Fintech tycoon, Olugbenga Agboola bets big

Awash in venture capital money and investors delirium for all things that aid Africa’s next phase of fintech growth, no firm has got richer or gained more over the past year than Flutterwave —one of the continent’s most prominent tech brands— and its co-founder, Olugbenga ‘GB’ Agboola. As one of the leading tech entrepreneurs in Africa, Agboola is one young man unarguably imbued with a great deal of knowledge and more qualifications than one can count. He has built Flutterwave, a Fintech unicorn that has rapidly gained prominence in the payments landscape, providing a single-use solution infrastructure for a lot of people in Nigeria and across Africa. Along the way, the unicorn has recorded significant milestones in its journey within the African tech ecosystem and secured investments from renowned venture capital firms and forged strategic partnerships with industry giants such as Alibaba’s Alipay, Uber Technologies Inc., Audiomack, and Netflix Inc.

Agboola recently launched ‘Go Time AI’—an accelerator designed to support African start-ups working on artificial intelligence products. The first cohort of the Go Time AI accelerator launched in 2024, provided participating start-ups with financial support, technical resources, and guidance from industry experts. It offered up to $200,000 in funding and mentorship to selected start-ups, in exchange for eight per cent equity. Applications for the second cohort opened in May 2025. As he was helping young start-ups, Agboola is equally widening his company’s ambitions past card and mobile money payments. Just recently, Africa’s tech ecosystem woke up to a major news: Agboola’s Flutterwave, has bought Mono, a Nigerian open-banking start-up, in an all-stock deal reportedly worth between $25 million and $40 million. The acquisition brings together two of Africa’s leading fintech infrastructure companies.

Founded in 2020, Mono has built APIs that allow businesses to access bank data, initiate payments, and verify customers. Both Y Combinator-backed companies count Tiger Global —the lead investor in Flutterwave’s Series C and Mono’s Series A— among their backers. With this deal, Agboola’s stock in one of the continent’s biggest payment networks— with an estimated net worth of over $200 million— is expected to soar to a new mind-boggling figure.