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Long before investors placed billion-dollar valuations on African startups, before global venture capital firms arrived in Lagos, Johannesburg, and Cairo, many of the continent’s most celebrated entrepreneurs were students sitting inside lecture halls, writing exams and building the foundations of ideas that would eventually transform industries.
The founders behind companies such as Flutterwave, Interswitch and Moniepoint did not emerge from the same institution or a particular academic system.
Their paths were diverse, stretching across African universities and some of the world’s most prestigious global institutions.
These universities did not “create” unicorns, as entrepreneurship depends on far more than education, but their classrooms, networks and communities formed part of the journeys of founders who went on to build companies worth billions of dollars.
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Africa has growing list of unicorns, including Interswitch, Flutterwave, Andela, Chipper Cash, MNT-Halan, Moniepoint, Wave, Tyme, and OPay.
In this article, Nairametrics looks at the classrooms that shaped Africa’s unicorn founders.
Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife
- Olugbenga Agboola – Flutterwave
- Tosin Eniolorunda – Moniepoint
Of all the institutions connected to African unicorn founders, Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife has a rare distinction: two African unicorn founders studied engineering there before independently building companies in the payments industry.
The first is Olugbenga Agboola, who studied Electrical Engineering at OAU before going on to earn an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management and then accumulating years of experience at PayPal, Google Wallet, Standard Bank and the Royal Bank of Scotland.
When he co-founded Flutterwave in Lagos in 2016 alongside Iyinoluwa Aboyeji and Adeleke Adekoya, he brought to the founding table a technical education rooted in OAU’s engineering faculty and a global payments career that had taken him across four continents.
Flutterwave became a unicorn in March 2021 after raising $170 million at a valuation above $1 billion; a Series D in 2022 pushed that valuation to $3 billion, the highest valuation achieved by an African startup at the time.
The second unicorn founder who studied at Obafemi Awolowo University is Tosin Eniolorunda. He was admitted to study Mechanical Engineering at OAU in 2002 and graduated in 2007.
He joined Interswitch as a software engineer in 2009 and programmed the company’s first point-of-sale software, giving him a front-row seat to the structural gaps in Nigeria’s payment landscape.
In 2015, he left with co-founder Felix Ike to start TeamApt. TeamApt, later rebranded as Moniepoint Inc., crossed $1 billion in valuation in October 2024 when it raised a $110 million Series C from Development Partners International, Google’s Africa Investment Fund and others.
University of Benin, Benin City
- Mitchell Elegbe – Interswitch
Mitchell Elegbe, the founder of Interswitch, studied Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Benin, graduating in the mid-1990s.
He worked in software at Computer Systems Associates, then at Telnet as Group Head for Business Development, before founding Interswitch in 2002.
The company built the switching infrastructure that, for the first time, allowed different Nigerian banks’ ATMs and POS terminals to talk to each other, the plumbing on which the country’s electronic payment system now runs.
In November 2019, Visa announced it was acquiring a 20 per cent stake in Interswitch for $200 million, valuing the company at $1 billion, making Interswitch one of Africa’s earliest confirmed technology unicorns. The deal closed in early 2020.
Elegbe has since been appointed to the jury of the Ernst and Young World Entrepreneur of the Year awards three consecutive times, the only entrepreneur from Africa on the global jury, and the only person in the award’s 40-year history to have won in both the emerging and master categories in his region.
The engineering foundation that became part of his entrepreneurial journey began at the University of Benin.
University of Lagos
- Felix Ike – Moniepoint
Felix Ike studied Computer Science at the University of Lagos, graduating with first-class honours.
He then joined Interswitch, where he spent approximately 20 months as a software developer before Tosin Eniolorunda, his colleague and a fellow former Interswitch engineer, invited him to co-found what would become Moniepoint.
Ike became Moniepoint’s Chief Technology Officer in 2017. As CTO, he played a central role in designing and scaling the payment infrastructure that today handles eight out of every ten in-person payment transactions in Nigeria, according to the company’s own disclosures.
Moniepoint says it processed more than 14 billion transactions in 2025.
University of Waterloo, Canada — One Alumnus, Two Unicorns
- Iyinoluwa Aboyeji – Andela and Flutterwave
Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, born in Lagos in 1991, attended Loyola Jesuit College in Abuja for secondary school, then Columbia International College, before earning a Bachelor of Arts in Legal Studies from the University of Waterloo in Ontario.
