About
Owosho and Omolara Sanni met at the Federal University of Technology, Akure, in 2018 and spent the next two years running their own e-commerce businesses, sourcing goods from China and selling them in Nigeria. They hit the problem every Nigerian vendor hits: buyers would not pay upfront, and Naira cards stopped working for dollar payments.
Around 2020, they moved to 1688, the Chinese wholesale marketplace, and paid suppliers in yuan through Alipay wallets. In 2023, they built an escrow platform to solve the trust problem — Nigerians did not trust the digital payment infrastructure enough to leave money in it, which was the exact problem the product existed to fix.
They launched the payment service in May 2024. Midddleman now converts naira to renminbi and pays Chinese suppliers through Alipay and WeChat Pay, translates 1688 listings into English, runs verified procurement agents in China, and lets importers compare freight rates across more than forty Nigerian logistics providers. Over $1.6 million processed, 12,500 registered users, and close to ₦2 billion in trade volume on $46,000 of funding.
Profiles 
