2024 alone, Lagos attracted more than $6 billion in foreign startup funding, accounting for over 70 percent of Nigeria’s total technology investment inflows during that period.
From payment infrastructure and digital banking platforms to health technology and enterprise software, Nigerian founders are increasingly building products capable of competing in international markets.
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Below, we take a look at ten locally built tech products and services that have expanded beyond Nigeria and are making their mark across Africa and the wider world.
10. Reliance Health
Reliance Health began in 2015 as Kangpe, a telemedicine app built in Lagos by Dr. Femi Kuti, Opeyemi Olumekun and Matthew Mayaki. Kangpe offered on-demand consultations via chat.
The founders later scrapped Kange and launched Reliance Health in 2018 as a fully integrated health maintenance organisation combining flat-fee health plans and sand telemedicine.
By 2022, Reliance Health had covered more than 200,000 individuals and more than 600 businesses, including Biersdorf Nivea, Jumia and PwC. That year, Reliance Health raised a $40 million Series B led by General Atlantic, marking the largest Series B round in African healthtech history at the time.
Reliance Health has since expanded beyond Nigeria. It launched operations in Egypt in late 2022, and expanded further into Senegal in 2024, hiring local teams and contracting healthcare providers in each market. Its partner provider network extends to Kenya and Ghana.
9. Paga
In April 2009, Tayo Oviosu co-founded Pagatech with Jay Alabraba. The company received its CBN operating licence in August 2011 and launched commercial operations shortly after.
In 2020, Paga established a presence in Ethiopia by acquiring the Ethiopia-based software development firm Apposit, absorbing its 63-person engineering team and its CEO, Adam Abate, as the head of Paga Ethiopia.
Beyond its consumer and agent network, Paga has built Paga Engine, an enterprise payments API that allows companies, including Western Union, Wise and Flutterwave, to terminate international remittances to Nigerian accounts.
More than 150 businesses use this infrastructure, effectively making Paga the invisible backbone of several cross-border payment corridors. The company is now UK-headquartered. In 2025, it launched in the US, delivering digital banking for the African diaspora.
8. LemFi
LemFi, originally called Lemonade Finance, was co-founded by Ridwan Olalere and Rian Cochran, his former boss at OPay, in late 2020. The founders chose Canada as the launch market.
LemFi’s international licensing strategy is among the most aggressive in African fintech. In 2022, it acquired RightCard Payment Services Limited in the UK for $2.5 million, gaining a UK e-money licence. In 2023, it entered the US.
In January 2025, it expanded into Europe through a partnership with embedded finance provider Modulr Finance, and then acquired Irish currency exchange firm Buttercrane, giving it a Central Bank of Ireland licence and, through EU passporting, the ability to operate across the European Economic Area.
In December 2025, it acquired Pillar, a credit fintech, extending its services from remittance into credit-building tools for immigrants without local credit history. It also expanded to Egypt in July 2025.
As of April 2026, LemFi serves more than two million customers across 27 send-from markets, including the US, UK, Canada and fourteen other EU and European states, Australia, and Nigeria, enabling transfers to over 30 countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America.
It processes more than $1 billion in monthly transaction volume. Total funding stands at $85 million, and in April 2026, it committed £100 million to expanding its global infrastructure from a London hub, a commitment formally recognised by the UK government as part of the UK-Nigeria Enhanced Trade and Investment Partnership.
7. Moove
Moove was founded in Lagos in 2020 by Ladi Delano and Jide Odunsi, two British-born Nigerian entrepreneurs whose parents had emigrated from Nigeria.
Moove was born when the pair identified a specific structural failure: millions of Nigerian ride-hailing and delivery drivers could not own their vehicles because they had no credit history that traditional banks would recognise.
Moove’s answer was revenue-based financing, using a driver’s weekly ride-hailing income as the repayment mechanism, bypassing the credit infrastructure that excluded them entirely. They started with 76 cars in Lagos.
Moove has now gone global as that model turned out to be just as useful for underserved drivers in India, the UAE, Ghana, South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Egypt and now the United Kingdom and Latin America. By 2025, Moove had financed more than 36,000 mobility entrepreneurs across 20 markets on multiple continents, with its vehicles completing over 50 million trips.
It has also partnered with autonomous vehicle company Waymo, supporting Waymo’s UK expansion in 2025 after a pilot in Phoenix, USA, in 2024.
6. Kuda
In January 2017, Babs Ogundeyi, an accountant who had spent a decade at PwC auditing African banks, co-founded a lending and savings platform called Kudi Money with Musty Mustapha, a computer science graduate who had worked at Stanbic IBTC.
In 2019, Kudi Money obtained a banking licence from the Central Bank of Nigeria, the first digital-only bank to do so, and relaunched as Kuda, offering zero-fee accounts, free debit cards and 15% interest on savings through a smartphone app.