He is among the very few African entrepreneurs known to have co-founded two separate companies that went on to reach billion-dollar valuations.
The first was Andela, co-founded in Lagos in May 2014 by Aboyeji alongside Jeremy Johnson, Nadayar Enegesi, Brice Nkengsa, Ian Carnevale and Christina Sass.
Andela built what became one of the continent’s largest engineering talent networks, received investment from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, founded by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan.
It was eventually valued at $1.5 billion after SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 led a $200 million Series E in September 2021. Aboyeji left Andela in 2016 to co-found something else.
That something else was Flutterwave, which he helped build as founding CEO alongside Olugbenga Agboola and Adeleke Adekoya. He left Flutterwave in October 2018, handing the CEO role to Agboola.
By the time Flutterwave crossed $1 billion in valuation in 2021, Aboyeji, now running Future Africa, a venture investment platform, had become one of the very few African entrepreneurs associated with two separate unicorn companies.
While his degree is in Legal Studies from a Canadian university, his operating experience was built entirely in Africa. Together, those experiences helped shape one of Africa’s most influential startup careers.
Grinnell College, Iowa
- Ham Serunjogi and Maijid Moujaled – Chipper Cash
Ham Serunjogi and Maijid Moujaled, the founders of Chipper Cash, studied at Grinnell College, Iowa.
Serunjogi arrived at Grinnell in 2012 on a scholarship. He was Ugandan, had represented Uganda at the 2010 Youth Olympic Games in Singapore as a competitive swimmer, and had served as president of the student council at the Aga Khan Academy in Mombasa before moving to Iowa.
At Grinnell, he studied Economics. Also at Grinnell, studying Computer Science, was Maijid Moujaled, a Ghanaian student who was running a popular coding group on campus. The two became friends.
They soon began talking about, and analyzing, what frustrates Africans who try to send money across the continent’s many borders: the fees, the delays, the currency fragmentation, the sheer difficulty of moving money between countries that share borders but not banking systems.
Eventually, they built Chipper Cash to solve this problem, launched it commercially in 2018 with an initial $30,000 investment and funds from Moujaled’s salary, before entering Y Combinator.
By November 2021, Chipper Cash had raised more than $300 million and reached a $2 billion valuation. A subsequent financing round in 2022 placed its valuation at $1.25 billion, the most recent publicly announced figure, making it one of Africa’s confirmed unicorns.
In 2022, Serunjogi was elected to Grinnell College’s Board of Trustees at 28, the youngest person ever to hold that position.
European Business School London
- Mounir Nakhla – MNT-Halan
Before co-founding Egypt’s first fintech unicorn, Mounir Nakhla studied at European Business School London, a constituent school of Regent’s College London (now Regent’s University London), where he earned a BSc in International Business Studies. He later completed an MSc in Environment and Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
Nakhla began his entrepreneurial journey by founding Mashroey, a company that provided financing solutions for commercial vehicles and small entrepreneurs in Egypt. He later launched Tasaheel, a microfinance company focused on expanding access to financial services for underserved individuals and small enterprises.
In 2017, Nakhla co-founded Halan with Ahmed Mohsen as a ride-hailing and transportation platform. The company subsequently expanded into digital financial services, and in 2021, Halan merged with Netherlands-based MNT Investments to form MNT-Halan.
The merged company evolved into a financial technology ecosystem offering digital lending, payments, buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) services, e-commerce and other financial products tailored to consumers and small businesses.
In January 2023, MNT-Halan raised approximately $400 million in equity and debt financing, comprising $260 million in equity funding and $140 million through securitised bond issuances. The funding valued the company at $1 billion, making MNT-Halan Egypt’s first fintech unicorn and one of Africa’s privately held technology companies valued at more than $1 billion.
MNT-Halan has continued to expand since attaining unicorn status. In July 2024, the company secured an additional $157.5 million from investors, including the International Finance Corporation (IFC), Development Partners International, Lorax Capital Partners, Apis Partners, Lunate and GB Corp to support its growth.
According to the company, MNT-Halan now serves more than seven million customers through its digital financial services ecosystem.
