How a $5.5M cheque from Jim Ovia helped build Moniepoint into a unicorn

Moniepoint founder and CEO Tosin Eniolorunda has revealed that the company’s first significant funding round came from banking mogul Jim Ovia, who wrote a $5.5 million cheque for 20% of the business after seeing an early pitch deck and concluding he was looking at another Interswitch in the making.

Eniolorunda made the disclosure on Nidacity, the entrepreneurship podcast hosted by former Finance Minister Kemi Adeosun, where he also spoke candidly about the difficult early days of building the company.

“There were hard times certainly,” he said. “There was a time I borrowed money from my wife to pay for salaries.”

Around 2019, Eniolorunda and his team made a decision that most people in Nigerian fintech thought was backwards. Online payments were the future everyone was chasing. Offline, the point-of-sale business, was considered unglamorous and too dependent on physical distribution to be a real tech play.

He saw something different.

“When the numbers started coming in, you are seeing 100% month-on-month growth,” he recalled. While the industry chased the shiny side of fintech, Moniepoint was quietly building the rails underneath everyday Nigerian commerce.

Then COVID arrived and settled the argument for everyone.

“COVID made people simply realise they could not go to banks to withdraw cash,” Eniolorunda said. Agents popped up overnight. The cashless policy that followed pushed the market even further. What had looked like a niche bet turned out to be the centre of the entire ecosystem.

By the time the dust settled, Moniepoint was processing transactions at volumes that put it among the top eight financial institutions in Nigeria by that measure.

Why Jim Ovia invested in Moniepoint

But to understand how Eniolorunda got to that point, you have to go back further, to a pitch deck that landed on the desk of Jim Ovia.

Ovia, the founder of Zenith Bank and one of the earliest investors in Interswitch, had been watching the new wave of Nigerian fintech with interest. When Eniolorunda and his team were preparing to shut down their bank software business, TeamApt, and go directly to consumers, they needed capital to bridge the transition. Their deck found its way to Ovia.

“He was already interested in fintech because he was one of the first investors in Interswitch,” Eniolorunda explained. “So he knows the story.”

Ovia moved fast. He made enquiries at Zenith Bank, where TeamApt had delivered a project and left a strong impression. The feedback was good. Within roughly six to eight weeks, a deal was done. Ovia’s Quantum Capital put in $5.5 million for 20% of the company. “He was like, stop raising, take this one, take 20% of your company and we’ll build,” Eniolorunda said.

His read, according to Eniolorunda, was straightforward. “I think what he found was that this is another Interswitch in the making.”

That first cheque unlocked everything. It gave Eniolorunda the runway to stop building for banks and start building for the millions of small businesses that would eventually become Moniepoint's core market. 

Today, the company has raised over $200 million, acquired a microfinance bank in Kenya and expanded into restaurant management software through its purchase of Orda. Its lending book is growing, using transaction data rather than collateral to extend credit to traders and small shop owners who have never had access to formal financing.

“One of the things that gives me joy today is the fact that we are lending to more and more smaller businesses,” Eniolorunda said. “Businesses that are just looking for 500,000, one million naira. Because I think that is where true financial inclusion is coming from.”

Eniolorunda is careful not to frame the Moniepoint story as luck, though he acknowledges some of it was. What he repeatedly returns to in his conversation with Adeosun on Nidacity is the value of unglamorous preparation.

Five years at Interswitch, studying the infrastructure of Nigerian payments from the inside, before striking out. A willingness to take the unsexy market when everyone else was looking elsewhere. And the discipline to stay profitable when the 2021 and 2022 fundraising boom was rewarding growth at any cost.

“To anybody that is listening,” he said near the end of the conversation, “you certainly have it in you. Keep on doing it. Success is around the corner.“

From a man who once borrowed from his wife to make payroll, it lands differently.