Olumide Soyombo is a big gun on the Nigerian investment landscape.
An entrepreneur himself, Soyombo is the co-founder of Bluechip technologies — system integrator that provides premier analytics, business application, infrastructure, consulting and managed services.
Soyombo started his entrepreneurial career at age 12 when he was selling pre-registered yahoomail and hotmail accounts to people. That was before he would go on to bag a bachelor’s degree in systems engineering at the University of Lagos in 2005. After then, he obtained a Masters in Business Information and Technology from Aston University, Birmingham.
It was after his return from Birmingham that he founded Bluechip technologies alongside Kazeem Tewogbade, his co-founder. They started the company through a seed investment of N5 million from Olumide’s father and went on to create a multi-million dollar business.
In 2014, Soyombo co-founded Leadpath as an accelerator for tech startups. Participating startups go through a three-month program before pitching their businesses to investors at a demo day. However, he found out in a hurry that there were not many investors who were willing to take on the risk of funding startups in Africa’s ecosystem. Thus began his journey into the world of venture capitalism.
Today, Soyombo has invested in 33 startups across Africa. They include Paystack, Lemonade Finance, Gbedu, Koa, Fantastic.ng, Engage, Powercube, Accounteer, Leadspace, Send.ng, Trove Finance and Brass.
At least 13 of the startups are in the fintech space while the others are distributed among Entertainment, Gambling and Casino, Clean energy, Co-working, Logistics and other sectors. If the array of the startups in his existing portfolio is any indicator, Voltron Capital will also invest in a lot more fintech startups than in startups from other sectors.
Most recently, he announced his plan of launching Voltron Capital, a pan-African venture capital fund. The fund will create a defined framework for pooling money together from multiple investors. The money will be invested in startups that have been vetted and are considered viable.
