The tech ecosystem is in dire need of innovators who will make a change and build scalable products that can thrive in the face of an ever-changing world. In Nigeria, different individuals have continued to push the country’s digital revolution forward by solving consumer-facing problems through tech. One of such people is Yele Bademosi.
Yele Bademosi is the CEO and Co-Founder of Bundle, a social payments app for cash and cryptocurrency. He is also a founding partner of Microtraction, an early-stage venture capital fund.
Yele was born into a missionary home in Ibadan. He attended Kings College, London where he studied Medicine, after a few years, he dropped out because, unlike his Parents, medicine wasn’t his passion.
After dropping out of medical school, he started learning how to code and design user interfaces. Yele launched his first startup Purple, a social app that lets university students with shared interests in the UK find and connect with each other. The startup raised an angel fund but didn’t scale.
Yele returned to Nigeria and worked as General Manager of Starta – an online community and resource platform for African startup entrepreneurs. Here he helped the platform reach over 24,000 subscribers in 8 months before it was acquired in 2016.
At Starta, Yele identified the “pre-seed funding gap” as a huge problem that was stifling the growth of the African technology ecosystem. He decided to solve this problem and in 2017, he founded Microtraction, an early-stage venture capital fund that invests in Africa’s most remarkable teams with technical founders at the earliest stage of their venture, helping them build enduring companies. Microtraction offers $25,000 for a 7% equity and has gone on to invest in over 15 startups.
Yele has also worked as the Director of Binance Labs, the venture arm of the crypto platform (Binance) where he was charged with developing Africa’s blockchain ecosystem, a position he held till April 2020.
In August 2019, he founded Bundle, an Africa-focused social payments app for cash and cryptocurrency aimed at driving crypto adoption on the continent by making it more fun, easy to use, and inclusive for Africans.
Africa as a whole, has the largest population of young people in the world, with a median age of 19 and one billion+ people expected to be born over the next 30 years. Bundle is targeting young, digitally savvy, educated consumers with spending power. Bundle was incubated within the Binance ecosystem and raised US$450,000 from the blockchain company, as well as other investors.