How a UNILAG prodigy helped build a fintech empire. His next bet? Decentralised Intelligence

The phone calls were getting worse. On the other end of the line were executives from a major Nigerian bank, and their frustration was boiling over. The software they had invested in, a system codenamed ‘Olympos’ designed to manage their entire POS merchant network, was riddled with bugs. It was unstable. Sometimes, it was a complete mess.

“There was a time when our users threatened to pull the plug and shut down the entire project,” recalls Julian Duru, the young engineer at the heart of the storm. For a fledgling startup, losing a major client isn’t just a setback; it’s an extinction-level event.

Every frantic bug fix seemed to create a new one. “I would fix something,” he says, the memory still sharp, “but in the course of fixing something, I break something else that was working before.”

“I remember at the time, I would spend all my waking hours writing code, trying to get the software to work. I knew what I was doing, but there was just so much work to do. I was the only engineer on the project, so I would often work late into the night and sleep at the client’s location”

This was the crucible. This was TeamApt—the company that would become the fintech behemoth Moniepoint—in its infancy, fighting for its life. 

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And at the centre of it all was Duru, a recent graduate from Unilag who had been thrown into the deep end of enterprise software development; tasked with building the foundations of a future unicorn while trying not to drown.

A decade later, the chaos of those early years feels distant—almost unreal.

When we speak, 30-year-old Duru is calm and measured, a man far removed from the firestorm he once navigated. He takes the call from his home, dressed in a grey T-shirt—the unofficial uniform of tech bros—in a room with a blank whiteboard, as if waiting for its next big idea, and a monochrome painting of a man embracing a woman.

To understand how that embattled young man survived, thrived, and a decade later, walked away with a life-changing stock payout, you have to understand who he was before the pressure ever began.

The answer lies in a childhood defined by books, a quiet ambition, and a mind that was always, always working.

The prodigy and the pivot

Long before he was debugging software, Duru was a different kind of prodigy. 

“I just spent most of my time around books and reading,” Duru says, his voice carrying a reflective warmth. “I was very curious about a lot of things: Math, biology, physics, chemistry, you name it. It translated to my performance in school because I used to win almost all the prizes on prize-giving day.”

His father was a professor, and his academic drive was deeply personal, fueled by a desire to make his late mother proud.

“She instilled in me that discipline and desire to be excellent,” he shares, his voice softening. “Plus, I was a mommy’s boy. I wanted to impress her a lot.”

In 2009, he placed 8th nationwide in the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE), a stunning achievement that signalled a mind of rare calibre. Like many bright Nigerian minds of his generation, he dreamed of building rockets and planes, a fascination that led him to write the SATs and apply to American universities. But ambition met a familiar obstacle: funding. The scholarships he needed didn’t come through.

So, he pivoted. He enrolled in Computer Science at the University of Lagos (UNILAG).

It was in the UNILAG library, not a lecture hall, that he found his true calling. While researching propositional logic, he discovered Prolog, a programming language that clicked with his innate love for structure and problem-solving. He spent more time teaching himself than relying on the classroom.

“I became fascinated with the idea of using code to represent statements and logic,” he says. That fascination became an obsession. He devoured books on Python and Visual Basic, losing himself for hours in the campus gardens, his laptop became a portal to a new world. “I built different kinds of games. I built all kinds of stuff.” 

He was building more than just hobby projects; he was building a reputation. In the tight-knit world of UNILAG’s computer science department, Duru became known, simply, as “the guy that could code.”

That reputation was his entry ticket. Tosin Eniolorunda, TeamApt’s founder, was looking for talent. He wasn’t posting on job boards; he was tapping into the trusted networks of the country’s nascent tech scene. A mutual friend recommended Duru, and he came in as employee number eight.

Duru, the Swiss Army Knife

He was affordable, competent, and hungry—the perfect trifecta for an early-stage startup. But the transition from coding for fun to coding for money was a baptism by fire. His first major project was a POS merchant-acquiring solution for banks, codenamed ‘Olympos.’

