As co-founder of Andela and Flutterwave, Iyin Aboyeji has spent the last decade dismantling one of the most persistent myths about African entrepreneurship that founders on the continent should aim small. At a time when investors encouraged African startups to build modest zebras or gazelles, Aboyeji rejected those limits outright. “If Americans are building unicorns, there is no reason Africans cannot,” he said, setting out to prove that a fully Nigerian team could build a billion dollar company. With Flutterwave, that argument is now settled fact. Once the psychological barrier was broken, the excuses disappeared, exposing how deeply founders in the Global South often internalize externally imposed ceilings.
The logic behind Andela was equally disruptive. Africa’s unemployment crisis, Aboyeji argued, was never about a lack of talent but a mismatch between rapid population growth and limited local economic capacity. The answer was not charity or protectionism but scale. By connecting Africa’s young workforce to global markets facing talent shortages, Andela effectively imported another economy over the internet.
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Flutterwave followed naturally, addressing the next bottleneck by enabling Africans to receive payments globally for the value they create. Together, both companies demonstrated a powerful thesis that Africa’s biggest structural problems can be transformed into globally scalable businesses.
That philosophy now drives Future Africa, the fund and platform Aboyeji founded to back builders solving Africa’s hardest problems with global ambition. What began as a personal investment effort evolved into a collective investing community and eventually a fully institutional venture fund. Yet the mission remains unchanged to provide capital mentorship and a strong founder network to entrepreneurs willing to bet on themselves. “The best bet you can make,” Aboyeji often says, “is betting on yourself.”
Beyond capital, his focus has shifted to systems. Through Itana, an ambitious free zone startup city in Lagos, Aboyeji is working to remove the structural friction that makes company building in Africa unnecessarily hard. From reliable power and high speed internet to housing legal frameworks immigration support and tax incentives, Itana is designed to give founders what they need to build globally competitive companies from Africa. The aim, he explains, is not to replicate Silicon Valley but to prove that any region with the right systems can become one.
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Reflecting on his experience navigating regulation, Aboyeji is clear eyed about the realities of reform. The hardest part, he notes, was not securing licenses abroad but working through regulatory authorization within Nigeria itself particularly around capital movement and stock transactions. The approach was never to break rules but to innovate within gray areas by partnering with licensed brokers engaging regulators directly and patiently shaping frameworks that aligned with a digital economy.
Over time these efforts helped give rise to entirely new regulatory instruments including digital sub broker licenses. “Real change doesn’t come from disruption alone,” he argues. “It comes from persistence imagination and working with the system long enough to evolve it.”
Across venture capital payments talent platforms and now startup cities, Aboyeji’s work delivers a consistent message. Africa does not lack talent or ambition. What it lacks are enabling systems. Build those systems and world class companies will inevitably follow.
