Samuel Eze, the Nigerian entrepreneur whose one-click checkout start-up once promised to become the “Fast for Africa”, has resurfaced with a new venture that could hardly be further from digital payments: an artificial intelligence and robotics platform for commercial fish farms.
Fishcluster Industries, incorporated in Delaware with its operational headquarters in Nigeria, this week announced it had emerged from stealth mode and secured paid pilot contracts with three large aquaculture operators. The company claims its integrated sensing, AI and autonomous robotics system will help commercial fish farms reduce losses, improve feed efficiency and strengthen protein supply chains across the continent.
The launch comes just months after the Central Bank of Nigeria revoked the microfinance banking licence of OurPass, the fintech company Eze founded in 2020 and ran until its collapse earlier this year. That revocation, part of a broader regulatory clean-up that swept away 46 dormant or undercapitalised microfinance banks, cemented the failure of a venture that had burned through investor capital, lurched through two strategic pivots and, by the accounts of former employees, descended into a toxic workplace culture.
The juxtaposition of the two businesses — one a heavily regulated financial services play that lost its licence, the other an audacious hardware-and-software bet on Africa’s underdeveloped aquaculture industry — has made Eze a polarising figure in Nigeria’s technology scene. To some, he represents the relentless entrepreneurial energy that the continent needs. To others, the shift from fintech to fish-farm drones looks like an escape from a string of broken promises.
A troubled fintech past
OurPass began life in 2020 as ParkCrowdy, an e-commerce platform with a one-click checkout feature. After raising a $1m pre-seed round led by Tekedia Capital in 2021, the company rebranded and set out to solve the problem of abandoned online shopping carts in Africa. Eze told TechCrunch at the time that he had watched his mother struggle with cumbersome checkout forms and wanted to build a “Fast for Africa”, a reference to the US start-up that had raised more than $120m before collapsing the following year.
But by the accounts of people familiar with the business, the one-click product never gained meaningful traction. Despite publicly claiming $500,000 in transaction value by mid-2021, the service remained heavily dependent on a small number of merchants using an online storefront provider the company had acquired. One source told local technology publication Techpoint Africa that “one-click checkout was only one-click checkout on paper”.
In 2022, OurPass began a pivot into business banking. The company officially announced the move in April 2023, promising bank accounts, point-of-sale terminals, inventory management and payroll services for small businesses. A pilot with supermarket chain Spar provided some early visibility, but the relationship never expanded into a full rollout. A partnership with payments company Flutterwave, which provided POS terminals and virtual account infrastructure, later reportedly broke down.
The business banking unit processed significant volumes — a Flutterwave case study claimed OurPass had handled at least N1tn ($1.2bn at current official rates) between 2021 and 2024 — but former employees say customer complaints about withdrawal difficulties mounted during the past year. The company also added personal banking services, putting it in direct competition with better-capitalised fintechs such as Kuda, OPay and Moniepoint.
The CBN crackdown
The final blow came last month, when the Central Bank of Nigeria published a list of 46 microfinance banks whose licences had been revoked with immediate effect. The regulator cited insufficient assets, failure to commence operations and inability to maintain minimum capital unimpaired by losses. Among the names was Ourpass MFB, the banking charter Eze’s company had acquired as part of its push into deposit-taking.
The revocation was not an isolated event. Over the preceding two years, several prominent fintechs had successfully bought tiny rural microfinance banks and upgraded them to national status, giving them the right to take deposits and lend across Nigeria’s 36 states. Moniepoint, OPay and Kuda all navigated the process by demonstrating substantial capital and genuine intermediation. Others, the CBN signalled, had treated the licence as little more than a regulatory key. “A banking licence cannot be piggybacked; it must be fed,” the regulator’s statement implied, as it cancelled the charters of several technology-linked entities.
For OurPass, the revocation arrived at a moment of acute internal strain. In February 2025, the company failed to meet payroll for the first time in its history. At a meeting with remaining staff, Eze reportedly asked employees to choose between working without pay for several months or shutting the company down, promising a $10,000 payout if new funding materialised. It did not. Some staff stopped coming to the office; others resigned. Attempts by Flutterwave to acquire the company — on the condition that Eze step away — were reportedly rejected, according to a person familiar with the discussions.
Former employees, speaking anonymously, described an erratic leadership style. Eze was accused of encouraging internal surveillance, overriding decisions made by senior hires and creating an environment where executives were left in tears after meetings. On Glassdoor, OurPass held a 3-out-of-5 rating, with several reviews citing late salaries, a toxic atmosphere and an overbearing chief executive.
A new aquatic venture
It is against this backdrop that Fishcluster Industries has launched. The company, which Eze says spent six months in stealth development, is pitching a hardware-intensive solution to a very different set of problems.
Africa imports more than 4.2m metric tonnes of fish annually to fill a structural supply deficit of about 3m tonnes. Nigeria alone has a domestic demand of 3.6m tonnes against production of 1.4m tonnes, leaving a gap of 2.2m tonnes. Commercial aquaculture has grown rapidly to become the world’s fastest-expanding food production sector, but productivity in Africa is constrained by poor water-quality monitoring, inconsistent feeding and limited data.
Fishcluster’s platform, branded as an “AI & Robotics Operating System for Commercial Aquaculture”, combines three integrated systems: SENTI for environmental sensing, FOS for operational management and FORGE for autonomous execution. The company says its technology can detect dissolved oxygen, temperature, pH and ammonia concentrations in real time, helping farmers intervene before fish stocks are lost. The robotic component, which the company describes as autonomous, is expected to include aerial drones and surface vehicles for large pond networks, though the company has not disclosed precise hardware specifications.
Eze has already secured paid pilot commitments from three leading Nigerian aquaculture operators. The contracts cover approximately 1,000 devices across active production environments, with a pipeline that Fishcluster values at roughly $1m if the pilots succeed and trigger wider deployments.
“Every industry eventually gets its operating system,” Eze said in a statement announcing the launch. “Commercial aquaculture’s moment has arrived.” He added that the company’s focus was “simple — help smallholder and commercial producers make better decisions, reduce losses, increase profitability, improve productivity, and strengthen regional food production through intelligent infrastructure.”
The corporate structure places the parent entity in Delaware, a common arrangement for African technology companies seeking international investment. The operational base remains in Nigeria, where the pilot farms are located.
The pivot from digital payments to aquaculture hardware represents an extraordinary entrepreneurial reinvention, but it also raises questions. Fishcluster has been built in six months, a timescale that is unusually short for industrial-grade hardware and robotics. The pilot programme will need to demonstrate device reliability and measurable improvements in feed conversion ratios — the key metric that determines profitability in fish farming — before any commercial rollout can be financed.
The company’s longer-term vision extends beyond farm automation. It hopes that continuous, verifiable production data will help banks assess agricultural credit risk, enable insurers to underwrite aquaculture policies and give feed manufacturers and processors better demand visibility. If successful, that data layer could turn Fishcluster into infrastructure for an entire value chain. But the path from a handful of pilot ponds to continent-wide deployment is steep and capital-intensive.
Eze’s track record will also shadow his fundraising efforts. The OurPass failure, the CBN blacklist and the accounts of former employees will be difficult for any institutional investor to ignore. The aquaculture industry, for all its potential, is littered with technology projects that struggled to move beyond subsidised pilot phases. And while Eze has spoken of “strengthening regional food production”, his new venture will have to prove that its promises are backed by more than a polished press release.
For now, Fishcluster is a bet that the same entrepreneur who once promised to fix online checkout with a single click can rewire the way fish are grown. The farms are waiting; the drones are not yet in the air.