Tsinghua University, China
- Zhou Yahui – OPay
Tsinghua University is a public research university in Haidian, Beijing, China. It is the alma mater of Zhou Yahui, the mastermind behind Opay.
Unlike most African unicorns, OPay did not emerge from the journey of an African founder building a company from within the continent. Instead, the fintech was launched in 2018 by Opera Limited as part of its expansion into Africa’s digital services market.
Zhou Yahui, the Chinese entrepreneur who founded Kunlun Tech, earned both a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and a master’s degree in Optical Engineering from Tsinghua University, which happens to be one of China’s leading engineering institutions.
After a consortium led by Kunlun Tech acquired Opera’s consumer business in 2016, the browser company accelerated its focus on Africa’s growing digital economy. OPay was launched in Nigeria in 2018 as part of Opera’s broader strategy, initially offering services including ride-hailing, food delivery, logistics and digital payments.
In 2021, OPay raised $400 million in a Series C funding round that valued the company at approximately $2 billion, making it one of Africa’s highest-valued private technology companies at the time and turning it into a unicorn.
Brown University, United States
- Drew Durbin and Lincoln Quirk – Wave
Brown University is another institution that occupies a unique place in Africa’s fintech story as the alma mater of both Wave co-founders, Drew Durbin and Lincoln Quirk.
The Ivy League institution is widely recognised for its strengths in computer science, engineering and entrepreneurship, and counts among its distinctions the oldest applied mathematics programme in the United States and the oldest engineering programme in the Ivy League.
Durbin and Quirk both studied at Brown University. In fact, they met as hallmates during their freshman year at the institution and went on to become friends. The partnership they formed at university would later produce two companies focused on solving payment challenges across Africa.
Their first venture was Sendwave, a remittance platform that enabled users in developed markets to send money to several African countries. The company grew rapidly and was acquired by WorldRemit in 2020, giving the founders deeper experience in Africa’s financial services ecosystem and strengthening their understanding of the continent’s payments landscape.
Recognising an even larger opportunity in domestic financial services, the pair launched Wave in Senegal in 2018. Rather than focusing on international remittances, Wave introduced a low-cost mobile money model designed to make everyday digital payments more affordable and accessible while challenging the high transaction fees charged by traditional mobile money providers.
The strategy fuelled rapid adoption across Francophone West Africa. In 2021, Wave raised $200 million in Series A funding at a valuation of $1.7 billion, becoming the first unicorn headquartered in Francophone Africa.
The success of Wave placed Brown University among the relatively small group of universities whose alumni have gone on to co-found billion-dollar technology companies serving the African market.
University of the Free State, South Africa
- Coenraad Jonker – TymeBank
Coenraad Jonker graduated from the University of the Free State before going on to become one of the key figures behind TymeBank’s creation and growth, serving as one of the principal architects of the digital bank’s development.
Jonker earned an LLB degree, graduating cum laude, from the University of the Free State. His legal education was followed by a career spanning consulting, banking and financial services, including senior roles at Deloitte, Standard Bank and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
His experience in banking strategy and financial innovation contributed to the development and launch of Tyme in 2019. Tyme is a digital banking venture initially incubated within Commonwealth Bank of Australia before becoming an independent business.
In December 2024, TymeBank reached a valuation of approximately $1.5 billion following a $250 million funding round led by Nu Holdings, the parent company of Nubank, alongside other investors. The milestone made TymeBank South Africa’s latest fintech unicorn.
University of Cape Town, South Africa
- Tauriq Keraan – TymeBank
Tauriq Keraan is also a founding executive behind TymeBank and a former Chief Executive Officer of the bank.
He studied Mechanical Engineering at the University of Cape Town, where he earned a Master of Science in Engineering (MSc Eng).
Before helping build TymeBank into one of Africa’s leading digital banking platforms, Keraan worked at Deloitte Consulting, where he was part of the team that developed the original concept for TYME (Take Your Money Everywhere) in 2012.
As CEO of TymeBank, Keraan helped oversee the bank’s rapid growth in South Africa, attracting millions of customers through a branch-light digital banking model.
After stepping down as CEO of TymeBank in 2022, Keraan moved into a broader role within Tyme Group, focusing on international expansion.
