Simdul Shagaya is the founder and CEO of Konga and Dealdey. With over 10 years experience in new media and investment banking, Shagaya, whose corporate Africa stints include Google, Lucent Technologies and Rand Merchant Bank in South Africa, launched e-Motion Advertising in November 2005, a Lagos-based integrated marketing and communications agency. In March 2011, the serial entrepreneur then founded Dealdey (Africa’s answer to Groupon), which grew to be Nigeria’s leading daily deals site.
Nigeria is a market with deep mobile penetration and fast growing access to the internet,” coupled with the fact that the country’s largest city, Lagos with a population of 18-million people making it the epicenter of one the largest urban cities only has two world-class shopping malls, the Palms, which opened in 2005 and Ikeja Mall, in 2011, Shagaya swiftly launched Konga, a spin-off from Dealdey.
His primary goal with Konga, was to aggregate the youngest and fastest-growing market that was dispersed, under-served and that traditional retailers were simply failing to reach; “Konga is a word that is found across the numerous ethnic groups on the continent. And every day, consumers in Nigeria and across West Africa started to log onto Konga for products that they otherwise were purchasing in physical retail stores.
In early 2013, Konga raised a $10 million Series A round from Investment AB Kinnevik and Naspers. In Q2 2013, Konga beta-tested 'Konga Mall,' opening up the Konga platform to third-party retailers and moving away from a pure first-party online retail model. In late 2013, Konga finalized a $25 million Series B round from previous investors, Investment AB Kinnevik and Naspers, the largest single round raised by a single African startup at the time. On November 29, 2013, Konga.com crashed and remained offline for 45 minutes as a result of unprecedented traffic stemming from its Black Friday promotion. Konga sold more during the first six hours of the promotion than it did in the prior month.
Konga officially launched its third-party retail platform in the first half of 2014, rebranding it as 'Marketplace' from 'Konga Mall'; by the end of 2014, Konga's Marketplace featured 8,000 merchants, beating internal targets of 1,000 merchants eight-fold. Konga received USD $3.5 million worth of orders during its 2014 Black Friday promotion, compared to USD $300,000 during the promotion in the previous year. Konga reportedly grew 2014 revenue 450% from 2013. In late 2014, Konga finalized a $40 million Series C round from Investment AB Kinnevik and Naspers, the largest single round raised by a single African startup to date. Despite reports that Naspers acquired 50% of Konga in 2013, publicly-traded Naspers disclosed that its stake in Konga after the October 2014 Series C investment was 40.22%. Konga was reportedly valued at approximately $200 million as of the Series C.
In January 2015, Konga was ranked as the most visited Nigerian website by Alexa Internet. According to CEO Sim Shagaya, Konga "leads the field in Nigeria today [early 2015] in Gross Merchandise Value," a metric measuring the total value of merchandise sold through a particular marketplace.
2. JASON NJOKU
Jason Njoku is CEO and Co-Founder of iROKO Partners. He graduated from the University of Manchester in 2005 with a Chemistry degree. After several failed business attempts in the world of online media, he moved back home with his mum at the age of 29. Whilst back at home, he observed his mum’s love of watching Nollywood films. A search for a reliable source of films online yielded nothing, and so the idea to stream Nollywood films online was born. In 2010, Jason moved to Lagos and set-up iROKO Partners.
Nollywood Love was the company’s first platform, streamed on YouTube. To-date, iROKO Partners is YouTube’s largest partner in Africa. In 2012, the company launched iROKOtv, a platform to stream Nollywood movies. The site has recorded over 800,000 registered users and today, 14 million hours of movies have been watched in 178 countries around the world.
iROKO Partners was also one of the first companies in the Nigerian digital music scene, launching iROKING in 2011. The platform has almost 100,000 registered users who have access to over 35,000 tracks by 400+ artists. Across all the iROKO Partners’ platforms, 193,000,000 minutes of entertainment are consumed every month.
iROKING has also launched mobile applications for its music application on the iOS, Android, Windows and Symbian (Nokia) mobile handsets. The application allows access to thousands of the latest Nigerian tracks and stream songs over Wifi or 3G
In 2012, Forbes Africa named Jason as one of Africa’s Top Young Millionaires to watch. He has also been named as one of London’s Top Black Men of Power in Black Enterprise Magazine. IROKO Partners has over 110 employees in offices in Lagos, London and New York.
3. SEUN OSEWA
Seun Osewa is the brain behind Nairaland. He enrolled into the University of Ile ife to study to Electrical Engineering in 1998 but dropped out to pursue his dream in ICT business. He started his career after going into web hosting but several months down the line, he was forced to close down. Although there was pressure from members of his family to go back to school get a certificate, he stuck to his achieving his dream in the ICT world.
Seun decided to start a web forum, as it was cost effective since start-up funds were farfetched. He created 3 forums in November 2003 (one for higher institution students, one for IT discussions, and one to cover the emerging GSM industry; the Mobile Nigeria Forum at MobileNigeria.com).
