How Ibrahim Adepoju is proving African software can compete globally

Ibrahim Adepoju was 16 and working at a cybercafe when he tried to copy software by dragging desktop shortcuts to a flash drive. He pasted them on another computer, and nothing worked. He later discovered the files were only two or three bytes, but he had no idea what he had done wrong, and there was nobody to ask.

Today, he runs Tyms, an accounting software company that generates most of its premium revenue from global customers who have no idea it’s built in Lagos.

This journey from confused teenager to global software founder has always been defined by a desire to do things differently. From teaching himself how to code to running a software consultancy to co-founding Tyms, Adepoju’s path has been defined less by titles and more by conviction. He is interested in systems, where they fail, and what happens when they finally work.

The unexpected path

Adepoju studied geology at the University of Ilorin, not computer science, because oil and gas felt like the practical route to financial security in Nigeria. He was fully committed to the path, becoming president of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, the Nigerian Association of Petroleum Explorationists, and the Nigerian Mining and Geosciences Society student chapter; attending industry conferences in Lagos; networking with Shell and Chevron executives; and even winning research grants. Everything in his university years pointed toward a stable career in the oil sector.

But between geology lectures, whenever he could access a computer, he kept building things on the side. WordPress blogs that went nowhere and practice websites for imaginary businesses. In 2012, he started learning HTML properly, though he still thought of it as nothing more than an interesting hobby that helped him relax between studying sedimentary rock layers.

Things started to get serious in 2016 when someone asked him to build a music website right after graduation. Adepoju spent a weekend putting it together and quoted 75,000 naira, genuinely unsure if that was reasonable pricing. The client paid immediately without negotiating. His upcoming NYSC allowance was going to be 19,700 naira monthly, which meant this single weekend project had earned nearly four times his expected government salary.

Building his own product

The weekend freelance work gradually turned into a steady income that exceeded his official earnings. One of his supervisors had a wife who ran a medical tourism agency with a dated website, so Adepoju rebuilt it over a weekend without charging anything. More clients followed from their referrals, and soon he was earning 30,000 naira monthly just designing newsletters for one retainer client.

In 2018, he registered his software company Aitechma and insisted during the CAC registration process that the business should be focused on artificial intelligence. The registration body rejected his application with a note saying “there is no such thing as artificial intelligence” and instructing him to “pick something more meaningful.” He still has the screenshots and finds them genuinely amusing now, given how the industry has evolved.

Over the next two years, Adepoju built MVPs for dozens of startups, including crypto platforms, fintech apps, and e-commerce sites. The work was good, and the money was steady, but he’d never built something of his own that people actually paid to use.

In 2020, he decided to change that by building an app for Ajo, the traditional rotating savings system he participated in with friends, where everyone contributes monthly and takes turns collecting the lump sum. A university friend connected him with Chineye Ochem, an accountant working at PwC, and unlike other potential cofounders who took days to respond to messages, Chineye replied immediately.

The CEO of Paga, Tayo Oviosu, discovered AjoMoney on Adepoju’s Twitter profile and reached out to discuss integration, which eventually led to him becoming their first institutional investor through his fund Kairos Angel. AjoMoney grew to 12,000 active users, with daily transactions across the platform, but Adepoju increasingly felt constrained by the amount of customer support and psychological management fintech required.

The accounting solution

The idea for Tyms was born out of  Adepoju’s personal frustration while trying to find accounting software for managing Ajo Money’s finances. QuickBooks wanted $70 monthly, and Xero wanted $50, while the Nigerian alternatives looked like they’d been built years ago and abandoned. He kept wondering why everything made in Nigeria had to look substandard and why local teams couldn’t build something that matched or exceeded QuickBooks in quality.

He told Chineye they should build their own solution since she understood accounting deeply from her PwC years, and he understood engineering and product development. They gave themselves a year to learn the domain properly and build something that actually worked at an international standard.

The technical challenge turned out to be more significant than Adepoju initially expected because accounting software lives or dies based on the quality of its general ledger, and getting that wrong means nothing else matters, regardless of how attractive the interface looks. Adepoju spent months reading academic research papers on financial systems and accounting architecture, which led to multiple iterations as the first versions were slow and buggy.

When they finally had something functional, they tested it with a major telecommunications company in Nigeria whose finance team genuinely loved the product. But then senior management got involved and insisted they needed SAP or Microsoft, something with an established global brand name they recognised, and the fact that Tyms worked perfectly didn’t matter because it was made in Africa.

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That experience clarified everything for Ibrahim because it showed him that Nigerian enterprises would default to foreign brands regardless of actual product quality or pricing advantages. The real path forward wasn’t spending years trying to convince local companies to trust African software, but rather targeting global markets where products got judged purely on their merit and performance.

Global by design

Every single decision with Tyms from that point forward assumed an international customer base. Users could select any currency when signing up rather than being forced into Naira. The platform supported global accounting standards from launch, and they integrated Stripe before having a single foreign customer. All tutorial videos used American or British voice-overs rather than Nigerian accents, and nothing about the product’s design or messaging signaled where it was actually being built.

The first US transaction caught them completely by surprise because they hadn’t been actively marketing internationally, though their SEO work was bringing in organic traffic. Someone searching for QuickBooks alternatives found Tyms, tested the platform thoroughly, and paid within fifteen minutes of landing on the site without any sales conversation happening. That pattern kept repeating itself as American micro businesses proved they cared about price and usability rather than the company’s geographic location.

Today, Tyms operates two distinct products serving fundamentally different markets. The core Tyms accounting software has a user base that’s roughly 85% Nigerian, 10% from other African countries, and 5% from outside the continent. But Adam (useadam.io), their AI-powered accounting agent built on top of Tyms, tells a completely different story, with 95% of its revenue coming from the United States because of strong banking integrations that American customers need.

“The customers we’re supporting on adam.io are almost 100% not from our continent,” Adepoju explains, “which is why we’re investing heavily in learning how to serve that market properly and understand American business culture.”

The mission ahead

When asked how he wants to be remembered as his career continues unfolding, Adepoju’s answer comes quickly and with conviction. “I want to be seen as an innovator, a disruptor, someone who decided to do something differently and showed others they could follow the same path.”

He’s particularly focused on changing the mental model that constrains African SaaS founders. “I want to prove that just because you can’t sell something in Lagos doesn’t mean you can’t sell it everywhere else in the world,” he says. “I want to give other founders the confidence that all of us can start bringing US dollars to the continent by building quality products.”

For Adepoju, the ultimate validation isn’t the funding rounds or the revenue numbers, though both matter. It’s the gradual shift in what people believe is possible when building software from Africa. Every American customer who pays without questioning the company’s location, every finance professional in Lagos who mentions Tyms as a credible option, every founder who sees his path and thinks they might try something similar, that’s the real measure of success.