Who is Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi? The brains behind Paystack.
You have probably heard of Paystack, right? and have used it before, I’ve used it too. But what is Paystack? Who built it? How was it built?. I will discuss this today.
Let’s begin.
What exactly is Paystack?
Paystack is a technology company solving payment problems for ambitious businesses. It is an online payment gateway that makes it easy for merchants to accept credit and debit card payments online from users or customers. In October 2018, this company recorded more than 25,000 merchants, 2,900,000 payments collected and $27,500,000 payments given out to merchants.
Recently, it was acquired by an American company named Stripe which solves the same problem of payment, through a deal worth over $200 million (₦76.6 billion), making it the biggest Nigerian startup acquisition.
With many other success stories, the question is what makes Paystack this successful?
The answer, is the people behind it.
It would interest you to know if you don’t already that Paystack is a Nigerian-owned company, built by Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi, so who are these people? where did they get the inspiration of the company from? and where are they now?
Shola Akinlade who is the CEO (Chief Executive Officer)of Paystack was born and bred in Lagos, he studied Computer Science in Babcock University where Ezra Olubi was his coursemate.
In one of his interviews, he stated that Paystack was not built by him but by the economy.
He saw the demand for it at that time, in 2015 and he noted that everyone he met with and spoke to needed a way to receive payment from their customers, so Paystack was a necessity for many businesses, so he started building and that was when Ezra came into the picture.
Ezra Olubi is the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) of Paystack, as stated above he attended the same university as Shola and he is also a co-founder of the company.
Paystack was the first Nigerian company to go to Y Combinator (YC) in San Francisco which is an American seed money startup accelerator launched in March 2005, where they presented their idea and were given ₦120,000 to start the company.
As for the question of where they are now, I would assume that they are probably looking for problems in the world to provide a solution for.