Kuda launched in the United Kingdom in November 2022, not as a side market, but as a direct play for Africans in the diaspora, offering UK-to-Nigeria transfers at a flat £3 fee against a remittance corridor worth more than £3 billion a year.
Kuda is also now licensed to operate in Canada and Tanzania.
5. SeamlessHR
In 2017, Emmanuel Okeleji and Deji Lana, two friends who initially ran a jobs aggregator called Insidify, pivoted and built another product, which became SeamlessHR. It was officially launched in 2018.
SeamlessHR was built not to help Africans find jobs but to help African businesses manage the people already on their payroll. SeamlessHR built an end-to-end cloud platform, covering recruitment, core HR management, payroll, performance management, leave, time and attendance, HR analytics and, more recently, embedded finance, from the ground up around African compliance complexity.
Sterling Bank became its first significant client, and the early validation was clear: revenue from SeamlessHR grew ten times faster in its first year than Insidify ever had.
SeamlessHR’s software is now used by nearly 2,000 medium-to-large enterprises to manage payroll for more than 300,000 employees across 20 African countries, with physical offices in Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya.
4. Moniepoint
Moniepoint began in June 2015 when Tosin Eniolorunda, a Mechanical Engineering graduate from Obafemi Awolowo University who had spent years as a software engineer at Interswitch, left with Felix Ike, a Computer Science graduate from the University of Lagos, to start what they called TeamApt.
Their aim was to build white-label backend payment software for Tier-1 Nigerian banks. But when the banks moved too slowly to scale the agent banking products TeamApt had built for them, the founders pivoted, deciding to deploy those products directly to Nigeria’s vast informal economy themselves.
That pivot produced one of the more remarkable growth curves in African tech. TeamApt’s point-of-sale terminals became the backbone of Nigeria’s agent banking economy, the small kiosks where millions of Nigerians without easy bank access go to withdraw and transfer cash.
The company rebranded globally to Moniepoint Inc. in 2022. The scale, by the company’s own account, is now difficult to overstate: Moniepoint says it processed more than 14 billion transactions worth roughly N412 trillion ($294 billion) in 2025, and that eight out of every ten in-person payments in Nigeria now run through its network.
In 2025, Moniepoint’s switching subsidiary, TeamApt Ltd, secured direct processor and acquirer licences from both Visa and Mastercard, letting it handle international card payments and offer switching services to other businesses across Africa.
3. Interswitch
In 2002, Mitchell Elegbe, with support from Accenture, launched Interswitch. It was Nigeria’s first interbank switching company, building the plumbing that allowed different banks’ ATMs and POS machines to talk to each other for the first time.
Visa agreed to acquire a minority equity stake in Interswitch in November 2019, valuing the company at $1 billion, with the deal subject to regulatory approval and confirmed as closed in early 2020, making Interswitch the first Nigerian tech company to reach unicorn status.
Beyond the Visa deal, Interswitch sells its products in 23 African countries, acquired a majority stake in Uganda’s Bankom in 2011, acquired East African payments provider Paynet Group in 2014, and entered a payment processing agreement with US network Discover Financial Services in 2013. Its Verve debit card has also been launched in Kenya.
2. Flutterwave
Flutterwave was founded in 2016 by Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, Iyinoluwa Aboyeji and Adeleke Adekoya, three people whose backgrounds were almost perfectly suited to the problem they were trying to solve.
Their first major break came through handling driver payouts for Uber’s Nigerian launch, proving the infrastructure could perform at scale. By 2022, Flutterwave had raised $250 million in a Series D round at a $3 billion valuation.
Flutterwave now holds payment licences in 34 African countries and supports transactions in more than 150 currencies. Its technology powers payment collection for Uber, Microsoft and Booking.com. Operations span Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, South Africa, the US, Canada and 29 other African countries.
In the first half of 2025 alone, Flutterwave secured 20 additional US Money Transmitter Licences, bringing its total to 34 and allowing it to operate across American states without intermediaries. In that same period, it processed nearly $1 billion in transactions for East Asian merchants doing business in Africa, partnered with Global Remit to scale its Send App remittance product into the UK and EU, and earned its second consecutive place on TIME’s 100 Most Influential Companies list.
1. Paystack
In 2015, Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi, two former course mates, wrote the first lines of Paystack’s code in a small Lagos apartment. By 2016, Paystack had become the first Nigerian company admitted into Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s most selective startup accelerator.
By 2020, the BBC reported Paystack was processing more than half of all online transactions in Nigeria, serving over 60,000 businesses, including FedEx, UPS and MTN. That same year, the COVID-19 pandemic drove a fivefold rise in business sign-ups.
In October 2020, Stripe acquired Paystack outright for more than $200 million. This was Stripe’s largest acquisition at the time and the biggest startup exit in Nigerian history.
Paystack now operates plugged into Stripe’s global infrastructure spanning more than 40 countries. It has expanded operations into South Africa and Ghana, became the first African payment gateway partner for Apple Pay, and is the preferred payment partner of WooCommerce.