The Olympos project was his baptism. He had to rapidly shed his solo-coder habits and master enterprise-grade frameworks like Java Spring Boot and the then-new Angular 1. The pressure from the banks was relentless, but within the chaos, a crucial bond was forming.

“It was the first really full project I worked on that stretched me to that point where I had to deliver real value to people and there was money on the line, and there were real stakes on the line,” he says. 

The learning curve felt like scaling a cliff, not a hill. He had to quickly move past his “hard guy” approach of coding everything from scratch and master industry-standard frameworks like Java Spring Boot for the backend and the then-new Angular 1 for the frontend. The pressure from the banks was relentless, but within the chaos, a crucial bond was forming.

His relationship with the CEO, Tosin, became his anchor. “It was more like an older-younger brother type relationship,” Duru says. “He came through for me a lot of times when I was struggling at work. He really came through for me, knew how to help me manage the stress, gave me a lot of advice.”

That mentorship and the trust it fostered were key to why Duru stayed for a decade in an industry known for high churn. He was never allowed to stagnate. As the company grew, he became its ultimate utility player, somewhat like a Swiss Army Knife.

“If a team needed a frontend developer, they could just deploy me. If another team needed backend job done, I could work with them, sometimes, for months,” he says. “I sometimes worked as a Product Manager, sometimes Software Architect. I moved around a lot, contributing to different teams.”

This constant movement kept him challenged and engaged, rotating through the company’s most critical projects—from pioneering the virtual accounts system that would become an industry standard, to building out business loans and fraud detection systems. He was always at the frontier of the company’s expansion.

Years flew by. The scrappy startup that had pacified exacting bankers became a corporate giant. The team of eight grew to thousands. One day, while working on a fraud project, Duru took a moment to look at the company’s live transaction data. The scale was almost incomprehensible.

“I was checking our transaction volumes and saw that we’re crossing hundreds of millions of transactions every day,” he recalls, a note of awe in his voice. “And it just hit me that a lot of the work that we put in in the early days laid the foundation for the scale we now support. It hit me that, wow, we’ve really done a lot at this place.”

Moments like that come unexpectedly. Sometimes, it’s as simple as walking into a restaurant and seeing a Moniepoint POS at the counter—only to watch it trigger a backend process he once helped build.

“It’s easy to downplay the work you’ve done because it starts to feel normal,” he says. “You’re just doing your job. You don’t even realise how big it is until someone else points it out.”

Read also: Moniepoint debuts on TIME100 most influential companies list

The payoff and Julian Duru’s next quest

That decade of grit, learning, and loyalty culminated in a life-changing financial outcome—a reward that marked both an end and a beginning.

But for Duru, the payout isn’t an epilogue.

He is stepping away from fintech to tackle a foundational question of our digital future: In an AI-driven world, how do we track and reward the value of human insight and creativity?

His new focus will explore the realm of decentralised intelligence and the “semantic web”, as he calls it. 

The vision is complex, but the core idea is simple. Imagine every piece of content you create—a line of code, a marketing strategy in a document, a musical riff—is an asset. Your asset. When an AI or another system uses that knowledge to create something new, you should be compensated.

“The internet is in need of new economic models, especially since the dawn of Generative AI. We need to find a way to allow people to conveniently and safely expose private, proprietary data on the Internet. Today, there are privacy-preserving technologies that seek to enable this”, he says. “People’s intellectual property can be protected, and they can be fairly compensated with automated royalties.”

“But it doesn’t end there. The end goal is a distributed, decentralised network of humans and machines cooperating, coordinating, and co-creating. Such that every contribution is acknowledged, every participant rewarded.”

It’s a mission to build the infrastructure for a more equitable digital economy, ensuring that the human creators who feed the AI models aren’t simply scraped and replaced, but are made partners in the value they help create.

It’s a challenge of breathtaking scope, but it feels like a natural evolution. After a decade building systems to meticulously track and move financial value, Duru is now looking to design a system to track and move intellectual value.

You can follow him on his journey here.