He decided to start Nairaland when he noticed two odd things about Mobile Nigeria. Despite its narrow focus, it was the only Nigerian community that gave a voice to Nigerians at home. Most other Nigerian sites were owned and dominated by Nigerians in the US or UK. They covered only issues of interests to Nigerians abroad, so also the off topic section of the forum, covering topics outside telecoms, like romance and jokes, was becoming more vibrant than the Mobile Nigeria Forum itself, suggesting the need for a more general-purpose Nigerian forum.
Seun as he is fondly called is most times referred to by many as the Mark Zuckberg of Nigeria as they possess some of the same qualities. Both are seen as young, vibrant, innovative school leavers who went ahead to pursue their dream.
4. Gbenga Sesan:
Oluwagbenga Olabisi Sesan born on July 27, 1977 was appointed Nigeria's first Information Technology Youth Ambassador in October 2001. His
interest and work is built around the use of ICTs in socio-economic transformation—focusing on underserved groups. He has often expressed his strong belief in the potential that Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) hold for Nigeria and Africa.
He has been an active participant at national, regional, and international discussions on the need for Africa's inclusion in the Information Society, and has consulted widely for numerous organisations, including Harvard University, Microsoft, Res Publica, Freedom House, International Telecommunications Union, Heinrich Boll Foundation and United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) -- where he was the Vice Chair of the African Technical Advisory Committee. ‘Gbenga Sesan is the Executive Director of Paradigm Initiative Nigeria (PIN), a social enterprise that connects underserved people-groups with ICT-enabled opportunities.
Originally trained as an Electronic & Electrical Engineer at Obafemi Awolowo University, ‘Gbenga completed management training at Lagos Business School, New York Group for Technology Transfer, Oxford University, Harvard University, Stanford University, Santa Clara University and University of the Pacific. His consulting experience includes assignments completed for numerous institutions, including Microsoft, Harvard University, and United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, Freedom House, Res Publica, Heinrich Boll Foundation, the International Telecommunications Union and the British Council.
Beginning his career with Junior Achievement of Nigeria in 2001, ‘Gbenga served as Program Assistant, Program Manager, Lagos Digital Village Project Manager and Development Manager. While at JANigeria, he had the opportunity of completing the Venture in Management Program (now Venture in Management and Enterprise Program) in 2001, a course that was his first introduction to management. While training volunteer and implementing JANigeria programs, ‘Gbenga also picked up skills that continue to be useful for his career development. ‘Gbenga has consulted and made presentations focusing on Social Media, and the general use of ICTs for development, in over 30 countries.
He is a Crans Montana Forum Fellow, Archbishop Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellow, Ashoka Fellow, Our Common Future Fellow, Cordes Fellow and Schwab Foundation Fellow. ‘Gbenga was Nigeria's first Information Technology Youth Ambassador and served as Vice Chair of United Nations Economic Commission for Africa’s African Technical Advisory Committee. In 2006, he was appointed as a member of the Nigerian Presidential Task Force on the Restructuring of the Nigerian Information Technology and Telecommunications Sectors. ‘Gbenga also coordinated the development of the first mobile application used for election monitoring in Nigeria, ReVoDa. He served as a multi-role coordinator for the social media conversation and reports around the protests across Nigeria following the unpopular increase in pump price of petrol by the Nigerian government in January 2012. He was recently named Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur of the Year 2014.
5. EMEKA OKOYE
Emeka Okoye is the CEO of Vikantti Software and CTO & co-founder of Next.2.us. The latter is a website that focuses on geosocial connectivity using various applications, including SMS and mobile phones. Okoye has over 17 years’ experience in Web, Enterprise & Mobile Software and Project Management. He graduated as a Geologist in 1990 but being passionate about software engineering, he built Nigeria’s first banking website (IBTC, 1996) and Internet Banking app (IBTC, 1997), co-founded one of Nigeria’s earliest start-ups and built the biggest Nigerian Portal (NgEx.com, 1997) and was the Project Manager/Lead Architect of Nigeria’s first major E-commerce Project in 2000 (FSB Bank, Valucard, UPS & Xerox, 2000).
After building Africa’s first mobile app for crowd-sourcing election data in 2011, Emeka has been pioneering the adoption of Semantic Web and Linked Open Data in Africa. As the Architect for Africa’s first Semantic Web music portal, MusicInAfrica, Emeka is undoubtedly one of the continent’s visionaries in mobile applications development.
His software development company, Vikantti mostly develops enterprise-related products such as Signature Verification Systems, Cheque Confirmation Systems, ATM Journal Management Systems and Mastercard Applications, among other things. In 2012, he founded OpenDataNG, a citizen-led Linked Open Data initiative for Nigeria to make public data accessible to common folks, discovering insights for organizations and generating wealth from Government data.
http://go.engineer-ng.net/profiles/blogs/top-5-nigerian-men-in-infotech
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