When the African fintech startup Flutterwave achieved unicorn status (a valuation of more than $1 billion) just five years after it launched, the fintech industry took note.

Everyone from budding entrepreneurs to market-watching investors wanted to know how a small technology company operating mainly on the African continent managed to surpass the Silicon Valley standard of greatness.

To answer them, company CEO and founder Olugbenga “GB” Agboola keeps it simple. Flutterwave, he declares, never forgets about its end users.

“For us as a company, it’s really just about: How do we make sure our customers can scale on our platform? How do we make sure our customers can go to any country in Africa and all they have to do is just flip a switch, literally, on our dashboard and they can just go live in their new market?” he says. “Our growth has been customer-defined, our expansion is always customer-driven. Where does the customer want us to be? We listen to the customer a lot in Flutterwave, in fact, extremely. We have an extreme customer obsession in Flutterwave when it comes to what our customers want and how we deliver to the customer.”

“It was this belief,” Olugbenga recently blogged, “that had us entering new markets like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Turkey to support the payment needs of one of our longest standing customers, a ride hailing behemoth.”

Starting From Zero

Flutterwave began in 2016, after Agboola noticed that multinational corporations had trouble bringing their operations to Africa. The odd patchwork of monetary rules and regulations that governed finance on the continent led to processing delays that slowed the pace of business.

“This typically meant that business and personal transactions sent to Accra from Lagos, or from Nairobi to Johannesburg, had to be sent to Europe or North America, then rerouted back to the continent,” Agboola said. “It was a costly and time-consuming process that we believed we could fix.”

Having cut his teeth at fintech giants like Google Wallet and PayPal, Agboola knew firsthand how digital platforms can transform the speed at which work happens. If he wanted to increase Africa’s economic viability, all he had to do was build the kind of infrastructure that would allow money to move at modern speeds.

It was the best kind of idea: straightforward and easy to understand.

“When we were starting Flutterwave, a major core thesis has always been about making Africa feel like a country,” Agboola shares. “We invested a lot in that philosophy because we believe so much in the fact that payments should be simple in Africa. Payments is broken in Africa, but it can be simple in Africa. And that obviously meant a lot of expansion that people did not even imagine possible.”

So, he hired the best engineers he could find and began to search for investors. Then came the hard part. He had to make his simple pitch to multinational companies.

Keeping Customers First

While Flutterwave’s success seems obvious in hindsight, it didn’t feel that way at the time. Agboola flew from his home in Nigeria to Silicon Valley to drum up interest in his African financial technology platform.

“In 2016, I faced one particularly tough situation: I was pitching Uber to be their payment processor in Africa. I was in San Francisco and nobody knew Flutterwave,” he recalled. “I didn’t know what Uber would say. I didn’t sleep for days, as I needed to figure out how we would execute if they came on board. We even had lingering doubts about whether we even had the right capital and skill sets.”

The ride-sharing service had long wanted to expand in Africa and faced many of the problems that Agboola knew well. Seeing the potential in his solution, the company signed on — and Flutterwave had its first big-name client.

Uber didn’t just help Flutterwave get off the ground, however. It helped guide the company’s expansionary efforts.

“Uber has been a customer that has defined our growth firm. We helped Uber to scale across Africa, and we followed them into every market that they’re going  into,” Agboola says. “So our expansion and growth story can be linked to our customer’s requirements, and it can also be linked to our philosophy about making payments simple across Africa, and simplifying payments for endless possibilities.”

A More Personal Approach

While Flutterwave originally grew alongside its largest customers, the startup eventually turned its gaze toward a different clientele: African families.

The Flutterwave platform had already proven adept at helping to bolster African economies and provide new opportunities to the African people. But Agboola believed his company could do more. He wanted to effect change at home.

In 2021, the company did just that. With the launch of Send App, a remittance service focused on helping Africans, Flutterwave found a new way to accomplish its goal of connecting all of Africa.

Through Send App, workers who leave their home countries to find more gainful employment can quickly, securely, and inexpensively wire money back home in their local currencies.

The app proved to be a significant change for many Africans. With the extra income provided by remittances, students were able to take advantage of educational opportunities, families could receive help for emergency medical procedures, and entrepreneurs found willing sources of capital.

And, in the same way Flutterwave followed the needs of its multinational clients, the company continues to secure new licenses to operate Send App in countries with large numbers of African workers.

It’s all part of the original vision that drove Agboola to start the company: helping Africans through modern technology.

“Those were the driving forces behind Flutterwave: How do we become like a butterfly that can create a ripple effect in the ecosystem and still be tiny, yet we can make waves?” he says. “Hence the name Flutterwave, by the way.”