I believe in mentorship, says Edmund Olotu, yr-

old-CEO of G-Pay 

The Spark meets one of Nigeria’s foremost entrepreneurs, Edmund Efe Olotu. The 33 year old started his path down entrepreneurship professionally when he was opportuned to spend five months in Saudi Arabia, where he and his team successfully carried out  high level IT consulting work for one of the largest interior company.

Read on as he shares his story of how it all began…

While doing a research project with a classmate at Harvard University, we came across a paper written by a prominent scientist in Germany about the transport of HIV and other viruses in the body. It got our creative juices flowing and we decided there and then to start a company to discover a new class of Antiviral drugs. We had no prior experience and no money- But that didn’t stop us. In 2006 I co-founded Molecmo NanoBiotechnologies (now Novira Therapeutics) with Ali Munawar, an immigrant like myself, but from Pakistan. The preceding two and the half years that followed were some of the best and worst times of my life; but I am glad to say that the company still exists today. Our Anti-Viral drugs are being considered for Human trials in the USA, after passing Animal trials with flying colours.

We raised more than twenty nine million US dollars in Venture capital for the company and I left the company and the USA in 2008 December to return to Nigeria to set up a technology incubator to do a similar thing here.

Edmund Olotu

When I arrived in Nigeria I was offered a job with the now defunct HITV almost immediately. I was the GM for International Business Strategy and Special Projects for about two years before I resigned. My experience there was a steep learning curve in the dynamics of doing business in Nigeria. The potholes and obstacles that await any forward thinking entrepreneur whether deliberate or incidental. I left HITV in early 2011 to focus on building my technology incubator- It’s called TechAdvance, and basically it focuses on the advancement of technology businesses in Nigeria and more importantly the breeding of a new class of Entrepreneurs within the Nigerian ecosystem.

TechAdvance is run by Samuel Uduma (another brilliant Spark and a rare gem in the Nigerian technology ecosystem) and I. In the USA we have launched My Merchant Services Match and GenerateForSchools. A company that helps schools in the USA generate recurring revenue by converting surrounding business to our credit/debit card processing platform.

In Nigeria, we have launched G-Pay Instant Solutions LTD a payment application development company. With a focus on payment applications for Electricity utilities and universities. Last year we launched SuperGeeks LLC, a Personal consumer Electronics repair shop (hopefully we will be a chain one day) and a provider of extended warranty services for Personal Consumer Electronics. We have other companies in the pipeline currently either in stealth mode or going through Alpha testing.

Give us a run-down of your biggest achievements

I have been lucky a few times in my life and a lot of things I do not deserve have somehow materialized in my favour. A few I have worked terribly hard for include getting a distinction in my Masters degree at the University of Nottingham Business School- It was one of my proudest moments- As only three of us graduated with a distinction and I was selected to do a PHD without having to apply.

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