Nigeria’s sixth technology unicorn was minted yesterday, but the numbers behind its emergence reveal a striking pattern that sets the country’s startup scene apart: most of the founders who built billion-dollar companies from Lagos had never started a business before.
Moove, the mobility fintech co-founded by Ladi Delano and Jide Odunsi, secured a $250mn Series C round led by Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Company at a $2.1bn valuation. The deal, co-led by Woven Capital — Toyota’s growth fund — and Ion Pacific, will fund Moove’s pivot from financing ride-hailing cars to building “Nests”, robotics-first depots designed to charge, service and orchestrate fleets of driverless vehicles.
Delano and Odunsi are serial entrepreneurs, but their success is the exception in Nigeria’s unicorn club. A Launch Base Africa analysis of the six Nigerian companies that have crossed the $1bn valuation threshold shows that first-time founders are overwhelmingly responsible for the country’s most valuable tech ventures.
Of the six firms — Interswitch, Opay, Andela, Flutterwave, Moniepoint and now Moove — five were founded or co-founded by Nigerian nationals. Opay, the mobile payments platform, is the outlier: it was created by Chinese entrepreneur Zhou Yahui, a second-time founder who imported a battle-tested playbook from Asia.
Strip out Opay and the numbers become stark. Across the five Nigerian-founded unicorns, 12 individuals of Nigerian origin signed the first incorporation documents. Nine of them were launching their first startup. The only serial founders in that group are Moove’s Delano and Odunsi, and Flutterwave’s Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, who had earlier co-founded Andela in 2014 as a first-timer. Three of the five founding teams — those at Interswitch, Andela and Moniepoint — were composed entirely of rookie entrepreneurs.
The pattern confounds a piece of conventional wisdom common in more mature tech hubs. In Silicon Valley, studies suggest that serial entrepreneurs account for the majority of unicorn creation, their experience prized by venture capitalists who back teams that have navigated scaling pitfalls before. Nigeria’s data tells a different story. Access to vast, under-served domestic demand appears to level the field for first-time founders in digital payments and financial infrastructure.
The depth of unmet demand in many African markets means execution often matters more than founders’ résumés. In Nigeria, for example, the scale of financial exclusion — with around 60 million adults lacking bank accounts — creates opportunities that do not necessarily require founders with multiple successful exits to attract investor interest.
Interswitch, founded in 2002, took 17 years to reach unicorn status in 2019. Chief executive Mitchell Elegbe and his co-founders Akeem Lawal and Charles Ifedi, all first-timers, built the digital payments backbone that now processes transactions in more than 30 African countries. Moniepoint, created in 2015 by Tosin Eniolorunda and Felix Ike — also first-timers — concentrated solely on Nigeria and became a unicorn in 2024 after nine years of steady infrastructure building. In both cases, foreign capital arrived late and in large tickets: Interswitch’s Series D and Moniepoint’s Series C together attracted more than $500mn.
Faster routes exist. Opay’s Zhou reached the milestone in three years, and Flutterwave in five, fuelled by rapid pan-African and global expansion and outsized funding rounds. Andela, an edtech outlier in a landscape dominated by fintech, needed seven years and a Series E to join the list. Moove’s six-year sprint to a $2.1bn price tag, underpinned by a fleet of 42,000 vehicles across 13 countries and $420mn in annual recurring revenue, blends the two approaches: serial founder experience atop a market that was largely untapped when the company started in 2020.
The funding details of Moove’s latest round underline the scale of international confidence that Nigerian tech can now command. Co-lead Woven Capital is the growth fund of Toyota, while existing backers that joined the round include Uber — for whom Moove is the largest global fleet partner — BlackRock, MUFG, Franklin Templeton and the Ontario Power Generation Pension Plan. Moove plans to grow its autonomous vehicle workforce by more than 220 per cent, from about 150 staff to roughly 500 by year-end.
The sequence of deals has embedded a conviction within Nigeria’s technology ecosystem that unicorns built from the country by Nigerian founders are no longer isolated anomalies. On a continent where foreign capital has historically set the terms and chosen the winners, local founders appear to have earned the trust of global investors in a sustained way. Moove’s round, syndicated across sovereign wealth, automotive and asset management money, is only the latest affirmation.
The six Nigerian unicorns remain a tiny cohort on a continent of 1.5bn people. But the data makes one thing clear: the country’s pipeline of large outcomes has been built not by a small caste of repeat founders recycling their track records, but by first-time entrepreneurs betting that financial inclusion and infrastructure gaps could be turned into businesses of global scale. As Moove’s Delano and Odunsi steer towards autonomous fleets, the next crop of Nigerian founders will be watching — and most will be doing it for the first time.